“Giant Badgers Terrorise Iraqi Port City”

Pretty standard headline here at Blue Crab Boulevard, no? Only it isn't ours. It is from the Australian Daily Telegraph. Honest.

THE Iraqi port city of Basra, already prey to a nasty turf war between rival militia factions, has now been gripped by a scary rumour – giant badgers are stalking the streets by night, eating humans.

The animals were allegedly released into the area by British forces.

Local farmers have caught and killed several of the beasts, but this has done nothing to dispel the rumour.

Iraqi scientists have attempted to calm things down. However, the story has spread like wildfire in the streets of the city and the villages round about.

Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, director of Basra's veterinary hospital, has inspected the corpses of several badgers and tries to reassure Iraqis that the animals are not a new post-war arrival in the region.

“These animals appeared before the fall of the regime in 1986. They are known as Al-Ghirayri and locally as Al-Girta,” he told AFP. “Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific.”

Not everybody is convinced.

Now we love a good Animal Uprising™ story around here, so we are fairly miffed at the Daily Mail for horning in on our turf. Media bullies. Anyway, one of the absolute best "witness" interviews in the article:

Sattar Jabbar, a 50-year-old local farmer from Abu Sakhar north of Basra, believes the badger can tackle even large prey.

“I saw it three days ago at night attacking animals. It even ate a cow. It tore the cow up piece by piece. I tried to shoot it with my gun but it ran away into the orchards. I missed it,” he said.

Now considering that the badger in question has been identified as a honey badger or ratel, we can pin down the upper range of the creature's size. They grow to a maximum of about 28 pounds. Even though we have been known to claim some fantastic things in our stories, we would really hesitate to try to sell our readers on the idea that a 28 pound badger took down and ate a 1,000 pound cow. We would have made it a full grown elephant. (We have the mental image of the character played by Lara Flynn Boyle in Men in Black II eating her would be human attacker whole. But we digress.)