This week, Kit and I decided to read about fierce mammals, or rather, Kit decided, and delegated the reading to me. Our second mammal was the Tasmanian Devil. These small marsupial carnivores are good at running, swimming, climbing trees, fighting, and crushing bones with their teeth. Even birth is fraught with competition and death. Females deliver about 30 young, each the size of a grain of rice. Immediately after birth, they commence an epic struggle to the pouch, where four nipples are located. It doesn’t take a mathematician to deduce that only the strongest survive.
Presumably, if a litter is particularly feeble, none of them make it, as the mother renders no assistance, whatsoever, to any of them. But, perhaps it is not deliberate neglect. If you give birth to something the size of a grain of rice, you could be forgiven for failing to notice. I imagine a Tasmanian Devil, about two weeks after giving birth, suddenly exclaiming “Hey! There’s something wriggling in my pouch! Oh, wait. It appears I’ve had babies. Silly me! I thought it was a tarantula, or something.”
After we had read this, Kit said, “They sound like they might make nice neighbours.”
“Sorry. What?!” I hear you cry. Let me explain.
The first fierce mammal we read about strikes fear into the hearts of men, women, martial arts experts, and every species, native or alien that has ever heard of it (most of which are components of its diet). It can be summarized as a cross between an armoured tank, and The Devil Himself. It has the build of a silverback gorilla, the teeth of a shark, the claws of a sun bear, the stink of a skunk, and the temperament of a ravenous Tasmanian Devil with a dental abscess. We had been learning about…the honey badger!
Kit describes it as follows:
“By weight, a honey badger is 50 percent claws and 75 percent teeth attached to some fur (somebody else’s). It does whatever it feels like, and eats whatever it sees, even you!”
Included in the honey badger’s diet are meerkats! I said to Kit, “To them you’re not Meerkat Kit but a Mere Kitkat!” He glared at me coldly.
Fortunately, the honey badger is the only species in the family, Mellivorinae. Its closest relative is the weasel, which will never admit it. We learned that the males are called boars and the females are sows. The collective noun for a group of honey badgers is a colony. To paraphrase Kit, he hopes that word is seldom employed when referring to honey badgers. I told him that the babies are also called kits. He refuses to believe me. I can’t say I blame him.