Rats that are trying to get away from a dog that’s trying to kill them is different than rats that are trying to kill something.
A bunch of humans can bring down a guy with a gun, but a guy with a gun can kill a bunch of humans. What matters is whether the bunch of humans has bringing down the guy with the gun as the primary objective rather than each person being worried about his or her own life.
Probably because in real life rats don’t coordinate their attacks and would tend to run from the dog or try and escape. But then, in real life, lions and buffalo don’t attack together either. Nor bears and crocs. And the hunter wouldn’t work with any of these things either, he’d be trying to get away from it all and save himself.
I did read the cite, and they were talking about a couple hundred rats, or a weight equivelent…have a 20 or 30 lb dog, you’d get 20 or 30 lbs of rats (with a 1lb rat, that would just be 20-30 rats). It’s unclear, to me, exactly how the contest worked…did they release all the rats at once or over time. Were the rats starving, well fed, something else? Did the rats actually fight together, or did some fight while others fled? There are a ton of unknowns in your cite, and wrt this fantasy OP, I’m unsure how relevant it is in any case. Presumably, these are trained rats that will ‘defend you’.
Really, every choice is valid in this thread since it rests on assumptions the person making it has. If you choose a buffalo and hunter because you figure there is plenty of open, flat ground for the buffalo to run around (and it’s a trained buffalo that will carry your hunter and yourself), then that’s a valid choice. Everyone is tweaking the assumptions to justify their own choice…as am I. I do think that 50 hawks (I pick ferruginous hawk as one of the bigger ones) is going to be a large factor…if they are trained and can coordinate somewhat with each other and the rats. But all of this rests on assumptions I’m making that if the circumstances changed I’d go with something else. It’s going to be very hard to counter a hunter if he starts of 5 feet from me…or a lion for that matter. 
If the rats aren’t on your side you’re pretty much doomed. There’s nothing that can kill them all, and the only defense is to outrun them - but you can’t run forever. When you and/or your mount tire the swarming sea of rats will overtake you and you’ll be done. This will happen in any terrain - but they will be more effective at killing things in a moderately thick forest, where the speed of targets is reduced and they can leap down on them from above.
If the buffalo aren’t on your side they can’t be stopped. They’ll literally charge over and steamroll any defense you can muster. Your only real defense from them would be to stay out of their reach - which would probably mean climbing a tree. If the tree is in a moderately thick forest all the better - the buffalo won’t be able to charge in there.
If the hawks aren’t on your side they can’t be stopped. They fly and attack fast enough that you can’t evade or stop their strikes, which would maim and blind you and make you easy prey for everything else. Your only real defense from them would be to stay out of their reach - which would probably mean hiding in a moderately thick forest.
The hunter has no chance against either the rats, the buffalo, or the hawks - unless (like you) he’s hiding halfway up a tree.
You better hope you have a moderately thick forest available to you for you to hide out in, with your friend the hunter and your defensive army of rats. Anything that approaches will either be blasted by the hunter and/or ripped apart by rats, and eventually enough of the larger distractions will be dealt with that your hunter can climb to a slightly higher but still protected perch and start blasting the hawks from cover. When all those are gone you win.
So a forest is good. An open plain is of course bad, because one of the hawks, rats, or buffalo isn’t on your side and can’t be stopped by anything.
Another option, if you know you have a large stretch of open water available, would be to take the crocodiles and the hawks. A couple of the crocodiles could swim you out to the middle and help you stay afloat while the others kill anything that tries to swim in after you. You mainly have the hawks to prevent them from diving in and ripping your face off. Note that this tactic would require a LARGE body of water - large enough to both keep you out of the hunter’s range and also to give the crocodiles time to kill the thousands of rats that are swimming out to climb on your head and eat your face. (Which they might still succeed at doing -there are a lot of them- though the hawks might be able to help with that.)
As long as there’s room to run, I think any of the animals could eventually take out the rats. Run through a mass of them, squishing multiple rats with every step. If a few get lucky and manage to jump on the animal while it’s running full speed, then it can run ahead of the pack a bit and drop and roll. Rats are very slow compared to the other animals. This image of a relentless wave of rats that can’t be escaped is not how things would play out.
If I remember correctly (I may not), a human can eventually outrun anything on land. Maybe not ME. Okay, definitely not me. But as a species, I think humans are champion distance runners. Someone please correct me if I’ve gotten this wrong.
Of course, the problem is getting ahead of animals that can outrun the human in the short term.
I was wondering why the zoo guy said he’d take the wolves, and it’s probably because he’s thinking more literally than the rest of us. He knows the true hunting and fighting behaviors of these animals and is going with the one group that would actually use teamwork in real life.
Me, I’m taking my trained buffalo. Hi yo, Silver!
+1
I think, for this discussion to go anywhere, we have to stipulate that the animals are going to behave, as much as possible, as they do in the wild. Thus, the wolves will work together, as is their nature. The others? Not so much, except possibly the buffalo, due to their herd instincts. So, yeah, each individual rat is on the attack, but they are not a coordinated swarm of rats. The hawks are individually on the attack, but they aren’t functioning as a “squadron.” And so on…I don’t know about riding the buffalo. Has anybody ever done that and lived?
There are literally tons of rats. They’d form a swarming sea hundreds of yards wide that would flow across the land like an angry carpet. A slow-moving carpet, sure, but to engage them you have to enter them - or be a hawk or the hunter. (And the hunter can’t both shoot and outrun the carpet.)
It can reasonably be assumed that if the rats are defending you they’d form a defensive perimeter that would require something to run through/over it (or fly over it).
In an open field, hundreds of rats would die, sure. But if an animal kills fifty rats and one rat gets a grip on its body, climbs up, and starts clawing at its eyes, then the animal will slow down - and get get dozens of additional friends, and be completely blinded in short order, and shredded shortly after. Of course this will take a little time and a charging cape buffalo is both fast and pretty big - it wouldn’t surprise me if one of them could last long enough and make it far enough to steamroll the soft target in the middle of the roiling mass. But have no doubt - no matter how big or fast the target, the rats would get it sooner or later unless it completely ran away and fled the field.
Do rats ever actually behave in any way like that? If the animals are going to behave completely contrary to their natures, we might as well be arguing over whether my wyvern will kick your griffin’s ass.
Presuming the rats are all actively attacking the same target, their individual actions will inevitably result in a relentless wave of rats. When you get ten thousand rats all heading in the same direction that’s what happens.
I’m not sure how this would work defensively. If your animals aren’t acting ‘intelligently’ defensive, then they’re just going to attack the nearest enemy animal and not bother defending you. And if all the attacking animals are single-mindedly targeting you, then you’ll be lunchmeat, relatively speaking - your defenders will get distracted and run off and leave you alone and you’re done.
Well, okay, the human would probably stick by you, but he alone can’t stop everything at once.
I admit I’m no expert on rats, but it’s my understanding that while they are fine with climbing over each other somewhat, they don’t form giant vertical stacks of themselves arranged like cheerleaders. Which means that, inevitably, they’re going to be spread out only one or two rats deep, which means they’re going to take up a lot of surface area. Now admittedly the ‘carpet’ wouldn’t be evenly distributed - it would concentrate itself on nearby targets.
This is, of course, assuming they’re playing along at all. In reality they’d doubtlessly just flee scattering in all directions, the hawks would ignore you, the gorillas and wolves would shy away from you, the crocs would stay near the water, the hunter wouldn’t shoot at you because of laws, and the buffalo would kill your butt before anything else got the chance.
The zoo guy did mention that wolves would work in a pack, but he also thought they would be most effective against the huge numbers of rats and hawks. Zoo guy seemed to think it would be near impossible for rats or hawks to inflict mortal damage to a human. But I don’t know, 10,000 is a hell of a lot of rats.
Well, yes, exactly. The animals should defend you as they might defend one of their own. That being the case, one supposes the bears and lions should be all females and think of you as their cub. Males of those species are kind of self-centered. So, the buffalo will consider you part of their herd and defend you as they would a calf from a predator. What is completely out, I think, is the animals coordinating cross-species. The hawks aren’t going to dive bomb the hunter and drop angry rats on him, for example.
20 or so years ago, I saw some British fellow on PBS. He was a biologist who studied gorillas, IIRC. In talking about species preserved only in captivity he noted that animals are more than their DNA. They are also their behaviors. A gorilla raised in captivity by humans may look like a gorilla, but it doesn’t know how to BE a gorilla as they function in the wild. Thus, if these animals are really supposed to be these animals, we have to preserve their behaviors.
Most things, in an endurance race. Unfortunately wolves are one of the few animals that actually can roughly hang with humans( pronghorn antelope probably have us beat ). And this matters more in the context of humans as a hunter, where critters are fleeing and humans pursuing. Because in a sprint we don’t fare so well - the only thing we’re going to outrun in a short distance are probably the crocodiles and the rats.
Wouldn’t the lions work together, as well?
The more I think about it, the less I’m liking the hunter. Both the buffalo and rats are a hard counter to the hunter.
However, there is no hard counter to the rats. So you gotta take them.
So then the only question is whether to take hawks or buffalo. I’m sticking with buffalo.
This sounds more like a Stephen King version of rats that never get tired and can easily inflict severe damage. In reality, these rats will tire long before a buffalo, bear, or human.
Rats cannot swarm over a buffalo running through them at 35 mph. Picture a car driving through a mass of rats. You can even put some fur on the sides to give the rats something to grip. Those rats will bounce right off and probably be killed in the process. If one gets on, it will be hanging on for dear life, not gracefully scampering up to the head where it can chew on eyeballs unmolested.
10,000 rats could do severe damage to an immobilized animal. To a charging buffalo, they will be squished or left behind.
To me, the hunter would be my last pick. I really don’t see a single hunter with a hunting shotgun as being all that effective, really. What I think is getting folks there is the ‘unlimited ammo’, but that doesn’t mean you get a magic Hollywood shotgun…it just means he’s loaded down with a ton of ammo. He’s got to reload the thing. And the different shot is for different things. Birdshot isn’t going to do much more than piss off a lion or buffalo or whatever. Slugs aren’t going to do much against hawks or rats. My WAG is he’d go with a general load, something like buckshot, but whatever he goes with will be a compromise. As a fellow human with a pretty good idea of what a shotgun can and can’t done, I find the hunter the least dangerous thing on the list…depending on the terrain and initial disposition (I don’t find the crocs very threatening either, unless we are talking about starting in a muddy river or them right next to me). Like I said, if we are talking about starting the hostile hunter 5 feet away from me I’d have to rethink that…but I’d say the same thing about the lions or wolves too.
Yup, you’re right. But lions are lazy assholes. Don’t pick them.