I changed your vote to hork bajir
Er, I was hoping to still have one vote towards rhinoceros (as my primary battle morph) and one towards Hork-bajir (as my secondary). I thought we got two votes, right?
Ah, well, I suppose it doesn't really matter how I vote since I'm posting here about what my votes would be, anyway.
I think another one chose bobcat. I can see the appeal of a cat as a battle morph, but a bobcat isn't much bigger than a house cat. As a standard for battle morph you should be asking "How well does it stand up against a Hork-Bajir?".
Keep in mind, though, that the smaller morphs tend to be faster, and present a smaller target. In a contest of brute force, yeah, a bobcat would probably lose to a Hork-bajir. But if the Hork can't even
hit the bobcat? As a side note about bobcats, I once camped at a nature center that had a bobcat kitten that they'd adopted. Those things are stronger than they ought to be. I watched that kitten, which was a TINY thing, tackle a housecat that was at least four times its size, and sent the bigger cat tumbling down the stairs. Do not underestimate the power of pure unadulterated wildness.
That could be a downside to choosing a Hork. Because that Yeerk who has been fighting a war for years as a Hork-Bajir has more experience than you do. Unless my theory about the Empire giving crap soldiers to visser Three is correct. because if you're known for beheading your soldiers after failure, anyone who has any pull in the empire is going to make sure they aren't stationed on the same planet as you.
That makes a lot of sense. I'd actually always wondered how the Animorphs could consistently beat Hork-bajir in combat. If you showed me a Hork-bajir, and asked me who would win in a fight between that and a tiger/bear/gorilla/wolf, I would put all my money on the Hork-bajir, every time. I generally tended to think it was because the Hork-bajir had been herbivores with no natural predators, and thus would have no natural instinct for fighting; the Yeerks that controlled them therefore wouldn't have the benefit of that instinctual knowledge, either.
Either way, though, Hork-bajir still makes sense as a battle morph.