Since an experiment on a live camel would likely put the animal rights folks in an uproar, just a rough estimate would satisfy me.
If the straw is travelling sufficiently fast, one straw will do it. It would probably be necessary to carry out the procedure in vacuum.
- Definitely 42. I see you didn’t specify size or material of the straws, so the answer is (always) 42.
The load capacity of a male bactrian camel is 240 kg, ie. 240, 000 one gram straws.
I don’t, however, know about African or Europea … AAARRRrgggghhhhh
Just to nitpick, the saying implies that the addition of the weight of a single straw would break the camel’s back, not that the weight carried was made up of straws.
Although there’s no reason it couldn’t be, I guess.
It would probably be necessary to carry out the procedure in a hurricane/tornado.
Witness photos of straws driven thru./into wooden telephone/power poles.
Is anyone else thinking “Mythbusters” ?
According to this an 18 x 14 x 36 bale of straw weighs about 55 lbs (about 25 kg.) SentientMeat has helpfully pointed out that a male bactrian camel can carry 240 kg, (about 9.6 bales.)
Since one bale of straw measures about 5.25 cubic feet, that means the male bactrian camel could carry about 50.4 cubic feet of straw. I’ll leave it to someone else to work out metric equaivalents.
Well… I think I’m smarter for having read this.
:smack: …only on the SDMB…
Actually, the load capacity is not the same as the backbreaking capacity. The quoted load capacity of 240kg is just how much weight a male camel normally can walk around with. It’s going to take quite a lot more weight to actually snap the spine of the animal.
Yes, but then the weight-bearing area of the load becomes the critical factor, and the phrase provides no information about that: if the straws are loaded onto a saddle comprising an extremely sharp knife (ie. an area of less than 1 mm[sup]2[/sup], maybe a few hundred will separate vertebrae. Spread evenly (over, say, 1 m[sup]2[/sup], and the camel will be squashed to a pulp by literal billions of straws before the vertebrae separate.
THIS!
Also, the animal’s back is not similar to a rigid piece of material that will sustain weight X and then fail at weight X plus weight of one straw. The animal’s back is made of muscle, connective tissue, and bones. I’m sure one of the animal’s back muscles would fail prior to the back breaking, causing the animal to fall over and no longer be in position to find the back breaking weight. Or the leg could buckle leading to falling over, same deal.
I think we should stop using the camel idiom/phrase entirely in favor of the more binary operation of the “drop that overflowed the glass”. If you ever played with water and filling glasses, the meniscus fills and then one drop, sploosh!
I found this thread by searching instead of starting a new one.
Not so! The saying refers to the “last straw” as doing the final damage, which most certainly implies that the burden it is being added to already consists, at least in part of straw.
Uh oh, zombie I see!
I can easily see Adam and Jamie going out to build competing model camels, each with a different breakdown method (“Now what breaks on the camel is its spine. I’ve made a “spine” out of pieces of PVC tubing held together by an elastomer that matches the cartilage “discs” in a camel’s spinal column…”), then loading them with weights, culminating in straws that they add one by one until the models snap.
Not the way I’ve ever heard it. I only hear of the “straw” that breaks the camel’s back. Never anything about “last straw”.
I wonder how many straws it takes to break a zombie camel’s back?
Although, on this board, it’d be a straw MAN, instead.
Good question! Let’s find out.
One,
two,
three
CRUNCH
Three.
What kind of straw do you come into contact with? A few hundred pieces of straw is what I would picture to be a handful of straw. That’s one weak pack animal.
One, maybe, if the guy who said this is wielding it:
Snort! Anyone knows it’s 44, always 44. Did you NOT account for the hemispheric wave variation in the locations where camels are known to congregate?
Amateur…