The Man Eating Badgers Of Basra

I suspect a conspiracy and a cover up. No one is admitting it, of course, because it wouldn’t be a cover up if they were admitting it. And a categorical denial is always a dead giveaway. British Major Mike Shearer would have made Special Agent Dana Scully suspicious. “We can categorically state,” he says, “that we have not released man-eating badgers in the area.” And the fact that the second unit in any British Army formation is always called the “Badger Brigade” is just a coincidence, I suppose.
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When Major David Gell asserted, “We have not released giant badgers, and nor have we been collecting eggs and releasing serpents into the Shatt al-Arab river”, it sounded as if he doth protest a bit too much, to me. And who asked him about giant serpents? When they start denying stuff you haven’t even asked them, you know they are hiding something. First the man eating Badgers of Basra and then the Loch Ness Monster and the Beast of Bodmin Moor. They’re all like some drunken fairy tale, told by a drunken fairy to other drunken fairies.
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Suad Hassan doesn’t think it is a fairy tale. She told the London Times, “I was sleeping at night when this strange animal hit me on the head. I have not seen such an animal before. My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer. It was the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey. It runs so quickly.” And from where could such a monkey dog have come from except from Great Britain? And what diabolical reason could he have for hitting a sleeping woman on the head? And what kind of bizarre 2/3rd dog and 1/3 monkey tool could he have used?
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This omnivorous eating machine is properly known as Mellivorinae Mellivora capensis abyssinica, and by the time you pronounce his Latin name he could chew your foot off. So humans call him by shorter names, unpleasant names such as “ratel”. In Basra, where misbehaving children are warned he is coming to eat them, he is known simply as al Girta, “the beast”. But in Iceland he is the terrifying Hunangsgreifingi. In equatorial Africa he is the Nyeger who comes by night. In Italy they whisper of il tasso miele. And in England those who dare to speak his name call him… the Honey Badger. And he is not called honey because he is sweet.
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Picture a creature over 40 inches nose to tail, 20 pounds of perpetually angry, hungry beast that ravenously devours rodents, porcupines, skunks, foxes, jackals, antelope, chickens, vultures, hawks, frogs, fish, beetles, scorpions, turtles, small crocodiles, fruits and berries and they are especially fond of fresh melons when in season. al Girta has even been known to use his razor sharp teeth and claws to remove the testicles from any creature that gets between him and his meal, such as leopards, lions and even …humans!. (Music sting!)
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Farmer Sattar Jabbar has faced down this Mesopotamian Chupacabra. “I saw it three days ago at night,” he says. “It even ate a cow. It tore the cow up piece by piece.” Jabbar said he tried to shoot the beast but, “…it ran into the orchards. I missed it.” Sounds like it might be time for a badger fatwa.
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Mushtag Abdul-Mahdi, who runs the Basra Veterinary hospital, and who is clearly on the payroll, insists, “Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific.” But Ali Mohsen, a local farmer, isn’t falling for this line of British camel dung. “This animal appeared following a raid…by the British forces,” he says.
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The badger has won “The Most Fearless Animal” from the Guinness Book of World Records, and at youtube.com/watch?v=Ua3M1O-WQrM, you can watch one of these rodents of unusual size steal a meal from a King Cobra and then eat the snake. Despite being bitten repeatedly al Garta wears the cobra down, bites off his head, passes out from the effects of the venom and then reawakens before nonchalantly resuming his meal. Dedicated, single minded, impervious to pain and neurotoxins: It sounds like these Indigenous Nocturnal Carnivores (or I.N.C’s ) would make the perfect royal marine.
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Still Major Gell insists that Man Eating Badgers are not a threat to humans. Then why are they called man eaters, Major? You can almost hear the British brass hats smirking as they claim, “Badgers? We don’t need no stinking Badgers.”
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