‘Eagle: spread those wings and fly’
Some years ago, in the summer of 2007, amid the tragedies of The Second Gulf War, I read an article that surprised me and made me laugh out loud. UK military spokesman, Major Mike Shearer, was forced into a rebuttal of a story doing the rounds that the British had been training and then releasing ‘man-eating’ honey badgers to attack the residents of Basra. Now war is far from funny, please don’t misunderstand me, but — even with the alleged history of training animals that the British Armed Forces have had levelled at them over the years (look it up: from squirrels defusing minefields, to dolphins intercepting or diverting torpedoes, I’m truly not making this up) — the statement made was as deft as it was bizarre.
‘We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area’. (Major Mike Shearer, UK military spokesman)
Now the humble honey badger is truly fearless, counting cobras as a key part of their diet, attacking lions and elephants, and — as the meme goes — they really ‘don’t give a fuck’. They are also, however, far more intelligent than they are given credit for, as the BBC’s excellent ‘Honey Badgers: Masters of Mayhem’ showed. The star of this show — Stoffel — proves that time and again. But ‘man-eating’? Not that I — since then a true fan of the rattel, as it is known commonly — had heard the slightest hint of.
