What is an Al-Ghirayri or Al-Girta

This strange article “Giant badgers terrorise Iraqi port city” says that these giant man-eating badgers are known as Al-Ghirayri and locally as Al-Girta. I did a search for that name and turned up nothing. Shame, I really wanted to see a picture of man-eating badger.

Al-Ghirayri or Al-Girta maybe
(just a regular badger I guess)

Here’s some progress towards an answer. The folks in the comments on the Digg article of this suggest that this is a video of one of the beasts. And here is a the Wikipedia entry on your standard Honey badger (maybe the same thing?).

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) on Jul 11th, 2007 and is filed under Idle Curiosities.

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2 Responses to “What is an Al-Ghirayri or Al-Girta”

  1. Russell Wallace says:
    July 11th, 2007 at 4:54 pm

    Looks like a honey badger, but they don’t get very big and it’s hard to imagine someone calling them “bear-like monsters”. The Eurasian badger, which may be native to northern parts of Iraq, although not Basra, can grow two to three times the size of a honey badger, and would be a lot more likely to scare people who weren’t familiar with them.

  2. Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) says:
    July 11th, 2007 at 5:03 pm

    Interesting Russell. Here’s the link for the Eurasian badger. All this makes me realize what a boring place to live Maryland, US is :-)