The honey badger, which is also called the ratel, hunts alone for most of its food, although older cubs accompany their mothers. It moves in a slow winding walk and a rolling trot, and it can also climb trees and swim. In a single night it may cover up to 35 kilometers, or 22 miles, according to an estimate cited in a zoo fact sheet.
In the southern Kalahari, adult male honey badgers ate about 1.3 kilograms of food a day, and females about 0.9 kilograms. A honey badger's search for food peaked twice a day, from about 6 to 9 in the morning and again from about 4 in the afternoon until 1 at night, and it was resting or sleeping about half the time.
A honey badger locates food by smell and then digs. Its front claws are long and strong while its back claws are short, and it can close its ears to keep dirt out. It takes a honey badger 1 to 2 minutes to dig out a gecko or skink, and nearly 10 minutes to dig out a larger snake.
A honey badger has 32 robust teeth, and they often show a lot of wear. Its tongue has sharp, rear-facing bumps. It sometimes hides food and saves it to eat later.
A burrow can run up to 9 feet, or 3 meters, long and end in a chamber where the honey badger rests. A honey badger often sleeps in a different burrow from one day to the next.
Honey badgers leave scent marks, and people can notice the smell of the gland at the base of a honey badger's tail from more than 45 meters, or 148 feet, away.
In the southern Kalahari, one dominant adult male's home range could overlap the ranges of as many as 13 females.
Zoo records show a honey badger at London Zoo in the 1830s, brought from India, and the first one in a North American zoo was a male at the Philadelphia Zoo in 1904.
As of November 2026, honey badgers in the wild live up to about 8 years, although in zoo care they can live more than 20 years.
Words to know
- robust: strong, sturdy
- skink: small lizard
- peaked: reached a high
- trot: a bouncy run
- estimate: careful guess
