Which Animals Could You Beat in a Fight?

Sure, us Americans are obviously delusional, but can we talk about the fact that almost half of all brits think they would lose to a goose? They're 20 pounds, have no teeth or claws, and their bones are hollow. Have a little confidence, guys, I'm sure you can take poultry in a fight.
- Actually, this does explain why all those brits in Untitled Goose Game let the goose walk all over them.
- Less than 80% of people think they could take on a rat in a life or death battle. You could literally pass out and fall on it and probably crit it.
  
  But if you miss you wake up with no face
  
  Not everyone is a 15-55 year old able bodied person.
  A good chunk of the population is disabled and mobility impaired. Large swaths of the population are elderly.
- Almost half of Brits might not be as able-bodied as you might imagine.
  I'm more interested in the rat fight, because I had my fair share of mouse encounters and rats are bigger, more dangerous and just as quick.
  
  I mean, Americans have huge obesity rates, but apparently, nearly 20% of us think we can take a chimp. I'm sure a rat couldn't kill me, but I have no idea how I would catch one with my bare hands, so that feels like a draw to me.
  
  The rat one would depend very much on what shoes I had on.
  If I had my work boots on, Remy's getting punted across the room.
  
  I think of it more for the rat, that if it wants to it’ll fuck me up, but I’m more likely to kill it before it kills me.
- Geese are terrifying though
  
  If you know you will fight it, might as well just go for it and grab it's neck or something
- Have you ever been attacked by one of those demon spawns? They will not stop attacking you, you can boot it and it will just get up and continue, I'd rather fight a kangaroo, at least when you punch one of them in the face they back off, goose just gets angrier.
  
  I had a goose come at me once. I held my jacket open like it was a giant set of wings and he ran like hell. I was not impressed.
  
  Yes but you can kill a goose easily. The only reason they are a nuisance is because most people don't want the heat of killing them.
  
  kangeroos are pretty jacked though.
- And the fight would be harder than against a cat.
  Wtf are those people smoking? Have they ever seen a domesticated cat in severe distress??
  
  Cats have FIVE pointy ends and an extremely powerful will to live.
  
  I would rather fight any bird than a cat.
- MARIO STOMP!
- You clearly don’t understand that British geese run in gangs and are shanked to their teeth.
- They may not technically have teeth but they have a serrated beak.

Look at all this shocking overconfidence.
Meanwhile, over in reality, Billy Big Balls is getting the tendon in his ankle severed in 0.3 seconds while screaming like a banshee and falling down. The only reason people look at even the high-percentage animals this way is that, 100% of the time in daily life, they have no interest in fucking you up for real.
Edit: Actually, there is one exception: I firmly believe the average person could fuck up a goose if they committed to it. Geese are pushy assholes with surprisingly sharp beaks and humans don't really like getting in life or death struggle with any organism, by and large, but I've seen a person seize a goose by the neck and the goose in question wasn't so intimidating after that happened.
- I was about to say that people seem extremely under confident about geese.
  
  Yeah. They are scary, sure, but I think a lot of it is that they are clearly very fragile also, and so people are faced with either just letting themselves get bullied or else becoming a monster who's stomping on this tiny carcass and most people opt for option A.
- Don't try us.
- As long as you're okay with getting bitten and scratched to hell, the "shove your arm down its throat and suffocate it to death" method is surprisingly effective.
  https://people.com/human-interest/travis-kauffman-mountain-lion-attack/
  https://apnews.com/general-news-92375ef965ef46a69d9d65a4c4fc2645 (tbf, the bear fled in this case)
  
  Any reason you shouldn't just break its neck? I mean, grab the neck near the head, jerk it very fast in any direction a gew times and you've turned an angry goose into a nonissue.

chimpanzee would rip you the fuck apart, more than a gorilla
- Yeah, a chimpanzee will straight up rip your arms off and beat you to death with them. They have zero chill, and a massive proportion of fast-twitch muscle (which means they can create huge bursts of strength, but struggle with fine motor control.)

If people knew more about chimpanzees, they'd be right down there with bears and elephants. I would 100% prefer to take on a wolf or a kangaroo, taking Aussies at their word about how insane roos are, over a chimp. The chimp probably has just as high a K/D as the bear or elephant, but it's going to teabag you while wearing the face it ripped off your skull before you go out.
- Kangaroos do this move where they try to kick the balls off their male opponents. No thanks.
  
  Still better than a chimp
  
  have you seen their nails? their kick can easily disembowel you.
- At the same time people also murder the fuck out of chimps with fairly primitive tools and have for a long time, what chimps really got on us is that crazy murder energy that you only really see in humans with the aid of PCP. Wouldn't wanna fight one but in theory its about equivelent to fighting an unbelivably pissed off human.

14 May 1805: Narrow Escape
One of their most harrowing experiences with a grizzly occurred on 14 May 1805, on the bank of the Missouri River between the Milk and Musselshell rivers. Clark wrote:
Six good hunters of the party fired at a Brown or Yellow Bear Several times before they killed him, & indeed he had like to have defeated the whole party, he pursued them Seperately as they fired on him, and was near Catching Several of them one he pursued into the river, this bear was large & fat would way about 500 wt
Lewis described the climax of the incident:
he pursued two of them seperately so close that they were obliged to throw aside their guns and poucnes and throw themselves into the river altho’ the bank was nearly twenty feet perpendicular; so enraged was this animal that he plunged into the river only a few feet behind the second man he had compelled to take refuge in the water, when one of those who still remained on shore shot him through the head and finally killed him.
When they butchered the animal, they found that a total of eight rifle balls had entered its body in different directions.
https://lewis-clark.org/sciences/mammals/bears/grizzly-bear-encounters/
You will not beat a grizzly bear unarmed. You might not beat a grizzly bear armed.
- I love that the original word for bear has been lost to the annals of time because it was feared that saying the word for bear out loud would summon a bear and that was instant total party kill for everybody involved.
  Bears are the original boogie men.
  
  On another etymological note, we have no idea where the word "dog" comes from.
- When I visited Yellowstone, I found a clearing that recently had a bear in it. Grizzly or not, there was a claw mark about 7ft up on a pine tree, and there were peels of bark hanging down the tree. That bear casually peeled the bark off the tree with the same effort you could peel a cucumber with a peeler.

Confirmed: Brits are shit fighters
- That's how I'm reading it 💪. Although, I would let the eagle win🫡 🇺🇸
- U fackin wot m8 ?!?
- -majority of British think they could not beat a goose
  Just LAY on them they weigh like 5 pounds
  
  geese are fawkin aggressive and WILL be attacking you and moving a lot. you would have a hard time landing a kick let alone a landing whole body.
- That's not how I'm reading this chart. Brits seem to broadly agree with Americans about almost everything, they're just more pessimistic.
  They're right about geese though
  
  Don't take my comment seriously.

anyone honestly saying they could win a fight with a bear is someone who hikes with a .45 and thinks that will do anything for them before the bear has already killed them
- Park rangers are advising hikers and campers in national parks to be alert for bears and take extra precautions to avoid an encounter.
  They advise park visitors to wear little bells on their clothes so they make noise when hiking. The bell noise allows bears to hear them coming from a distance, so they won’t be startled by a hiker accidentally sneaking up on them, which might cause a bear to charge.
  Visitors are told they should also carry a pepper spray can just in case they encounter a bear. Spraying the pepper into the air will irritate the bear’s sensitive nose and it will run away.
  It is also a good idea to keep an eye out for fresh bear droppings so you have an idea if bears are in the area. People should be able to recognise the difference between black bear and grizzly bear scat.
  Black bear droppings are smaller and often contain berries, leaves, and possibly bits of fur. Grizzly bear droppings tend to contain small bells and smell of pepper.
  
  note that none of that is shooting a bear with a gun or fighting the bear because those "hikers" are the goddamn dumbest
- Leaving to hike in bear woods right now! With a 9mm. And a .22 rifle. TBF, there are only black bears around here. :) (But one is a momma.)

I've played enough RPGs to know you can lose to a rat, even with a sword and armor equipped
- Still remember my nuclear submarine being sunk by a bunch of biremes in Rise is of Nations

Would enjoy watching some tough guys try and fight anything from chimp on down.
“Yeah, bro, I can totally fkn take an elephant!”

No wonder the Brits lost the 13 Colonies, mfs can't even take a goose.
- This is one of those moments when you can immediately identify who has and who has not regularly interacted with the animal in question
  
  I know right, do geese not exist in England? Or do they have special English geese that weigh 50 pounds and lack wringable necks?
- A goose is a gangster swan, and everyone knows that they break arms.
  
  Swans are meaner than geese by far. You don't wanna be anywhere within sight of a swan.
  
  Drop those bars!
- A goose will back off of you give it a boot to the chest. I've fought off a couple of geese and a goose-sized duck and a chest-kick is the best move. Works best of you are able to wind up and use the side of your foot like you're trying to score a sweet goal in soccer, but a regular punt gets the job done too.
  
  A kick or a stick is all anyone needs!
- We just took a break to watch you all fight those grizzlies.

Over 30% don't believe they would prevail over a house cat.
Would like to hear their story.
- Cats are literally made of weapons and they are very assertive about their rights.
  I don't know what precise definition you want to use for "win the fight," but in think in most cases, you will either kick the cat before it attaches itself to you or else it will do a significant amount of damage for which you should go to the hospital and then take its leave. I think the second outcome is probably a lot more likely if the cat has decided it's go time and I would generally define that as "win."
  
  Winning the fight in this case just means accepting some pain.
  Getting hold of the cat will probably hurt. Breaking its neck doesn’t take a lot once you’ve got hold.
- My girlfriend's cat got very sick one day and we had to feed her through a tube.
  Well one day she got better and decided that she wasn't going to put up with tube feeding. I am a 6ft, 230lb man and I shit you not, I had to put my entire body weight on her to keep her from squirming. Every ounce of my strength went into holding her down so that the tube wouldn't rip out of her throat as the food was going down. I couldn't believe how strong a kitty could be when you try to get them do do something they don't want to do.
  So no I don't think I could take a house cat in a fight.
  
  But she got fed so in a way you did beat an angry cat in a fight. I'd call this a win.
- I feel I could walk away victorious from a fight with a cat, but I'll probably bleed out on my way to the hospital. Similar results to a knife fight.
  
  It’s the infection from cat bites that will get you. You could lose a limb.
- Mom had two female cougars she raised from the bottle, as house pets. They were abandoned for whatever reason, can't remember. Declawed for safety, but still.
  Tasha had a thing for men wearing hats. Any hat. Any man. So my 20-something dumbass decided to start a little shit. 90lb. cat vs. 130lb. me. Got down on the living room floor wearing my straw cowboy hat and stared her in the eye. "Let's go bit-..."
  All I saw was a tawny blur and fighting to get on my knees. She got the hat and a monster hank of my long hair. I let her keep the hat. And the hair.
  I now have zero illusions as to fighting animals.
  
  Wtf though there's a huge difference between a 10lb housecat and a 90lb cougar. Although there are cases of people fighting off cougars with their bare hands...

TIL 10% of Americans would beat an elephant in a fist fight.
- It doesn't say fist fight it says fight. An mg42 some ammo a and a bit of distance are going to win against almost any animal hence the whole multiple extinction events directly caused by predation by humanity.
  
  It's right there on the top of the graph.
  "Which of the following animals, if any, do you think you could beat in a fight if you were unarmed?"
  
  Unarmed fight.
  
  Emus would like a word with you.

Every single creature on this list would kick my ass no problem.
Please do not make me have to explain to my mother I lost a fight against a rat.
She'd understand if I lost a fight against a cat though. None of us win against an angry cat.

I'll stop at eagle, but it would be a close match, and I'd need the ER. Eagles aren't heavy, and if you can get your hand around it's neck, it's all over--swing it like a chicken. A large dog would be a toss-up, and no one is beating a chimp. No one. More people could beat a cobra than a chimp. There was the video of the guy besting a kangaroo, but that would not be me. The rest are fantasy.
- I'm 6'1", 250 lbs and hulking and my ancestors were dog soldiers who would bring dogs with us to war and in winter when food was getting a little scarce we would toss Fido in the pot.
  I said that to say I can and have sucessfully fought a large dog before, but not a rabid large dog, just angry large dog.
  That being said, If the dog is rabid, all bets are off.
  If someone put a gun to my head and said, fight the chimp to the death or die right now, I would do my best, but unless I get really lucky, maybe, maybe 30% of the time I win.

The longer I look at this the more fascinating it gets. The fact that the bottom rows are not absolute zero across the board. The fact that the US respondents are well over 3% confident they could take on a grizzly unarmed. Is it just a social thing, always responding with confidence ? Or do they have no basic idea what a grizzly really is. Are these always the same people who think they can take on a bear and a lion? So many questions, so little data.
- A human isn't doing anything to an elephant unarmed. Punchs? Kicks? You're not going anywhere near that trunk. It's like kicking a tank.
  If the elephant was a scared little bitch. You could probably scare hunt it into exhaustion maybe, maybe
  
  elephants are vengeful, they went after a deceased womans funeral after she died when she was alived and she harrassed them.

I'm surprised by eagle being so low. Like, they don't exactly have a ton of mass, and can't pick you up. If you can avoid getting blinded, there's not a whole lot they can do to you that isn't superficial scratches. If you can grab them, it's over.
- I think you are underestimating how much an eagle talon can fuck up your face and neck, and difficult it would be to restrain one unarmed.
- Okay, I grabbed it and now it opened two of my arteries. What should I do next?
  Everyone thinks they could win a fight against a little person until they find out he’s holding knives in each hand and another in his mouth. Also eagles are huge.
  
  Most of an eagle's size is their wings.
- Anyone could thrash an eagle stupid, even the big ones. But if they get hold of you first, yeah, those wounds won't be superficial.
  
  Ask a falconer about getting "footed" by their bird.
  Full size eagle could easily break your hand, or possibly your forearm, if it got the right grip. No claws needed.

It says 'unarmed' but it doesn't clarify if you're unprotected. I assume not and you're in the standard issue Spandex shorts of fighting. So I would likely bleed out as a result of everything past rat, which is hardly a victory.
I had a wounded squirrel I thought my cat had killed lacerate the fuck out of my arm once. My cat would not have been as stopped at the tendon like that squirrel. And she knew it.

That’s over 2 terabytes of adults! That’s a lot!

They're right about the goose. Do not fuck with.
- A goose is one of two things on this list that I have actually fought. I guess I won. It stopped attacking and retreated after I kicked it in the head. I should note that I was not the aggressor in this fight.
  The other thing I fought was a large dog that was attacking a little neighbor kid. I was probably 13 years old. I managed to get it off the kid long enough for its owner to come get it. The kid and I both needed stiches. The asshole owner of the dog was a cop, so nothing happened to him or the dog. Too this day I regret not putting a bowl of anti-freeze in his backyard to get that dog.
  
  I should note that I was not the aggressor in this fight.
  Yeah that’s assumed tbh, it was a goose.
- I've always wanted to fight a goose how do they attack? Hit you with their feathers? They don't have teeth to puncture skin do they?
  
  Their beaks are sharp enough to rip open a fish and they can fly so they're going for the face
  
  I've seen one get pissed at a car honking at it to get out of the way (they're a protected species, Canadian Geese, specifically), and it actually ripped the license plate off his front bumper with its beak and like held it in its mouth threatening the guy to step out of his car and do something about it.
  Was the wildest shit I've ever seen. Like something out of a Miami throw down, except it was a goose and a car.
  
  They bite, they peck hard enough to break small bones, and they beat with their wings (stronger than you probably imagine)
  
  They bite pretty hard, and they have excellent strength from their wings. They can batter you pretty good, but once you get ahold of the goose it's game over. You could just sit on it and crush it to death.
- Peace was never an option.

Chimpanzee is way too high Jesus Christ. It goes from reasonable shot at winning but succumbing to your wounds later to 20x stronger than you and smart enough to go for the sharp bits
- Yeah, my first thought was that a king cobra should be higher than chimpanzee. Not because king cobras would necessarily be easy, but because it would be possible.
  Beating a chimp would depend on whether a human hit to its head could knock it out or at least stun it, as well as getting such a blow in immediately at the start. But my guess is that their skulls are built differently enough that such a hit would just motivate it more.

I'm way more confident in my ability to take a goose than a cat. Geese are mean and can hurt, but push come to shove I could tank that with adrenaline.
Cats will claw your eyes out.
- Yes, I assume most people have never experienced a cornered cat.

I'm always more concerned by the 30% of humans that don't think they could take a rat more than the delusional people myself.
They might be assuming you get weapons or whatever, but 30% of people don't even have to self confidence to just flop around on the ground for a bit.

AMERICAAA 🦅 🦅 🔥 🏈 🛢 🛢

Why do 5-10% of Americans think they can beat a Gorilla Lion Elephant or Grizzly Bear? Note beat in a fight as in engage successfully in combat. What do they think you are even going to do vs the Grizzly or elephant again?
Also chimps should be way further down on that list. You'd have a better chance against the wolf.
- americans are just tougher thats why 🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲

We can all beat the fuck out of cobras. Just sayin
- It would probably be a pyrrhic victory though.
  
  Yeah if there's no anti-venom, this does seem like the kind of fight where just everybody dies.
- Yup. I mean, you might not survive with this method, but if you just get it to bite your foot (assuming you have shoes) you could just stomp it immediately afterwards.
  Similar story for the eagle - it will definitely leave gashes in you, but so long as you flail your arms and get one decent hit on it (enough to get it out of the air), you would be able to cripple it decently fast.
  I'm realizing I don't really like thinking about hypothetically beating up animals, though. If they're fighting you, they're either scared for their lives, defending their young, or starving to death.

I'm good down to Eagle, and then it's straight losses.
- Eagles can be huge, fly and have fuckin razor sharp meat hooks for fingers.
  
  The challenge is to win, not walk away unscathed.

Hand to hand? Up to and including a large dog. Only one animal at a time, mind you. And the dog would likely tear me up good.
Armed with whatever I can get at home? Maybe up to crocodile depending on the range.
For anything else, I’m going to need to buy larger guns, or try to kill the animals with a vehicle. Depends on which vehicle and which animal. Not that I would willingly hurt anything on the list.
(The post said fight, it didn’t say “unarmed”)
- It did in fact exactly say “unarmed”, assuming the image is accurate.
- Ah nice (seriously)! I can ask you how you'd go about with that cat.
  In case you're serious: you will not touch them in a fight without getting more and more hurt and bleeding when getting close. Not are they fast and cover every every direction simultaneously with their flexibility but also do those claws cut instantly if required.
  (not trying to convince or belittle you here. Just curious. In reality I hope we'll never find out)

How do people think they can defeat a goose? They're one of the meanest animals on the planet. They're up there with wolverines and opossums.
- Bruh they weigh like 15 lbs and their neck is long and poorly protected. If you can't beat a goose in a fight there's something wrong with you lol. Sure it might be hard to catch but it's not like a single goose is going to take you down Shadow of Colossus style by skillfully dodging all your attacks while it goes after your weak points and once you get ahold of a goose it's dead.
- It's easy. Grab the neck behind the head, spin, and throw. The goose figures out not to attack the 150+ pound ape after that. Not all the apes though, just the one that threw the thing.
  
  Have you ever seen geese fight? They're vicious.
- Common and Virginia possums are timid and will hiss or faint if they're confronted and can't run away.
  What kind of possum is mean?
  
  I don't want to be gross, but when I was a kid, my dad was bringing me home from Little League and there was an opposum in the driveway. My dad ran it over with his car, and later on that thing got up and walked away. I count winning in a fight means to the death, and those things don't die.
  
  Right lol. I was gonna say I get comparing geese and wolverines, they're both known for high levels of aggression, but opposums are known for remaining so still you think they're dead lmao it's almost the exact opposite!
- Geese are mean and scary, but that doesn't make them deadly. Unless they get a super lucky shot on a major artery they can't kill you. You might end up with some deep scratches but I don't think a goose could even break anything more than your hand. If it's a fight to the death at the end of the day you can just run at the goose and tackle it, sacrificing your face and legs and arms to some really bad scratches.

the dogs you have to worry about is the ones that are known to bite or aggresive.
- Right, don't fuck around with Dachshunds...

I'm gonna go ahead and claim defeat over the possible fight with anything. Hell I lost a fight with hair curlers once.
- One of those big white ducks with the red gullet things once trapped my son and I in a bathroom at a zoo. We were heading there anyway and my son stopped to look at it, then it start following us a little too fast so we booked it. We did our business and I forgot about the duck until I open the door and it tried charging in. I ended up throwing a roll of toilet paper behind him and while he was distracted we snuck by.
  All in all 9/10 zoo day. My son still talks about the time I outsmarted a duck.

Now we know why life expectancy is lower in the US…

I mean I've been thinking about how to fight geese for a long long time now. I've got grudges.
- Don't stick your neck out; I promise it's not good for the gander
- Think Mario 64 bowser fights, only you grab the goose by the neck instead of the tail. Though that is to fight for a draw.

Well, I've been attacked by big dogs, and either "won", or ran them off, without needing stitches. So that's all I'm confident about

I'm pretty confident in fighting most things that are smaller than a dog. Once you get into dog size or larger, things get complicated.
The largest animal I think I could take in a fight is a capybara. Maybe a manatee; but only on land.

Graph is missing Australia..
- I think they're the kangaroos.

In america's defence on the eagle front, theirs are basically glorified seagulls

Some of these are a grey area. I could probably be the last one standing with a wolf, but would likely die later from the damage.
- I feel like you both loose in that case.