Help me settle a bet with a friend of mine:
I claim that a person with average jaw strength can, if not consistently rip chunks of flesh out without use of back and neck muscles, can at least penetrate to the jugular and thus cause quick death.
So, fill me in? What is the most damage-resistant part of the body that someone can mangle by gnawing on?
Also, for extra credit, could a situation came up where it would be advantageous to attempt to bite someone (being attacked by someone stronger, etc.) and if so, what should they bite?
Your extra-credit question is odd, since any fight that gets desperate enough lends itself to biting. The single best place to bite someone is the throat, where you should easily be able to cause jugular-ripping damage, as well as prevent your opponent from biting you back. Odds are you won’t have that choice, though. In any event, biting (and eye-gouging) are discouraged by social convention, so if you’re going to bite, you invite your opponent to do the same, so you’d better bite deep.
As a minor aside, the anaerobic bacteria between the teeth make human bites potentially extremely dangerous.
For extra credit, it depends: back in the day, I discouraged a poorly applied rear choke hold by biting the guy on the forearm he hadn’t managed to place properly. I don’t think you can come up with a hard and fast set of rules, though, as to where to bite or when it would be advantageous, other than “wherever you can” and “whenever you can” with the caveat “as long as there’s not something more effective you could be doing, like getting the heck out of there.”
Assume that the oppertunity comes up to bite someone’s wrist. Are average human teeth capable of nicking the artery, or just scraping at the veins? If you did open up someone’s wrist with your teeth in a fight, how quickly would blood loss start affecting them?
Also, what is the strongest human bone that can be bitten through while still clothed in flesh and in place?
Believe it or not the jaw muscles are probably some of the strongest muscles in the body. If I remember correctly the average man can easily put down 200+ pounds of pressure with his mouth. I’m not sure if thats enough to bite through a femur, but it’s definitely enough to cause some major soft-tissue damage.
If your attacker has any desire to live long hes out of the fight at this point. A serious laceration of the radial artery is going to lose you around a quart of blood in a couple minutes without some attempt to control the bleeding.
WAG none of the above unless you want to count fingers and such. Even then it would take some serious determination to bite through even a finger. A major long bone, no way in hell.
Our bodies are in many respects very resilient. If your example was an equivalent level of force people would have chunks ripped out of their bodies all the time in fights. Our skin has a lot more “give” than thin sheet metal.
How is human flesh in any way different from, say, a rare steak? You can bite through that, can’t you? Well, then, you can bite through human flesh, too.
drachillix yeah, but it would not be “punching through” the skin (like a nail into drywall) it would be more like “cutting through” the skin (like scissors on playdough). So the elasticity is not as much of a factor, because you’re not stretching the skin.
When you’re biting a steak you’re just biting through muscle. If you’re biting someones arm or neck your teeth have to first break through the skin, which is pretty tough, and probably a little layer of fat before you’d even get to any muscle.
I’d also imagine the person would be tensed up if they were struggling and it seems like that could make it even harder to take a bite big enough to actually rip a large chunk of flesh off.
You should bear in mind also that a steak is already cut across the grain and you are biting into it with the grain. If you tried to bite a chunk out of, say, a sirloin tip across the grain, you’d likely be frustrated. Certainly if you cut a steak from a larger piece in the wrong direction, you won’t have a tender steak: you’ll have beef floss.
[slight sidetrack]
I read in a newspaper yesterday about a bloke that some twenty years ago had scored the winning goal for Watford against Plymouth in an FA cup semi final match. Nowadays he is a construction worker and the other day he was jumped by a cow-orker who tysoned one of his ears and whispered “Plymouth” in the other.
but i need that extra credit nonetheless. As they say in Pig Latin:
Habeamus testiculos suum, habeamus cerebrum suum
(or something along these lines anyway … cough cough…)
I think positioning would have something to do with how effective the bite would be. I can rip through a steak (mmm… steak) like nobody’s business when it is only an inch thick and perpendicular to my mouth. Position the same steak parallel to my face and my teeth would inflict much less damage.
