Honey badger vs lion? Why the badger usually walks away

The short answer

A lion wins a fight it decides to finish. It seldom decides to.

Lions are listed among the honey badger's known predators, alongside leopards and spotted hyaenas. The University of Michigan's Animal Diversity Web adds the detail that matters most: lions and leopards tend to kill only older and weaker honey badgers, because the thickness of the skin makes the rest of them difficult to grasp.

So the badger walking away is the ordinary outcome. The badger being killed happens at the end of its life, or when something has already gone wrong for it.

How far apart they actually are

A honey badger is 60 to 70 centimetres in the body and 8 to 12 kilograms, which comes out around 18 to 26 pounds. That is a well-built dog that happens to be shaped like a weasel.

A lion is a different order of animal. Animal Diversity Web puts males at 189 to 272 kilograms and 2.4 to 3.3 metres long, roughly 417 to 600 pounds, with females averaging about 126 kilograms. Put the lightest male on that scale against the heaviest honey badger and the lion still outweighs it more than fifteen times over.

The hide is the whole trick

A honey badger's skin is very thick and loose, which stops a predator getting a firm grasp and lets the badger twist and bite the attacker.

That sentence describes a specific mechanical problem. The San Diego Zoo says it more plainly: the skin is thick enough to withstand bee stings, porcupine quills and even dog bites, and loose enough that a badger held by the back of the neck can turn around inside it and reach whatever is doing the holding. Behind that hide sit a massive skull, powerful teeth and long claws.

A lion's method depends on getting hold of something and keeping hold of it. The honey badger is built to make the second half of that fail.

It does not wait to be grabbed

The defence starts well before contact. A threatened honey badger raises its hair, holds its tail erect, rattles loudly, and releases a foul-smelling liquid from enlarged glands under the tail. It also frequently charges attackers.

That last habit is the reputation in one line. Most small animals that meet a predator try to become difficult to find. This one closes the distance.

The San Diego Zoo describes the honey badger as an animal that does not start fights it cannot finish, and as wildlife few other animals want to confront.

The colouring is doing work too

The colour scheme is borrowed. A honey badger's black body and white mantle mimic the markings of a baby cheetah, which makes predators less likely to attack in the first place.

A cheetah cub is guarded by an adult cheetah. Looking like one makes a predator hesitate, and hesitation is all a 20-pound animal needs to be somewhere else.

Why a lion usually has better things to do

Lions are built around big prey. They hunt in groups, though the actual killing is done by an individual lion, they hunt mostly at night and into the early morning, and a solitary lion succeeds about 17 percent of the time against 30 percent for a group hunt. Lions that cannot catch large prey will fall back on birds, rodents, fish, ostrich eggs, amphibians and reptiles.

Set a honey badger against that list. A lion with buffalo available has little reason to risk a face on a 20-pound animal that bites back through its own skin.

So who wins

The lion. It is fifteen times heavier and it sits on the list of animals that kill honey badgers.

The record also says it mostly collects the old and the weak, which makes the honest answer narrower than the viral one. A honey badger makes itself hard enough to kill that most lions, most of the time, leave it where it stands.

The badger we put in the story

Belli is our honey badger, and that survival logic is his entire personality. He worked out somewhere along the way that being hard to handle is the same thing as being safe, so he leads with the intimidation and keeps the good heart underneath where nobody can use it against him.

He was always small next to most of what he met on the road. Planted feet, a lowered head and a complete refusal to move ended a lot of confrontations before they got worse. The temper has rules, though. Belli goes off at unfairness, at stupidity, at anything needlessly complicated, and then takes it personally that the situation needed explaining at all. When somebody he cares about is actually in danger, the noise stops and he just moves.

You can meet him and the rest of them on the Atomic Critters Universe page. He also has his own Belli Badger collection, including the Belli Journey unisex tee, which shows him doing exactly what he did for years before any of us met him.

More in this series: do otters hold hands, and does the famous picture tell the whole story.