She’s the authoritarian matriarchal warlord with a fart so powerful it strikes terror in the heart of honey badgers. She rolls with a posse that’s 30-strong, uses warthogs like DoorDash for her tick snacks between brawls, and has a cousin who catches birds with his butt cheeks. Her ancestors were sailing to Madagascar more than 65 million years before the British Empire, and she gets turned on by the hyper-violence of gang fights. Exalted with mummification in ancient Egypt, she’s the Rikki-Tikki Riot Grrl of the east African plains, the erotically berserk mob tactician that turns cobras into ballpark brats on the daily. If you can see her coming, it’s already too late. Nothing can stop the battle-hardened banded mongoose.
And in case you missed the news, self-organized mongoose warfare has become so brutally hardcore that the call of scientific inquiry has rung out across the globe, seeking to make sense of (or at least seek safety from) the species’ ceaseless fury. And that call has been answered. An elite and seemingly fearless international crew of mongoose-minded researchers are now setting out to figure out how these thrash-metal freak weasels are capable of such merciless violence between their warring tribes — and what we humans might learn about our own war-party tendencies from the aggressive behavior of these vicious mammals.
