Inspired by the “Screaming 15 year old girl peppered-sprayed by cop thread” in GD, I pose this question to you.
If you were forced to choose between wrestling a vicious girl that looks like the one in this video, or a vicious 20 lb housecat, which one would you pick? Pretend that the only rule is that you can’t bring any weapons except the ones you were born with. The goal is to restrain is your opponent with sustaining the least amount of injury to yourself. Hurting them is incidental, but okay.
Me, I’d pick the girl. And I’m a skinny girl myself. My rationale is that a cat is harder to grab on to and restrain. They have four paws bearing a total of 18 sharp claws that scratch you worse than a mofo. When a cat bites, it can bite. There is no mercy between their jaws when they are really angry. And they are squirmy and fast. You can’t pin them down without a lot of coordination and leverage and strength.
A girl? Slam her to the floor, pin her arms down, and that’s it. As long as you keep herself out of the range of her face where she can bite you and you weigh a decent amount, then you’re good. She’ll struggle for a while but eventually tire herself out. Then you can knock her lights out if you were so inclined.
The cat could hurt me worse than the girl could before I restrained it/her.
And Duke, I’ve never seen a cat that couldn’t get out of range of a stomp before I had my leg halfway drawn back. Sure, if you land a kick and catch the cat between your foot and the floor, or your foot and a wall, you could crush it. Not likely, IMO. My friend has a very docile cat who, unfortunately, does not like to be touched. If she is sitting on the floor and I make the slightest move towards her, she is on the other side of the room before I can take a breath. Cats are fast.
The cat. I might take my shirt off to do it (use the shirt to wrap the cat in), but definitely the cat. With no shirt, I’d probably be forced to injure the cat, which I’d hate to do, but it’d be a lot easier than a 100 pound panicked human.
I’ve done both, by the way. The only part of this that’s hypothetical for me is the “hurting them is incidental” part. I was trying, in both instances, to restrain them without hurting them.
ETA: But I don’t have any *training *in restraining either. Maybe if I did I’d have a different answer.
Also, cat scratches and bites tend to heal pretty well. The same cannot be said of human bites, alas.
I’d expect to end up shedding some blood, but physics are working against it. It is far more fragile than any truly crazed human being, even an itsy teenage girl. Yes, I’ve known someone that had a tendon severed in their hand by a feral cat bite. But a human is much more likely to inflict serious damage. One of the worst things I’ve ever witnessed was a teenage girl damn near skinning another girl’s face with her teeth.
Bites, not so much. I had a cat bite get really infected very fast. I then got lectured by the doctor (“In your line of work you should know better! Next time get in here before it starts swelling!”) and informed there is an antibiotic specific for cat bites. Works a treat, too.
As for the OP, I’d take the girl. I would’t be nearly as worried about hurting a fighting kid (who should know better) than a cat who is probably scared to death and can’t understand a word I am saying.
Then again, I like cats. Kids, not so much*.
*Some kids I like. Most of the kids raised by my friends are turning out to be decent human beings. The ones I am exposed to in public a lot, however, seem to belong in cages.
I am a rather small human and may not do well against someone my size or bigger and much younger, so since I wrestle with cats on a regular basis as part of my job I’ll just stick with the cats.
On the other hand, I know some tricks about people, too. I once knocked out a guy who probably weighed more than twice as much as I did. It’s all about knowing the right spot and doing things they don’t expect. When he fell to the concrete floor of the parking garage I thought I’d killed him (and I was okay with that) so I duly went and reported it to the cops. But when they went to get him, he was gone.
A housecat (feral) clawed my face (there was no biting). The entire attack lasted about 10 seconds, beginning to end. I wound up in the hospital for two days on 2 kinds of continuous IV antibiotics due to severe cellulitis and infection in my eye socket. I can only imagine what it would be like to be in a pitched battle with such an animal rather than just a brief encounter.
I think the teenaged girl’s attack might hurt more in the moment but the cat’s bites and claw wounds would get infected and could cause more harm in the long run. They’ve got that bartonella bacteria in their mouths that is pretty toxic, poop on their claws, etc. Also, it seems like cats just know how to fight, whereas most teenage girls could be fended off by someone larger while inflicting minimal damage.
I can stomp that wiry 15 year old girl into submission with one foot, one stomp.
I’m a big ol’ girl. Even if that girl had a weapon, I would probably have her ass stretched out on the ground in 3 seconds flat.
But I didn’t come in here to vote. Oh no…I came in here to say that I have been rolling on the floor laughing since reading this in the “pepper spray” thread in Great Debates :
I wanted to express my pure delight at those responses to the silly arguments in that thread, but I had vowed not to post in that backward trainwreck again.
When I was working with feral cats, I got a call from a lady who had somehow managed to get a feral cat and her kittens into her bathroom. She was able to get the kittens without injury but Feral Mama had let her know in no uncertain terms that this was WAR!
I went in with over the elbow thick leather falconers gloves. Feral Mama bit me through the leather. She was only able to barely break the skin - there was too much leather in her mouth - but I had a bruise for two weeks.
I did manage to get her in the carrier and get her spayed. She was released in the lady’s backyard where she would be fed. I am so glad I never had to deal with that one again; if looks could kill I would have been SO dead.
But I am amazed that people think a 20 lb fur-covered hiss machine would be easier to conquer than that sack of skin and bones in that video.
Good point, too. Your average cat has biological weapons in its mouth that your average teenager does not. Plus, they have canines like needles. A girl has an omnivore mouth.
Well cats are good at being both predator and prey. Humans are automatically predator when it’s cat vs. human.
Where does this fight take place? A football stadium? Cats are great at being prey. If it were me and my little girl-cat in a pitched battle and she had places to run and hide, I’d starve to death before I ever caught her.
A mouth full of exceedingly nasty bacteria. Human bites are quite nasty. And a human is much more likely to have a disease you can catch. After a quick google I got this :
Personally, I’d go with the cat. If for no other reason that the cat is rather less likely to have a hidden knife or gun, or a large unpleasant friend who’ll come up from behind and cave in my skull.
The infectivity of cat bite wounds is more than twice that of human bite wounds. Your average girl is not going to have TB, hepatitis, or syphilis swimming around in their saliva, so I would take my chances with them over the cat. Furthermore, an animal is more likely to give you rabies, the most lethal disease known to mankind.