Courage and Chaos

Ever wonder what it takes to be truly fearless? In this episode, we dive into the incredible world of the honey badger, a creature renowned for its audacity and resilience. Join us as we uncover the surprising lessons this small but mighty animal can teach us about facing challenges head-on, no matter the odds.

Sources:

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-happens-to-your-body-during-the-fight-or-flight-response 

https://animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/honey-badger-ratel 

https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/honey-badger-guide 

https://www.honeybadger.com/conservation.html 

Music by Soulful Jam Tracks

Transcript

Todd Pabst: 0:01

Welcome to Animal School. Grab your pack and gather around. Quicken breathing, a pounding heart, dilated pupils, tensing muscles. These are the physical signs of the fight or flight response, caused by a massive release of adrenaline that's triggered by your nervous system. This chemical release helps you to run faster, fight harder, and tap into strength you didn't know you had. It happens when you sense a threat, and this response is a very big part of why you are alive today. Fight or flight aren't the only responses, just the most well-known. There are technically four trauma responses, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Each option has its trade-offs. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to another. Every choice carries both a cost and a benefit. Every decision has weight. Sometimes, it's best to just run. the flight response makes sense. You won't get a lot of cool points for running, running doesn't make for a great story, but ego and survival can counter one another quite effectively. Winning a fight rarely leaves you unscathed, and if there isn't a clear benefit to engaging in physical combat, then you may be better served to escape confrontation entirely. Maybe you disappear. Maybe you retreat and regroup. Turning on the speed can be a very effective strategy for living to fight another day. After all, combat is unpredictable. Freezing is an option, just being perfectly still. This strategy doesn't work with all threats, but it evolved from a very logical place. Many predators have vision that's heavily influenced by movement, so fleeing could actually put you at far more risk than standing still. Running can trigger the chase response of predators. Being still can be your invisibility. This choice, like the others, really comes down to understanding the threat and using that knowledge to the best of your ability. In nature, the freeze response can be a common reaction for prey animals while they analyze a situation. Literal analysis paralysis. This can be a common default setting before the response gets ratcheted up to either flight or fight. Fawning is a newer addition to the canon of trauma response. With this option, you aren't staying still to avoid detection, you aren't fleeing to avoid confrontation, You're actively showing weakness, exposing a soft underbelly, showing an unprotected neck, lowering your posture, bowing down, rolling over. You're asking for mercy. You're working with everything you have to show that you aren't a threat. You're digging deep to pull out your meekest traits, avoiding eye contact, showing total submission. You're tapping out. This is the opposite of ego. This option, like all these options, can be a gutsy decision. You see this most frequently within social hierarchies, during power struggles within an animal community. A young male wants to dethrone the king, but he misses his shot. Now he's asking for mercy in front of all spectators. It's a tough lesson to learn, but not the toughest. Fighting is the final trauma response. Combat is violent, raw, and universal. The stakes don't get any higher. Even winning can be a death sentence. Enduring the wild can take an animal's ability to move, find food and water, and defend themselves in the future. Outside of the wild, nestled safely in civilization, even the prospect of confrontation is enough to get our overly sensitive trauma responses firing. We don't have the same level of dangerous stimulus that our ancestors did. Our environment is far more controlled and predictable. Civilization has given us a whole lot of security and some very soft edges. But that instinct? that gut reaction, that remains. That response is a robust one. Most people will do just about anything to avoid being in a fight. Making the decision to fight, to engage in combat with all the unknowns, you have to ask yourself if the juice is worth the squeeze. What am I gambling with this decision? What do I have to lose? Fighting is chaos, and chaos has so many variables. Countless intangibles and the ability to escalate dramatically and unpredictably. Combat is fluid, dynamic, a sort of lethal dance that ebbs and flows with the strength, weapons, stamina, intelligence, and experience of the combatants. And just how far are they willing to go to win the fight? Are they willing to go all the way, wherever it leads? Even Fight Club had rules. Nature doesn't. Honey Badgers won't go looking for a fight, but they also won't back down. They are exceptionally intelligent animals, and their intelligence has been proven through their problem-solving ability, tool use, and highly adaptable nature. But when it comes to fighting, they don't spend a lot of mental energy deciding whether the juice of combat is worth the squeeze. They go right for the juice. They drink it up. At just 11 to 35 pounds on average, they aren't exactly heavyweights, and most of the time, they aren't the big ones in the fight. Even their bite isn't that hard. Humans have a bite strength of approximately 120 PSI, which is enough to do damage, but not exactly crushing. The bite of a honey badger is about 30% stronger than that of humans at 160 pounds per square inch, but this falls well below your typical dog bite, which comes in at about 230 PSI. This is a far cry from a predator like an African lion that has a bite that comes in at 650 pounds of bite pressure. or the spotted hyena that has an eye-watering bite of 1,100 pounds. Hyena bites are strong enough to crush bone with ease. Honey badgers are loners, solitary by nature. Procreation and infancy are the only consistent exceptions to this rule. At 12 to 16 months old, a juvenile honey badger leaves the burrow to care of their mother and never looks back. By the time they're coming of age, they are already preferring their own company. They forego any notion of pack or community, even in environments where pack-oriented predators thrive. This creates encounters where the honey badger is seriously outnumbered at times. A honey badger against six lions. A honey badger against three wolves. A honey badger against a pack of hyenas. You can find videos of honey badgers defending against all of these. Honey badgers also aren't that fast, topping out at about 19 miles per hour, a speed they can only maintain for short bursts. Wolves run significantly faster at around 35 miles per hour. Hyenas and lions are more than twice as fast as a honey badger. So how exactly has this modestly sized lone mammal with a relatively weak bite gained such a fearsome reputation within the animal kingdom? Why do so many larger, stronger predators so often decide not to engage with them? It's simple. Honey badgers bring absolute chaos to every conflict and they thrive in the mayhem they create. Honey badgers are a nightmare to pick a fight with. Defensively, they're unique. Their skin is exceptionally tough, thick, and covered by coarse hair that's predominantly black, but contrasts to a grayish-white band that extends from the top of their head down their back and tail. Their look is unmistakable. This dark to light contrast helps to camouflage them in grasslands and woodlands that they prefer to frequent. In addition to being tough and thick, their skin is also exceptionally loose. This gives honey badgers the unique ability to turn in their own skin, to twist and bite, even when they're being securely held by a predator. This makes the honey badger almost impossible to control, and their attacker will be taking damage constantly. The honey badger's skin has been described as a sort of loose armor. It can stop bee stings, snake bites, porcupine quills, and some of the sharpest claws and hardest bites Mother Nature has to offer. They're almost entirely resistant to snake venom, a trait which evolved from a genetic mutation that keeps the toxins in the venom from binding internally and causing real damage. Cobra venom kills by paralyzing the breathing muscles. Honey badgers can take a full cobra bite, with drowsiness being the only side effect. If you wanted to attack a honey badger, your only real chance for avoiding damage is a small patch on the back of their neck. This is the only area on their body where a good grip might be able to keep them from rolling in their own skin and biting. you better get it right. While their bite isn't on the same level as lions or hyenas, they know how to make it hurt. They target the most sensitive areas they can get a hold of on their adversary, often attacking the nose, face, tail, and groin. They bite hard, and they hold on. If you manage to avoid the teeth, you still have their claws and stink glands to worry about. Honey badgers have five claws on each foot, with the front claws being especially sharp. They're about 3.5 centimeters long, curved, and incredibly strong. They use these claws for digging their burrows, gaining entry into termite mounds, breaking open beehives, pinning down prey, and making their enemies miserable. While fighting, they use their claws extensively both offensively and defensively. Finally, the stinklans. Honey badgers are in the same family as skunks and have two stinklans near the base of their tail that gives them a perpetual, unpleasant musk. When activated, these glands allow them to release a foul-smelling liquid on demand. Outside of combat, this is used for marking territory. In the heat of battle, they can release the liquid as a stink bomb to further disorient and deter their enemy. Pair this with a rattle roar, a sort of clicking battle cry they use to intimidate predators, and you can understand how fighting a honey badger is akin to sensory overload. The teeth, the claws, the smell. As tenacious as they are, there are plenty of fights that honey badgers don't win. While honey badgers have indeed fought off entire groups of lions, hyenas, and wolves at times, this isn't always the case. Leopards are especially adept at catching them on the back of their neck where they're most vulnerable, and their sheer strength, speed, and size of these animals is often too much for them to overcome. Crocodiles and pythons have also taken honey badgers for food, although the pythons tend to get more mixed results. Honey badgers know their limitations, and they'll often avoid confrontation when they can. Their eyesight is poor, but their sense of smell is powerful, and they'll typically retreat to safety if they pick up the scent of a nearby lion or other predator. As fearless as they are, they rely on their intelligence and keen senses to avoid confrontation, as much as their fighting ability to live through it. So what can honey badgers teach us about acting with courage? Courage isn't the absence of fear. It's the ability to move through it. Courage comes from feeling all the anxiety and fear, knowing the potential for pain and even death, and choosing to move forward with purpose, to face the challenge, whatever it is, head on and without hesitation. Hulking lions, grinning hyenas, an entire pack of wolves. It would be impossible not to feel fear when facing these threats. John Wayne said that courage is about being scared to death but saddling up anyway. Honey badgers get this. They know fear, and their flight response is alive and well. They're just keenly aware of when it's time to fight, and in those times, they lean in. Hard. They understand that when you're backed into a corner, and you don't have the size, the strength, the speed, or the numbers, it's not a time to give up. It's a time to fight harder. To be totally unreasonable. To use every dirty trick you have. Honey badgers have zero quit in them. They won't give up. They have to be physically stopped, and to be stopped, they have to be killed. They don't win their biggest battles by killing their adversary. They win their biggest battles by making the fight so tiring, painful, and miserable for their foe that they force them to give up, to tap out, to retreat. Their strategy is an extreme one. They go all in. They play for keeps. So how are honey badgers doing today? It really depends where you're looking. Honey badgers are notoriously difficult to locate during mammal surveys, so rough estimates are the best that can be done to determine their numbers. Overall population numbers are relatively healthy, thanks to a wide geographical distribution, their keen ability for adaptation, and an omnivorous diet that can consist of just about anything. They're listed as a species of least concern, but they are listed as near threatened in parts of South Africa and have limited protections in some areas. Not surprisingly, the biggest threat to honey badgers comes from humans. Indiscriminate trap and poison use, hunting both for bushmeat and traditional medicine, and persecution from farmers and beekeepers have damaged the honey badger population and contributed to an overall decline in numbers with a more fragmented distribution than they previously enjoyed. Their small litter sizes of one to two cubs, long dependency on their mother, and need for large spaces can make honey badger conservation a challenge. The symbolism of honey badgers across cultures is about what you would expect, universally fearless and tenacious. One interesting myth is that of the honey guide. The honey guide is a bird that's believed by many to share a symbiotic relationship with the honey badger, where the bird leads the badger to the beehives and the badger proceeds to knock down the hive and break it open, allowing both the honey badger and the honey guide to feast. While this behavior has not been documented, anecdotal accounts stubbornly persist. raising the question of whether long-standing observation of the behavior could be possible. Personally, I like the idea of this unlikely partnership. We all have challenges in our lives. We all have things we're avoiding. We all have a monster in the closet. What makes you feel small, slow, weak, and outnumbered? Sometimes we can avoid problems in our lives by paying attention, catching it early, getting out of the way. Sometimes we can be smart about it, Sometimes we can get lucky. The problem is when we ignore our problems, when we leave them alone in the dark to grow bigger and stronger, when we let them get too close, to multiply, to surround us, when we leave them unchecked. When this happens for long enough, the time to escape is gone. No more running, no more avoiding. Your only option left is to face it head on, to take action, to set a goal that's audacious, and to start attacking. When you find yourself in this position, you'll know what to do. Feel the fear. Move forward. Be relentless. Use every tool you have. Grind it out and make it miserable. With enough time and pressure, you'll break through. You'll hit the tipping point. That moment when momentum shifts, when what you're fighting against starts to weaken and fade. Your goal starts to get closer. Keep going. Don't give up. A crack starts to form. Push harder. It starts to weaken and crumble. Keep pushing. Make sure it falls completely. Make sure it can't come back. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you decide to stop being so reasonable with your circumstances. When the only option you give yourself is to move forward with purpose. Thank you for listening to Animal School. My name is Todd Pabst, and I am not an expert. I'm learning just like you are. Until next time.