Here’s a question to your question, what do you count as “unarmed”? I mean I know some one brought up the fisher but I’d expect it’d have no chance against you if you were wearing boots and just stomped it to death. (It probably wouldn’t have a chance if you weren’t wearing boots either but I guess it could give you a nasty gash on your feet or legs. However with a shod foot you could really do some damage.)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/capybaracamera/3331961983/
They weigh up to ~150lbs. You’d be dead.
We probably do need a rules clarification. The fairest fight would be a nude healthy male against some other mammal in an enclosed concrete cage with no hope of escape for either of them. The first to render death wins. Prize money goes up the larger and more fierce the opponent and you only get one. Let’s say a Siberian Tiger is $1,000,000 and a Maine Coon Cat is worth $1.01. How do you establish the money scale with balanced odds so that the bookie taking the bets makes money with evenly matched money with commission?
What animals are on this scale and how much are they worth? This is an amateur contest only so no pro fighters.
For what it’s worth, the owner of a hunting lodge in the Alaskan Range told me that the one animal that he, other hunters, and other animals stay away from is the wolverine.
As far as the cheetah, that might be the easiest big cat to beat. Cheetah’s are very lithe, skinny even, and have very small heads. They are built for one thing: speed. And they know this. One of the problems they face in the parks, which now have an artificially high concentration of predators, is that they make a kill and it is taken from them by lions, jackals, hyenas, etc. They will not fight. They seem to know that an injured cheetah, one that can’t get up to their 70mph is soon to be a dead cheetah. So, they tend to err on the side of caution.
Cheetahs supposedly make pretty good pets because they aren’t generally aggressive towards people and have been kept as pets by lots of people of thousands of years. I am not sure what they would do if they were physically attacked by a human though which is the key to this whole question for lots of different animals. Bobcats are pretty small but I don’t know how you could attack one with your bare hands and feet in an enclosed space without getting badly hurt. A mountain lion might make an even match for a healthy skilled male but I think even a win would still be near suicide.
A mountain lion is a whole different kettle of fish, as are other panthers. The are much more muscular. It would be fairly easy to injure a cheetah, then keep injuring him. Assuming you’d have the balls to get past the sweeping claws. I guess if the two of you were locked in a room and he was pissed, it would be a big problem. But “fighting” really isn’t in their DNA. Run, get animal from behind, bight on back of neck eat. If anything interferes with that, RUN!
Yeah so they`re heavy, but what do they have to attack with? On land they seem pretty slow and not fairly agile. If you can avoid being bitten or swiped with its short claws, I think a few hard kicks to its midsection would injure it enough for you to then just out-last it until its death.
Also, as an another thought, in the case of non-aggressive animals, does winning by starvation count?
There is no way you’re going to get me to strip naked and fight a Maine Coon Cat in a cage for a measly dollar. For a dollar, I’ll get naked and fight a 200 kg (around 440 lb) giant clam, using the Autolycus method: wait for starvation.
If the man has a knife, apparently he can take on something pretty big.
I saw a big, strong college football player defeated by a common gray squirrel. The short version is that the guy (who was pretty much of an asshole) lured it in close with peanuts_it was a park squirrel_ and then grabbed it.
Mr. Squirrel set to work with a will with all four sets of tree-climbing claws and those big nut-crushing teeth. The football player, who probably weighed over a hundred times the squirrels weight, didn’t do much but scream and bleed. A few moments later, the squirrel was back in his tree, leaping from branch to branch, and running along telephone wires. The football player was on his way to the hospital, where he had to get all manner of injections, and about a million stitches in his hands.
If the human is going about this with no weapons at all, I believe the animals are going to have to be pretty tiny, indeed.
A lot of animals that would be easy to kill if you could have a stick would be a bit tougher if you’re completely naked. The problem is that you have to grab them or stomp them, and they’re fast and have sharp teeth and claws. It’s not that they’re going to kill you or anything, it’s that your hands and feet will get cut to hell.
I’d go up against a cheetah. I’ve seen videos where the cheetahs are trying to attack a baby antelope, and don’t know what to do. They pat at it with their patty-paws, and the baby antelope kind of lunges, and they cringe. They finally get the baby antelope to run away, and then they know what to do–trip it and bite its throat. A cheetah isn’t going to be able to handle an aggressive human.
These questions are almost invariably* answered with WAGs portraying the utter helpessness of an adult human against most any animal. Do you really think a 100lb. animal wouldn’t be seriously hurt by a full-force fist blow to the head? Wouldn’t a person able to rear-naked-choke a 200 lb. MMA fighter be able to kill a bobcat half that size by the same method, arms badly scratched and all?
Almost the only real-life data we have on this are trained German shepherds going after padded guys, or the rare chimp attack, which seem to tell the whole story. But perhaps these animals are exceptionally adept fighters for their size against humans. As a WAG, a naked man could kill most herbivores in the 200 lb. range, given training on the specific strengths and weaknesses of each animal. A capybara would be almost easy, with it’s barrely torso, spindly legs and big head prime targets for kicks and strikes.
Large predators and very large herbivores could kill any naked man at will, but on a wider scale, humans are pretty large, heavy-boned and muscular creatures with very nimble hands and the brains to use them for evil things. Thumbs in eyes, knees to ribs, twisted joints, biting (yes!) etc. all work on animals as they do on humans. Many animal skeletons are surprisingly lightweight compared to humans. I could break many of the smaller limb bones with my bare hands.
- See the previous post for a different take
I think the closest matches would be a fully-grown wolf and a mountain lion, and the aforementioned cheetah. I think the mountain lion would come off the better for it, but it would be a good fight. The other two, I’d put my money on the human.
I doubt it. A white tail buck in that range would do in a naked man pretty handily, even in the time of year after they have shed their antlers. Ask anybody who hunts deer and they will tell you that the best way to dispatch a wounded deer is to shoot it again. I personally know grown healthy men who got knocked on their asses by badly wounded deer they sought to finish off with a knife. Their hooves are hard and sharp and they have very powerful muscles driving them.
Humans use weapons because that is what works for us. Naked, we are very poorly armed compared to other animals.
That’s right, I don’t. I punched an aggressive german shepard across the head as hard as I could on one occasion. It certainly knocked him over, but it his owner hadn’t finally got control of him at that moment, I expect I’d have ended by getting badly torn up.
Scumpup,
I’ve seen the videos and heard the stories of hunters getting their asses kicked by whitetail bucks. This is in part why I said most herbivores. I’ve skinned enough whitetails to see the massive glutes and thick necks these guys have. But so do humans who have trained their entire lives for fighting (not that I’ve skinned any): an average hunter trying to dispatch a stubborn deer is physically and mentally worlds apart from a trained fighter who expects a serious beating when entering a ring.
German shepherds were addressed earlier. I don’t think their proven ability to take a punch or tear a man up is representative of most animals half the size of humans. They have been bred for human-fighting ability for, what, 100 years now?
Weapons are totally needed to take out most animals with little risk. In a deathmatch, getting hurt is a given. The question is, could a naked man emerge as a winner? Apart from large predators and herbivores larger than a man, I think he could.
I’ll think we should at least allow the man to wear a pair of underpants, as long as he didn’t try to strangle his opponent with them.
Physically, what do humans have going for them? Two free limbs and awesome cardio. Our mobility is divorced from our breathing. 4-leggers have a hard time running and breathing at the same time. I think you can circle a lot of animals until they’re tired. You just close in, threaten, then sidestep. You do a boxer dance around the animal. It can’t swing at you and move at the same time, after all. So you keep bobbing and weaving for, like, an hour, throwing jabs to keep it on guard.
You’ll be tired, but so will they. If you can keep doing some sort of fencer advance-and-retreat so that the animal has to constantly reposition, it might help. Stay out of range but close enough that a charge at you isn’t possible. Maybe maintain a 45-degree angle from it’s face?
When you’re ready to move in, you take advantage of its stupidity. You hold your left arm out to the side and move it vigorously. Get the animal’s attention. Then smack it with your right arm that it wasn’t watching. Get on top of it. Gouge, choke, bite, kick. Ride it like a bull. Exercise+no wind pipe = blackout. Then kill however you can.
Will it work? I don’t know. But that’s my plan.
I took down a sea sponge myself not one week ago! I had to bite it over and over again. And use liberal amounts of soy sauce.
Heh… wish I’d been there to see that!
But I don’t know if it addresses the question here. It’s not like the football player was in a death match to kill the squirrel. If he was, he’d have crushed it long before the claws and teeth could kill him.
A clarification: It was a deathmatch. At least that is the way the football player planned it. His intention was to “kill one of those little bastards” for the entertainment of his buddies. The squirrel, of course, was merely trying to escape. Squirrels apparently have much quicker reaction time and reflexes even than a highly trained human athlete because he set to work a bitin’ and a clawin’ the very instant that asshole grabbed him.