dreamer_easy | The Honey Badger (Reply)

"But my childhood love of the natural world had forearmed me with a ready enthusiasm for when I finally came face to face with the honey badger in the wild. Actually, getting face to face with a honey badger is surprisingly difficult. They are blessed with the unique and, I should imagine, bloody surprising ability, if you've just caught one by the scruff of the neck, of being able to turn around inside their own skin. Grab one by the neck, look it in the eye and you'll quickly find that that's not its eye you're gazing into any more and its turned round in its skin so that it can stick its teeth out of its own arse and bite your nuts off. And they do enjoy a reputation for doing just that: tearing off the gonads of anyone foolish enough to provoke them. It might be some sort of bitter reaction to their diminutive scale compared to many other creatures - and, boy can I empathise with that one - or it could just be that they've learned over the centuries that jousting with sinister curved horns, snarling, pawing the ground and banging your chest are all well and good if you're a big, impressive animal want to signal your potency to an enemy, but if you're a small and irritatingly cute-looking thing and want to be taken seriously in the seedier end of the jungle, tearinq someone's bollocks off with your teeth does get your message across quickly."

- Richard Hammond, As You Do, p 126