nope, just a freaked out sculptor who nearly pissed his pants when it happened! 
I have had some martial arts training, but I don’t think I actually employed any of it at the time. It was more a matter of “i’d better fight because I can’t run.” I have bad knees from wrestling in highschool.
They may even succeed in throwing you off. They may hurl themselves to the ground, more or less guaranteeing you’ll be thrown off. It seems a bit of a reach to assume that “Hop on his back and ride him 'til he drops” is a workable strategy.
A possibly relevant point is what happens when tigers and leopards take to hunting people for food. In Jim Corbett’s tales of hunting man-eaters in India, he describes a leopard that killed well over 100 people before it could be shot, and at least one tiger that had over 500 kills. Some of the victims were taken by surprise, but many had at least some warning. With all the motivation in the world, none was able to cause meaningful harm to the predator.
What if you grab a big cat by the tail. I heard that works on big dogs. I didn’t hear it from a credible source mind you.
The Masai would do this occasionally. They’d surround a lion with spears and shields poised. Then one warrior would drop both and grab the lion by the tail. This would temporarily immobilize him, allowing the others to close in with long knives for the kill. Very impressive.
But it’s hard to see what value this would have in the absence of a bunch of other skilled warriors armed with sharp weapons. You aren’t going to cause much damage to a big cat simply by pulling his tail.
Blake, I still don’t believe that you’re gonna jump on the moose’s back, and then CHOKE HIM TO DEATH.
First, yes, choking is the best strategy. Or rather, the only strategy. Even big cats with razor sharp teeth often have to choke large prey to death, since big animals have skin so tough that the teeth and jaws of a lion cannot penatrate it. So I’m calling bullshit on the cite of a man who bit the bear to death. Did not happen. I submit that it is physiologically impossible for a human to bite though bear hide.
And gouging out eyes? No that important. Sure, it causes pain. Sure, if an animal lost an eye in a regular fight, it would probably try to run away. But you’re not “seeing off” the moose or bear or whatever. You are trying to kill it with your bare hands. Accounts of people scaring off bigger, stronger and fiercer animals are irrelevent, we are only interested in fights to the death. If you can keep fighting with a dozen porcupine quills through your hand, a moose can certainly keep fighting with its eye gouged. Besides, most animals aren’t nearly as visually oriented as humans are. They don’t need sight to find you. Remember, it doesn’t matter if they die a week later, they win if they kill you first.
Jumping on a moose’s back gets you what, exactly? He’s gonna buck, he’s gonna roll, he’s gonna run through the trees. Experienced rodeo bullriders consider it a success to last 8 seconds on the back of a bull. You fall off, with no rodeo clowns to distract the crazed bull, and you will die.
But you can’t choke an animal that’s fighting you very easily. OK, you assume the animal is so exhausted that it just watches you limply as you stroll over and put your hands around its neck. Have you taken a look at the neck of a moose? Their neck is as big around as your whole body. Covered by a leather armor. There’s a reason human soldiers would take off the skin of a large herbivore and cover themselves with it. Their skin is many times thicker and stronger than ours.
Next, about muscle mass. We may have muscles, but compared to the muscles of most animals, ours are puny. Apes have upper body strength several times that of a same sized human. You’re going to box that chimp, keep him away by your quick jabs and feints? Dude, a chimp as arms longer than you. He’s tougher than you. He’s gonna grab you and tear your ass UP. Or rather, Dignan’s ass.
Anyway, I’ll give you the porcupine or hedghog. You really could kill them if you were able to somehow psych yourself up for the pain. Best way would be jump up and land with one foot on the back of the neck. With modern sugery you might not have a limp after you healed, unless you got a quill right through a foot tendon. But you’d really have to psych yourself. It isn’t easy doing a maneuvar that is going to cause you excruiciating pain, even if you know it will save your life. Easy to hesitate at the last second and only do the job halfway. Worst of all worlds.
The question is a bit, well, pointless.
Humans are pretty useless without weapons, this we know.
But here’s the rub: we can use weapons and they can’t. Our inherent biological advantage isn’t size or strength or bite power or claws or heavy hide, it’s the intellect and dexterity required to pick up a stick and brain something with it.
Taking that advantage from a human is like declawing a tiger before you fight it.
The real question is, how heavily armed should the human in the fight be? A sharpened pole, or a modern sword? Does he get to wear hides, or chain mail?
Assuming close-quarters fighting… I’d like a full suit of plate armor with blades welded in strategic locations all over it, and a chainsaw!
Of course, if I’m allowed to use my intelligence and technology, I’m going to sit comfortably in my hotel in the middle of a large city, watching on TV as the animals sit around in the assigned fighting area, wondering why I haven’t shown up for the fight!
I have a pet african pygmy hedgehog, and I have no trouble picking him up even when he curls up into a ball. You just have to sortof cup your hands loosely under them and you can scoop them up no problem. If you were so inclined it would be a pretty simple matter to just pick one up and drop it a few times. They’re pretty clumsy animals, I don’t think they’d land on their feet.
The european ones are bigger though, so the extra weight might be enough to push the spines into your skin if you tried it. But they don’t have barbed spines, so I think any pain would be marginal as long as you were careful. Porcupines would be a lot worse I’m sure, though I imagine if it were a case of them or you you could tolerate it.
As to anything much larger than that, I’m pretty sure it’d kick my ass.
Grab sharp, pointy stick and stab it into its windpipe. Or eyes.
I doubt it would have successfully taken that many people: history is full of wild exxagerattions. But certainly a very big cat could kill a number of people if they were unarmed.
Not really. The Christians in those cases were probably improsoned for some time and were faced with multiple strong angry predators weiging much more than they did. And the Christians would nto have had weapons.
Its more like pitting Maximus from Gladiator against his clone, only the clone had a full frontal lobotomy.
Fun thread.
This is sort of cheating, but many large animals could be tricked into running off a cliff. This would probably work best with something like a rhinoceros or elephant that would have unstoppable momentum. Of course, outrunning it long enough for it to pick up speed would be tricky. The native americans used to do this to entire herds of bison, but that was a group effort and involved tools such as fire to provoke the stampede.
Seems like you could climb a boulder or tree to jump on an animal’s back, preferably landing with your heels to break the spine. This would work a lot better against a tiger or moose than something huge like a rhino. It would also be pretty much essential to take the animal by surprise.
In a flat-out fight, I would think you could take anything smaller than yourself if sufficiently suicidal, e.g. strangling a bobcat while it shreds your abdomen with its hind claws.
If sufficiently musclebound or on PCP, you could maybe kill larger animals provided that you could wrap your arms around their ribcage and suffocate them like a constricting snake. I have nothing to substantiate this, but it seems plausible for a Pumping Iron-era Schwartzenneger.
As for myself, I seriously doubt I could take anything fiercer than a coyote in a cage match, and even a fox could kill me with a hit-and-run strategy. If it’s too quick to grab or stomp on, any animal could peck away at you until you bleed to death.
Hedgehog is easy. The spines aren’t barbed so if you step right you won’t be jumping on the end of the majority of them but the side so they’ll fold. Your weight will easy kill it. A porcupine is a different story. Spines are longer and barbed. If you step on it you better commit because them things are gonna stay in you.
I agree that out advantage is in our ability to create tools to help us. Still, even a person in a leather jerkin with a sword (I would go with a lighter japanese sword) should be able to kill anything. Add a leather cap and you’re a mean fighting machine.
Personal experience:
I’m rather large. 6’5" and 280. I was taking a walk. Nice sunny morning. I walked the neighborhood every morning. I’d also played basketball, football and baseball, so I wasn’t exactly a lump.
I’m walking along and suddenly, right in front of me is a dog. A dog which stands on his hind legs and puts his paws on my shoulders. German Shepherd. He’s staring me in the eyes, mouth open, tongue drooling. His brother is on all fours next to him. I could count his teeth, which were much much longer than you’d expect.
Fortunately I remembered a wise eastern man who had been in a similar situation. He said, show no fear. Don’t move. Because the animal will attack movement.
I stood there smiling for 10 minutes. Or at least what seemed ten minutes. And I’m sure I was more tired than he was. Then his owner came out on the pourch, whistled, and both dogs left.
Now you would suggest I had grabbed those legs and swung this dog in a circle? OK.
We’re forgetting a lot of animals.
Clam. I guarantee I could take a clam. Tear his ass UP. The hard part might might be determining whether its dead or not.
Koala bear. No sweat. Pretty small. Pretty slow. I know they have sharp parts, but I think you could just whale on one with a series of stomps and bashes.
Human. I’d give the average human a 50-50 shot here.
Lobster. Fought and won. Several times. At least I fought the variety that come with rubber bands around their claws. And I was fortunate enough to have some boiling water nearby that I could wrangle him into.
Bacteria. Does it count if my anti-bodies kill them? Without anti-bodies, I die.
Heck, put me behind the wheel of a Jeep Cherokee and I’ll take on anything up to and including an okapi.
Per the OP, weapons are proscribed. If they’re legal, you can have your stick. I’ll show up with a lil’ ol’ .458 rifle and a large box of ammo.
Well, Jim Corbett (generally regarded as one of the most trustworthy authors of hunting stories who ever lived) reckoned that the official counts were in nealy all cases somewhat under the true totals. For one thing, people who escaped with injuries to die later were usually not counted.
OK. To clarify something: both you (me) and the animal are determined to kill the other. This is a grudge match. Two enter; one leaves. Just to make sure that neither combatant chickens out, it would be in a steel cage. I’m not sure of the dimensions, but it would not be sufficiently large enough to run something to death, but it would provide more room than a regulation boxing ring.
Whether or not the clam is dead, if you were to eat the clam, it would lose by default. This also applies for any large predator that might eat the human.
Well Blake, you certainly are suggesting that humans are a lot stronger, faster, tougher, and more deadly than anyone else here while also saying that animals are simply a lot wimpier than any of us believe. Comments like:
“I suspect that it would be simpler to look at the animals that you couldn’t defeat…
We are also exceptionally fast…have extraordinary stamina…All those things make us formidable fighters…Wolves/dogs are not a problem…Grazing animals will also not be a problem…You might be able to leap on the back of these animals and stay there (big rhinos and hippos)… I suspect that a human could beat almost any other animal (aside from lions, tigers, elephants, rhinos, and hippos)…I suspect that a trained fighter would pummel an ape into the ground. A good boxer could hit without ever worry about being hit…Usually if a person is attacked by a crocodile they will fight it off…”
give an impression of pretty heavy bias towards a simple upright ape that not known for being much of anything physically… one who relies heavily on tools and who’s populations would plummet were we to live just like all the other animals.
One particular example: There is a reason why, assuming I can keep flipping a bear until it is exhausted or incapacitated with broken bones, I can’t repeatedly kick it in the head or stuff my arm down its throat to kill it. I have never met or heard of any man who would make such an assumption. Those real-life veteran killers I mentioned are certainly biased and super-confident, but their claims are at least plausible. And I really haven’t ever heard anyone praising humans for their fighting ability like this before. The closest thing I’ve come to this to do with bears is from the old-time bear-wrestlers from 30+ years back. The ones I see now are hunched over crotchety old men notorious for exaggerating their abilities and toughness (it’s how they made a living), yet even they say all they can do is pin one or two specific bears for a second. That’s a far cry from repeatedly flipping a bear, breaking it’s bones, exhausting it, and shoving a hand down the throat for the kill… I kid you not I genuinely get the impression reading this type of stuff that the next line I’m about to read is “and I’d rip their heart out and show it to them before they died too”.
CITE!
So you want a cite for something that is common sense (that you need to know how to do a particular technique if you want to be reliable at it especially on other soecies)? Well here’s a start.
They certainly talk a lot about technique there, no? I guess throwing on a rear naked choke, securing the legs around the body properly to prevent movement, applying the pressure in the right spot, keeping the eyes from being gouged, squeezing your arms in the right direction, and power to use and time to keep it on for aren’t quite instinctual to people… especially for use on a water buffalo. I’m an average person: I don’t know how to suffocate a rodeo bull who’s bucking like hell underneath me in the 4 seconds I have before getting stomped. Do you?
“What I have pointed out is that average, everyday programmer types have fought off wild animals. It is up to you to show why this is impossible”… No, it is not. The question was “what animals could I (or most humans) kill in a hand-to-hand fight”, not “is it possible for most humans to fight off some medium-sized wild animals?”.
Not even a hint of the suggestion of healthy adult moose aren’t that tough so a human could kill them in that dialogue about wolves half our size hunting moose? Ok, then what was it for, you know - the point of mentioning it while discussing this subject?
SO basically mmmiiikkkeee your position seems to rest on two points. Firstly a grown man being unable to defend his life because he has splinters in his hand, and will simply collapse on the ground in agony. Secondly when matador dodges and weaves away from a bull he isn’t fighting the bull. The first is silly. The second is sematics.
I never said/typed/thought/or indicated either of those two points. Let me repeat – I did not say a grown man would unable to defend his life, I did not say splinters (I said 3-6” quills and noted the difference from splinters), I did not say he would collapse, and I did not say he couldn’t finish the porcupine despite the pain. How would you equate my saying the guy would feel a lot of pain and probably switch hands or tactics to him collapsing and not being able to defend his life? I wouldn’t be talking about strawmen if I were you…
Bull fighting/animal running… sigh. I intentionally put in a long-ass paragraph in my last post trying to explain this even though I felt it needed no explanation. Please read the part about how I said for it to be a fight there has to be a reasonable chance to make contact which the bull has. I said it’s not a fight when you spend 3 hours running a wild horse around the prairie from 100 yards out. So while the matador is dodging, yeah he’s fighting. Unfortunately matadors don’t fit the bill in this discussion. They got those other guys running around tiring the bull in between “rounds” or whatever they’re called, so he gets to rest. Then he gets to (finally) kill the bull with a very deadly weapon handed to him at some point by one of his many assistants. Take all his clothes away, no help or rest periods, no swords/poker/cape to jiggle around, and have him finish the bull with his bare hands – then it fits the OP.
Pain… ah yes. Of course that can be shut off in a life or death struggle. And how many here have ever had it happen to them??? Is this a factor in your fight plan? To walk in, have your balls ripped off by the cougar and nonchalantly bite kitty on the neck while he’s raking the skin and eyes off your face as a counter? That won’t have the slightest effect? You can literally completely ignore it? And the best part: who here thinks they’d be pumped up enough to go into a survival-superadrenaline mode when faced by a ferocious…… porcupine. You gotta have the motivation to get there, and I cannot see a waddling little porcupine switching it’s tail back and forth driving you into a near-physchotic life-or-death struggle. Why would you fear for your life when you can probably outrun it by walking at a brisk pace? So much for the Lord of the animals ferocity we are supposed to have if that’s all it takes to make us flip out. So you bet you’d be feeling it when you got a hand full of quills.
Oh and in case you need reminding, my position is based on numerous things like the average man not having any knowledge of grappling and choking techniques on animals too large to stomp to death, even fewer having experience in death-matches and keeping their cool while being fought to the death, humans being no stronger than any other animal our size (and in some cases even weaker), lack of physical tools to inflict damage (no claws, horn, nasty teeth or ability to out-bite the animal), the average man not having the strength to hold onto big animals long enough to get in a position to hurt them (and even the pros can only do it for a few seconds), having a very thin naked skin that’s not used to what we’d be putting it through, not having the capability to damage animals over a certain size even if we could get a good position, not having any idea what the animal’s weakness is (someone said they’d repeatedly kick a bear in the head to kill it – your bare foot will be shattered beyond repair before you do any damage to a skull that size), being a species brought up to use tools and think our way out of dangerous situations rather than fighting toe to toe in our birthday suits with various species, and so on.
I think I could take a bear in a cage match.
I would just climb to the top of the cage and sing. Eventually the bear would kill itself to get away from the sound.
I think this is the best thread I’ve read in months.