There’s been a spate of ‘vs’ threads in IMHO lately, so let’s go back to an old classic. A while back there was a story that a fully grown male African lion had decimated the Cambodian Midget Fighting League. Fortunately for humanity in general the story was a hoax, although the creator made the fake article based on the debate over who would win.
So, without further ado, all aboard the bad taste express! The human fighters are all male, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They are fit trained martial artists, know what they will face but have had little time to prepare. The lion is 550lb male fresh from the wilds of Namibia; not kept in captivity or tamed in any way. Scheduled for 6pm in a large, flat arena, the fight is to the death. Who wins?
The lion. You do realize that trained martial artists always attack their enemies one at a time, or if they attack in a group they do so in a way that allows their opponent to kill many of them with a single blow, or in such a way that if the the opponent steps cleverly to the side they will kill each other.
Now untrained martial artists at least have a chance of organizing some sort of plan before too many of them are dead. The might wear our the lion over time and have some small chance of striking a hobbling blow to the lion, after which they attack en masse, with almost every one dying in the process, but in the end one or two of the wee warriors may survive.
I’d like to change my answer from the lions to either the 42 or a stalemate. Taken together the 42 can lift several times the lions weight, so it should be no problem to eventually pin it down and start breaking limbs etc. So even if the lion does win, if this were in the natural world instead of the arena, the lion would be too injured to hunt afterward and if male, would be too injured to fend off rivals which means it would be forced to hunt and starve.
As long as the lion doesn’t stop to eat the hors d’oeuvres, I think it has the edge. They might have martial arts, but the lions claws will gut so many so fast the ground would look like a scene from the “Walking Dead”.
I was just gonna say ‘midgets’, but that’s rather last century and offensive; ‘little people’ sounds patronising to me. Wiki informed me that the correct term for those in the Cambodian Midget Fighting League would be proportionate dwarfism.
The difference between dwarfs (dwarves being Gimli’s kind) and midgets, for the politically incorrect.
42 guys knowing they are about to face 1 animal in a fight to the death. FORTY TWO! The lion doesn’t stand a chance. Surely a few men will be wounded and probably more than one will die from his wounds, but 42 people prepared to attack the animal will grapple and pin it as it grabs and delivers the killing bite to one of its first victims.
The reason I quoted what I did is I believe that makes all the difference in the world. If the dwarves opened the bathroom door on the tour bus and surprise a lion sprang out, everyone panics and pursues their individual hopes of survival. But even if your “little time to prepare” is only to hear the words “A lion is about to be unleashed in your midst and you must fight or die” then the mentallity changes from flee to pile on.
The Lion wins. There is not going to be any pile on. The lion is way too quick and strong for that. I don’t see how the dwarfs are going to land any crucial blows with just their hands and feet. Eventually, all 42 of them will be dead.
The little league wins. No more than 10 die in the pit. No more than half die of wounds. At least a dozen would come away unscathed. The biggest loss of life would be in the outset, where a few will have to die to occupy the lion. Hyenas kill lions, and while they’re much more dangerous than midgets, as few as five or six can kill a solitary lion. 42 is a fuckton of dwarves.
We are talking 42 humans here, even if they are small. Assuming they are all reasonably fit and not hampered by any movement issues, they will win eventually even without weapons but just with the clothes on their backs. A lion can only do so much at once, and all it would take is one of the 42 using his clothe wrapped arm as a shield to distract the lion and let the rest pile on to get the chance to take it down.
I predict plenty of carnage to the 42, and many deaths or injuries, but if they know there is no hope to get away except to kill the lion then I can’t see how 42 humans with 42 human brains couldn’t take down one mangy lion.
Definitely of the most amusing things I’ve read on the Dope, I doff my cap to you good sir (or miss or ma’am).
Got to say this is running a lot closer than I thought it would; as in the fake story I figured most people would reckon for a curb-stomp battle in the lions favour.
The Lions lost but only just barely to Titans but these are midgets we’re talking about.
I guess my only question is if a proportionate dwarf can punch/kick hard enough to break bones. Maybe if they went after the soft parts like the eyes, nose, and anus and hopefully enough blood flows out. 42 is a bit of a limited number though. I’m imagining at 4 feet tall apiece, that would only allow for ~ 8-10 waves. I’m leaning towards the dwarves after initially siding with the lion but this is a toughie.
