Polar Bear V’s Hippo.
Please help to settle an argument between my drunken friends and myself.
Which animal would win a fight to the death, whoever dies first looses?
The arena is tennis court size and no other external factors will be taken into consideration i.e room temp.
Hmmm, polar bears have sharp claws, hippoes are quite aggressive and have sharp teeth, so while they may not move as much, if the polar bear isn’t good at dodging, he might be serverly weakened by a big bite getting taken out of him.
However, most animals do fight to the death fromt he front, unless they’re like lions and cheetahs and stuff and chase their prey. the aforementioned aren’t, so I’d give it to the hippo on basis of poor strategy.
Although, you know, ana rea high school that’s pretty good is called the Polar Bears, but there is none named the Hippoes, so going on that… 
And is it hippos or hippoes?
hippi
That’s hippoi or hippopotami. From the Greek.
My high school mascot was a Polar Bear…so I’ll have to go with the bear.
I’m reminded of a drunken argument I had a few weeks ago about whether a tiger or an alligator would win in a fight. Decided on the tiger.
I’ve seen footage of polar bears attacking elephant seals up north. The ones attacked were females (I believe as they were all uniform in size); one was grabbed from behind and basically just did an accelerated “seal-walk” into the surf and then swam away. The bear couldn’t hold it back or get through the skin fast enough to hurt it. The other was where the bear snuck in from sea and grabbed an elephant seal pup from the rocks. It took a swipe at the mother’s head while retreating with the pup but wisely didn’t stick around to duke it out; if she had been fast enough to catch up she probably could have at least fought him off. As it was he almost got crushed by the whole group making a mad dash into the water as this was all happening. Female elephant seals can get up around 1500lbs, and are pretty awkward out of water, and don’t have much in the way of jaws. The overall size of the two animals looks fairly similar when viewed together.
Hippos are around 3,000-7000lbs, and are reasonably mobile on land. Plus they got a gigantic mouth with very nasty teeth. I’d put my money on the hippo vs P.bear. Watching these bears try to wrestle with seals half the size of a hippo looked like a man trying to pick up a 45-gallon drum full of water - it’s just too big, heavy, and awkward to be man-handled effectively. By the time the bear got a good grip or enough swipes in the hippo would have gotten ahold of him, which would be bad news.
The hippo would be the most likely winner.
I don’t know who’d win, but I’d certainly pay to see the fight!
Adding to my argument I’ve seen, on TV, a polar bear punching through 6ft of ice, it did take a couple of goes.
I’ve also seen a polar bear jump into the water drown a Beluga whale by hitting its blow hole and drag it out onto the ice.
It’d have to be a pretty tough animal to put up with that sort of punishment.
I’d go with the hippo. Can the bear bite the hippo anywhere to wound it fatally or make it bleed to death? Probably not. A hippo could easily flatten the bear against any convenient surface, or, if it wanted to, chomp and break its neck. In the water, I’d definitely go with the hippo-- it could probably hold the bear under while keeping its own nose in the air, and suffocate it.
Finally: a thread about something meaningful.
Hippoi are herbiverous, which suggest to me that they may not have much instinct to fight. They also don’t have teeth designed for tearing and stabbing, nor do they have claws for catching. They also don’t look nearly as agile; I’m betting a polar bear could come at a hippo from all sides in the time it took a hippo just to turn around.
I recall that back in the 70s (and for, all I know, a good deal of time before and after), there was a “zany” car dealer in Southern California who used to pose with exotic animals in his TV commercials–doubtless there are Dopers who could name him in an instant. In any case, I recall he had an ad in which he rode a hippo. It looked relatively fast, but I have the impression that it would compare as a tortoise to a hare in a dead heat with a polar bear. It also comes to mind that while there is apparently at least one hippo docile enough to be ridden for a while, I doubt anyone could manage to mount a polar bear.
Hippoi are, obviously, powerfully built animals, but they are mostly built to float in the water and chew grass. Polar bear are tremendously powerful carnivores who dine on walrusses which are, I guess, about the closest equivalent the Arctic has to a hippo.
There is also the point that a polar bear is fur-covered, while a hippo is said to actually have quite sensitive skin, which helps account for why it spends so much of the time wallowing in mud.
Venue might be a factor too. Polar bears seem to do fine outdoors in a St. Louis summer, but I wonder if a hippo could hack it on a polar bear’s home turf.
I’m betting the polar bear would win handily wherever a match was held unless the hippo had a gun or something. Then again, I remember having an argument like this when I was a kid about a steer going up against a lion. My money was on the lion. Later I read that such matches were considered a sucker bet in the days of the Roman Collisseum; supposedly, every time a match was ever held, a longhorned steer beat a lion hands-down.
No kidding: you think you could see this on Pay per View? Maybe somebody could figure out a way to settle these arguments through a computer simulation or something.
I’d go with the hippo. Those are some LONG nasty canines it’s got, if you’ve never seen a picture of a hippo yawning or screaming. Seeing how a hippo has a very protective layer of body fat, I doubt if the bear can kill it in merely a few swipes of its claws, where as the long, thick canines along with the hippo’s jaw strength would easily penetrate the bear’s layer of blubber in one go.
No teeth designed for tearing and stabbing? check these out.
“Hippoi are herbiverous, which suggest to me that they may not have much instinct to fight. “
They are also closely related to pigs, and the males fight fiercely using two foot long tusks. They inflict absolutely hideous injuries. Or at east they would be hideous on any other animal. Hippos have evolved armour plated shoulders with specially thickened skin. They can take a gash a foot long and several inches deep and not even get fazed.
Hippos are nasty mofos. No reference, but they are widely quoted as the most dangerous animal on the planet, killing more people than any other single species.
“They also don’t have teeth designed for tearing and stabbing”
When it comes to teeth designed for tearing and stabbing no other animal on the planet comes close. Even an elephant’s tusks aren’t actually designed for that. Hippo tusks are long, razor sharp and hard enough to take the weight of a hippo head swinging them into bone. Nasty, nasty weapons.
I’ll give 100 to 1 odds on the bear. The bear has speed and agility on its side. The hippo has armour plating and a matching set 14 inch ivory daggers. Bear can’t scratch hippo. Hippo can cut bear in half. If the fight takes place in the water I’ll give 200 to 1 on the bear.
I believe the hippo would win handilly. Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe Hippos are very aggressive and territorial animals, kill more people a year than any other wild mammall, and a bull hippo has the strength to bite a Nile Crocodile in half.
6 feet of ice? Couple of goes? C’mon now…
A beluga whale? out of the water and onto the ice? Hitting its’ blow hole? C’mon now…
In African watering holes which they share with numerous crocdiles, hippos are the undisputed masters. The crocs don’t try anything for fear of hippo retribution.
There’s a great National Geographic show called “Last Feast of the Crocodiles,” I believe, which has a scene in which a mother hippo pushes her baby into the crocodile section of the pond. The baby is squealing its head off, but the crocs get out of its way. Meanwhile, they attack and eat anything else that comes within reach.
The hippos are the kings, and they know it. 
This is more of a debate lite than a quest for facts, so I’ll move this thread to IMHO.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
http://www.polarbearsalive.org/facts17.php
Groups of beluga whales or narwhals will sometimes become trapped in what the Inuit call a savsatt, a small opening in an expanse of pack ice. When this happens, the marine mammals become easy prey for the bears.
Alaskan marine biologist Lloyd Lowrey once observed a group of polar bears hunting belugas at a savsatt in the northern Bering Sea. Although the exact number was hard to determine because of the snow drifts, he estimated that the bears had captured at least forty whales.
In the spring of 1999, roughly fifty beluga whales became trapped in a savsatt near Canada’s Ellesmere Island. Witnesses reported that as many as thirteen polar bears would gather at the ice edge at a time, waiting to pounce on a surfacing whale.
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1170/2001_May-June/73749175/p1/article.jhtml
http://hosmer.watertown.k12.ma.us/WWW/scole/oceans/text/funfacts/beluga_whale_nicole_d.html
Do you require any more sources?
What a brilliant question. I’d put my money on the hippo. Even though the polar bear seems more agile, and has the advantage of being able to stand on it’s hind legs making it much quicker, the sheer power of the hippo just seems unstoppable. If the polar bear makes one mistake, them hippo jaws will make poor teddy pay dearly.
Hippo wins on ice as well.