Aren’t zombies already dead? I thought it wouldn’t be a matter of killing them, but immobilizing them by chopping them up,
Sorry for what may be a naive question, my experience in the zombieverse is virtually nil.
Yeah, you don’t “kill” zombies so much as you either make them incapable of coordinated movement by destroying the brain, or you physically destroy them. Decapitated zombies are still a biting hazard.
I haven’t kept up with The Walking Dead, have they shown dismembered zombie parts still twitching?
Parts, no. Severed heads, yes.
Winter.
The repeated freeze-thaw cycles, especially as part but not all of the zombie thaws, would tear them apart or cause them to fall apart.
So you suckers in warmer climes are doomed. We in the northern tier will shrug this off like nothing.
And do the heads still bite?
Barbed wire, and lots of it.
Except the barbed points only really work on living humans, not the dead. They don’t feel pain. Once they get in, and you realize that you have to go out through that stuff, you’re boned.
The fact is, you have to try not to think too hard about a zombie apocalypse because there is no way it would ever happen, especially in America. As soon as an outbreak went on long enough for people to figure out what was happening, humans would start hunting the zombies and we would win very quickly.
In America it would be a turkey shoot, over in a few days except for a few stragglers hidden here and there. There are enough guns for every person to have one, and endless ammo. One good ol’ boy could shoot hundreds of zombies in an hour. Americans almost hunted the bison to extinction without even trying.
Even in countries without many guns, it would not be that hard. Humans could improvise body armor, shields and spears or swords, and engage the zombies in groups using medieval infantry tactics. There would be some human casualties, but they would easily win as long as they didn’t try to engage too many zombies at once. The zombies could be lured apart into small groups. They could also use missile weapons such as dropping rocks off of buildings, not to mention the use of vehicle-borne cavalry.
A zombie is a slow, very stupid medium-sized animal. They are less dangerous than a chimpanzee: slower, stupider, and weaker, though admittedly a bit harder to kill. Humanity isn’t in any danger of being wiped out by chimps.
I don’t mean cattle fencing, I mean proper gardens of it, with wrought iron screw picquets WW1 style, interlocked and piled up. Nothing’s getting through that.
Well, they certainly try.
The zombie, by himself, in most depictions, is kind of a pathetic thing, more likely to trigger sadness than fear, even if it’s growling and trying to eat you. As pointed out, they’re slow, stupid, and no match for a living human of comparable size and strength. If not for their lethal bite, they’d be laughable.
…alone.
In numbers, the zombie reveals his true fearsomeness: the monster is not the individual zombie, but the SWARM. I think the season finale to TWD this past Sunday kind of hammered that down. Daryl is a zombie killin’ machine, taking down THREE at once with a length of chain…
…but without room to move, think, and improvise… he’s dead meat. Pinned down by a swarm, ANYONE is toast. And that’s kind of the point of zombie apocalypses: the ultimate victory of the mindless consumer swarm.
Chimpanzees would be a threat if they hungered for human meat, I think. But if that became the case, they’d get wiped out in short order. But in a situation where the number just keeps growing, where every casualty stands up and joins the enemy…?
This is a point that is missed, I think, by the makers of trackstar zombie movies. They don’t understand the circumstances under which a slow zombie is pathetic… and terrifying.
Honest Trailers had the best take on this: “World War Z has everything you have come to know and love about the books title”.
Max Brooks himself said something to the effect of, “I kinda liked it, it wasn’t a bad zombie movie, but I had to deal with the fact that this wasn’t my work or my idea.”
Must be nice to get paid for someone using your title, though…
That’s pretty much the epilogue to the original Night Of The Living Dead.
Yes, I highly recommend the Alomal-137 Epidemiology Case Study. 
Same deal in Shaun of the Dead; it takes the British authorities about 24hrs to get the situation under control, and within 6 months everything is back to normal (save zombies being used on game shows and to round up shopping carts).