I like your thinking and that sounds like a fair setup, personally I’ll take the rats and hawks in that scenario, if the hunter has only a shotgun and he’s one mile away he has to be a lot closer to be effective against me.
I think. I hope.
By now three people have chosen the cape buffalo as a defender. I’m more surprised at people who choose the hawks. I feel like it would be one of the easiest to defend against because I just can’t imagine that even 50 of them could inflict mortal damage. It might be a slightly different story if it was 50 golden eagles. However, the hawks are probably the most effective against the 10k rats.
If hawks attack eyes, it’s gonna be nasty: fifty hawks will go from out-of-shotgun-range to pecking-your-eyes-out-range in a second or two. A really good shot with the shotgun might take a half-dozen out at once; that leaves 44 hawks going for the eyes, boo.
If it’s an open field, you gotta take the hawks and the rats just because there’s no damn way to defend against them, which means you gotta get real lucky with the hunter. Everything else I think can be handled with 10,000 rats. My scenario is a little cheaty, inasmuch as it allows a shield of sorts against the hawks.
I choose the rats and hawks. I haven’t seen the exact specs (where is Fishlegs when you really need him to break things down??), but my thinking is the hawks will be able to divebomb and distract most of the larger animals while 10k rats is just going to be nasty at chewing stuff up, assuming they are motivated. As for the hunter, we are talking a shotgun there…have you ever seen the Mythbusters episode where Jamie tries to fight the zombie horde with essentially a paintball shotgun? It didn’t go well. I think only a few hundred of those rats will be able to distract that hunter sufficiently to take him out, no matter how good he is with that shotgun, and even if he’s got it illegally set up to take more than 3 you normally have for hunting.
If it’s broken territory then I definitely want the rats and the hunter. As noted, get under forest cover and you’ve negated most of the danger from the air. Climb a tree and you are free from the crocs, lions, wolves, and buffalo. Rat-swarm any bears that try to climb after me while the hunter picks off targets of opportunity.
Glad to see after voting that I’m with the majority: hunter and rats for me, thanks. I, of course, need the firepower of the hunter, so that’s a given; and there’s just too many of those damn rats, so I’ll take them on my side.
Now, granted, the problem is there’s only one hunter so, if circumstances so happen that he’s taken out early, I’m fucked.
Rats + Toothless = Win!
The obvious answer is for fifty hawks to jointly fly me to safety, grasped in their talons. That’s really going to suck (ow! ow! owowowowow!) but it beats a gorilla mauling.
Next question: how many hawks would it take to lift a grown man?
Alternately, I could sit like Yertle the Turtle atop a mound of ten thousand bitey rats.
As a follow up, I assume the rats in question are large healthy rats but are typical brown (Norway) rats and not some giant jungle species. At 10" length and 4" across, each rat is just over .072 cubic feet. Round that up to 0.08cf with the tail and 10,000 rats fills a space 800cf or just under 30 cubic yards (and weighs 3.75 tons)
Here’s a guy next to a 30cy dumpster. Imagine that in a more pyramidal form and at least you could have the high ground with your shotgun-totting buddy.
I picked the hunter and the gorillas, and almost immediately regretted it. I figured that the gorillas would be smart enough to throw rocks or limbs at the attacking horde. But I don’t think that they would be experienced enough to aim well. (Do gorillas throw things at all? Probably not.) Yeah, should have gone with the rats…
You must have the hunter on your side or you’re dead. Bullets/shot are faster than any animal. It doesn’t matter how the hunter does against the animals. It matters how he does against you. One pull of the trigger and the game is over.
I’ll take 50,000 rats as my melee component. If they are legit trained to fight to the death to defend me, they will significantly slow down all the other opponents except the hawks, and hopefully my hunter can shoot them first.
Your chances of survival here are pretty negligible; really, something is going to get through to you and kill you. Your problem, when it gets right down to it, are the Cape buffalo; nothing in the list has a chance of stopping them. A cape buffalo is an absolute monster, bigger than a bear, very fast (too fast for the rats to mount an effective attack) and mean as hell, probably the only animal here who’d actually enjoy this. A shotgun will absolutely not stop one, and no other animal on the list is any match at all save the bear and you only have one. They’re just going to charge at you and hit you like a car. You’re dead.
In open ground, the rats wouldn’t actually be that great for defense against the other animals. In order to keep a high density, you really can’t have them spread out very far. The other animals could simply run through the rats and while some of the rats may be able to jump onto the charging lions et al, the attackers are coming fast enough that the rats would be unable to deter kamikaze mammals.
LHoD suggests having the rats at 50 feet out. Lions run at 50 mph or 73 feet per second, which wouldn’t give the rats much time to inflict damage, even if they could somehow jump and stay onto a moving animal.
However, there isn’t a good defense against the rats, either.
I don’t think this is survivable.
Willard (never saw any of the movies, but I remember enjoying the book) says go with the rats, and I’ll take the hunter also.
Most primates can half-assedly throw things but the ability to seriously wing an object one handed and hit a distant target with force and accuracy is unique to homo sapiens.
Plan ©: Cover yourself with 30 cubic yards of rats. Maybe use the shotgun barrel as a snorkel.
I chose the hunter and the rats because if they are on the other side, I’m dead.
Hunter definitely. I should probably choose the rats too, but I had to do research on bears for a book I wrote. They’re really tough, durable, and faster than people think. Hunter and three bears.
That said, am I the only person who wishes some quantity of honey badgers was one of the choices?
If I had my druthers, I’d exchange the hunter and the rats for their weight in those surrealistically huge and venomous Japanese hornets.
Oh, those things are awesome! Yeah, they would work well against any of the other animals on the list, I think.
And I’m thinking that the rats couldn’t kill or even subdue any of these animals before they would reach you and clobber you. That many giant hornets, on the other hand, might do the trick!
I went hunter (no big surprise there) and the 5 gorillas -------- but that could just be having just finished reading Starship Troopers for the umpteenth time. What’s wrong you apes ---- ya want to live forever? 
Magnum loads of #2 shot and big hairy gorilla feet and arms just sound like a plan.