I would still go with elephant. No disposition? They can get pretty angry pretty quick. And when you’re the largest land animal on the planet (by a fairly wide margin, too) you don’t need speed. And no tools? I think four foot long tusks and the ability to crush most other animals are pretty darn good tools.
Granted, you’d need a very large cage, but if the elephant was mad enough, I doubt any animal going up against it would stand much of a chance (assuming the battle was on land.) I mean, how many bites from even the most venomous snake would it take to bring down an elephant? Of course, it might be hard for the elephant to actually kill a snake, since it can slither around it’s legs, so we still have an interesting conundrum.
Can we get the bear to go mano-y-mano with a liger (cross between a male lion and a female tiger) and still meet the OP? If so we get closer to a more interesting fight as ligers weigh in at 1100 pounds.
I find it somewhat interesting that a gang of young powerful makes will abuse their power to cause unnecessary mayhem, and they only modify their behaviour when adults are brought in.
Also called the cycle of life. I guess other planets have had rock-paper situations, or scissor-scissor or whatever, but they probably didn’t last long.
I notice there are some arguing for a fair fight, saying for example that if the tiger weighs 500 pounds, so should the bear. But since big differences aren’t principally different from the small ones, if this argument is taken to it’s logical (and neccessary) extreme, you’ll end up having two identical critters fighting each other, and the battle will end in some kind of draw. So, evening the odds kills all discussion, the question is still: what animal is the most bad-ass: bear or tiger?
Polar bears always win, except when wrestling vikings.
I think Discovery had a show on this once.
The outcome was that if it was a grizzly and it could get in a good strike it would just break the spine of the lion (or tiger or liger).
I should hope so. Killer whales are like twice as big as white sharks. I mean, that’s a whole new weight division.
As to the OP, comparing the results of a tiger vs. sun bear fight to a tiger vs. grizzly bear fight is like saying that because I can pick up a bicycle, I can pick up a Buick. A grizzly bear is frickin’ huge.
No less of an authority than Walt Disney resolved this in the wizarding duel in The Sword and the Stone - Merlin prevailed by turning himself into a microbe (or was it a virus) and infected his opponent (who, I think, was a dragon at the time).
That’s kind of like say that because I can beat up a house cat with ease, a tiger isn’t going to be any match for me. A pissed off grizzly that’s looking for a fight is about as much like a sun bear as Mike Tyson in his prime is like a 2 year old girl. According to Wikipedia, Eurasian brown bears steal kills from tigers:
For whatever that’s worth. If that’s in fact accurate, I submit that bears wouldn’t follow tigers to steal their kills if they were likely to end up as lunch themselves.
