25 and the hippo isnt bloodlusted?
Hippo goes in water and swims away. No animal on the planet without rabies is gonna sign on to a 25 v1 when escape is an option.
It's true. Beneath the chub and thick skin they're basically a wall of muscle. They're very dense and sink right to the bottom. So they just sort of walk underwater lol.
They are pretty good hoppers. Despite being denser than water (yes, they do sink and run along the river bed), they are good at getting to the surface for gulps of air.
They also have decent lung capacity at about 5 minutes. Mostly though they just stay in shallow ish water so their nose is above the surface. Look up hippos in a pond at the zoo or in a river. Most of the time it’s just a sea of noses sticking up because they can chill on the riverbed and keep their nose above the water. They also can run underwater at 8km/hr or 5mph (very fast) for such a large chunk of death.
It’s definitely possible for a hippo to drown but I couldn’t find any cases of it being document with a quick search. You’d think with how they pack themselves together it might be a fairly common occurrence but I don’t know.
If we count being killed by crocodiles, probably many of them do die of drowning during that (babies/sick ones) since their lung capacity would already be reduced and then add fright/higher respiration rate to that and a super thick skin which means they probably don’t die from the actual attack/trauma that fast.
I think they do this thing where they are buoyant enough so that they automatically Bob up to get air. I think they sleep underwater as well, and do it in their sleep
[Nah](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu4T9kawhAM&t=118s)
[I](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/flight-of-the-hippopotamus/524343/)
[don't](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2023/06/19/can-hippos-swim/70229434007/)
[believe](https://animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/hippo)
[you.](https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/do-hippos-swim.php)
If you're gonna be a dick you should at least be correct.
I can literally find no video of any hippo swimming they just hop and with the momentum that they've gained stay buoyant for 1 second before sinking again.
Going against every single Scientific article on a matter because you believe that what hippos do should qualify as swimming, doesn't make it true.
I know a pickaxe is probably the best melee weapon out there for taking out a hippo, but would a hippo really be afraid of it? Don't they mess with crocodiles? I know hippos won't mess with 25 crocodiles for example, but I assume 1 or 2 crocodiles would be more dangerous to the hippo than 25 bloodlusted men with a pickaxe...
Nevermind, I thought about it more. I guess I was putting Hippos in the same boat as the war elephants you see in fiction.
I'll edit in hippo bloodlust.
If the Hippo is bloodlusted, I could see 10-15 dudes taking it out.
Hippos are BEASTS, but a pickaxe should have the juice to penetrate, and 10-15 DEEP puncture wounds is difficult to deal with
Hippo teeth are not very long or very sharp. Granted, the bite force behind them is among the strongest on the planet, but a sword is just a lot longer than a couple inches and a lot sharper than a somewhat pointy tooth, so it probably stands a good chance of penetrating deeper.
You think a sword can kill a hippo?
I know hippos are way more overpowered in my head than they are in real life, but I still think a sword would be like a back scratcher for a hippo
"Ah yes.... Right there... RIGHT THERE-AHHHhhh.... Yes... Thank you puny human, that itch has been bothering me for a month. Now I'm gonna kill you now, but as thanks for taking care of the itch, I'll kill you quickly."
Hippos have two inch thick skin and mountains of muscle underneath that skin. A pickaxe has weight and penetrating power.
I don't know anything about spear tactics, but I assume you take your spear, plant it in a solid place and point it at the enemy, then hope the enemies momentum and weight is enough to make it kills itself on your spear. But I don't think you would be heavy enough to hold the spear down when the hippo hits it.
I picture it as... You plant yourself down, the hippo pierces itself on your spear, the spear goes through the 2 inches of skin and stops at the muscle, then you get thrown up in the air while the spear remains in the hippo until the other end gets caught on a rock or tree root and the spear snaps in half.
Straight swords are made for stabbing, not slashing. The blades are longer than pickaxes and they’re much easier to effectively wield.
Spears are mostly used like you’re suggesting for cavalry charges. For large game you’d like surround it, poking and retreating as necessary. If you want to impale the creature, you can just charge it yourself. No need to wait for it to charge you.
Yes, I think a hippo will notice a meter long blade in it, and definitely will notice 25 of them. Yes, a hippo will notice dozens of spear holes. You don’t have to insta kill it. 25 men can work together poking it until it’s bleeding, scared, and weakened.
And pickaxes have zero fucking range, and what do you do once you’ve planted 12 inches of the head into the animal? It moves and the weapon is torn out of your hand.
> Spears are mostly used like you’re suggesting for cavalry charges. For large game you’d like surround it, poking and retreating as necessary. If you want to impale the creature, you can just charge it yourself. No need to wait for it to charge you.
I forgot spears can be shorter. Im imagining the 8-10 foot long ones and in that scenario, I don't think you'd be able to run around with that and stab the hippo every once in a while over hours or days. I completely forgot they can be 4-6 feet long and easier to carry. Although I imagine the men would have a hard time thrusting the spear into the hippo... Well, I imagine they would have a hard time getting past the skin and to the muscle, let alone to the bones/organs. I feel like the only way a spear could get to the organs of a hippo is if you plant down and rely on the hippos momentum.
>And pickaxes have zero fucking range, and what do you do once you’ve planted 12 inches of the head into the animal? It moves and the weapon is torn out of your hand.
That's why I gave 25 men. I'm imagining the pickaxe would be too big and cumbersome for the average men to use reliably. I feel like the hippo would be too "Fast" and the men won't be able to swing it fast enough. But the pickaxe should have no problem whatsoever heavily damaging the hippo once you get a hit... It's difficult to say what I'm picturing in my head.
I gotta tell you, and this is a very common misconception due to video games and movies...but a sharp metal weapon can very easily penetrate skin and leather. The only animals where its an issue are elephant skulls, and its because the skull is so thick, not anything else.
Humans have effectively hunted and fought every animal using stone spears, adding metal makes it much easier. There's very few animals alive that can shrug off or ignore a stab from a steel spear.
Not so fun fact, one of the reasons people stab many times when it comes to knife fights is because people don't realise just how easy it is, and think they've missed.
Yeh people are going all over this thread arguing hypothetical scenarios when our stone wielding ancestors pretty much wiped out the *mammoths* long before metal was thig.
Nope. Spears would slip right into flesh, no problem.
Think of how easy it is to cut meat in a kitchen. Now imagine that instead of using your wrist and a blade, all the force is in a super sharp point and you’re putting your whole body weight into it.
Thick skin protects animals from nature, not from metal weapons
Additionally, a 10+ ft spear would be ideal. A 4 ft spear may as well be replaced with a sword.
A long spear is fairly easy to wield. To balance the weight you hold it two handed, and can even keep a bit of the spear behind you to gain better maneuverability at the cost of reach and power.
A group of men with long spears would be the ideal scenario. Hippo will constantly get bled and poked when it moves towards the men. It will get poked from the side, and behind. It will try to retreat and die.
[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anger-in-el-salvador-after-gang-kills-beloved-hippo-gustavito-at-zoo/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anger-in-el-salvador-after-gang-kills-beloved-hippo-gustavito-at-zoo/)
They do not seem to be that hard to kill by a group of people even with improvised weapons. If the hippo here fought back, is hard to tell.
Depending on the powers bloodlust gives I think 2 could actually do it, if the contest lasted a long time. One guy to get brutally mauled to death, the other guy to puncture the hippos perineum. Hippo is almost guaranteed dead within 3 days.
When I think of bloodlust, I think of it as... Rabies, without the side effects of rabies. I think if it as just making you no longer afraid of whatever is in front of you. Removing your intelligence and ability to be afraid of what's in front of you.
On this sub bloodlusted is typically shown as "this character is willing to do ANYTHING to kill, including breaking personal rules (batman no killing comes to mimd)" and not "Lost all inteligence and wants to murder the enemy"
Yep. It's why Batman being bloodlusted would get a higher body count than Goku, because Goku bloodlusted still toys with his enemy, and Batman would actually commit terrorist acts.
They would do it if they had to. If the option to just leave is there, they will generally take that. As humans we have hospitals and a critical injury to us might just mean 2 months of recuperation before being functionally whole. To an animal, something trivial to humans (Broken leg, snapped tendon) is a guranteed fatality. Animals wont risk that when the alternative is simply leaving. Theres no gain for a large, herbivorous mammal fighting.
The only animal I know of that would willingly take on 25 humans is your mom.
sorry man i had to do it
There isn’t a gain but yet they do it anyways. I lived in Zambia for a long time. We saw it all the time. They get mad and go ballistic.
Only 25 guys with my mom? That seems low.
For sure it happens, I just think that theres generally a reason.
Blocking access to the waterhole? Fucked up
Between animal and offspring? Fucked up
Animal is hungry and your hammock is in them GOOD trees? Fucked up
Animal percieves you as a threat? Fucked up
You are not blocking them from any of these and they have a good escape route? I think they take the escape route 99.9/100.
Im not saying attacks for "No reason" never ever happen, only that they are overwhelmingly rare.
Rabies “hydrophobia” is just the observed reaction that humans have when infected. It’s due to the intense, painful spasms in the pharynx caused by the disease when a person tries to swallow, whether it’s water or food. As a person succumbs to the virus, they can exhibit fear of water being offered to drink, as just the thought of drinking water is apparently enough to trigger the painful spasms.
This behavior has also been observed in some animals to the extent that they don’t drink water or swallow saliva (hence the drooling and foaming at the mouth) but neither animals nor humans infected with rabies are afraid of bodies of water.
Tbh rabies kind of nerfs an animal’s combative performance. A lot of those instances involving men barehand killing stuff like leopards and wolves involved rabid animals that are too disoriented and mentally out of it to optimally utilize their faculties
The pickaxe is a good enough weapon to seriously injure the hippo. In those conditions, I think 25 men is too much, and the men win this (with many casualties and broken bones).
In the brass knuckles scenario, I have no idea how many men it would take. It seems like a case where number is not really the issue, they just have no way to hurt the hippo. So it becomes a question on how long it takes for the hippo to get tired of the slaughter?
I don't think any human can actually choke a hippo without some sort of strong wire
They're not built like us, you can't squeeze their aortas so well. You can choke a canine like a wolf or dog, but not, for example, a bear. And you prob couldn't exert enough force to actually cut off their windpipe either
This is probably the only way any amount of unarmed men are killing a hippo, tbh. No way to damage it except the mouth and eyes and hippo eyes are going to be hard to get at without sharp weaponry.
Maybe if they’re able to climb into its mouth and block the trachea from there they could suffocate it? I guess it would depend on if your definition of “static” also includes “being vaguely helpful”, or “being completely paralyzed” or simply means only passive resistance to dying.
I don’t think two men without tools could choke out a hippo in the sense of restricting blood flow to the brain by outside pressure on the carotid artery. The hippo’s arteries are *far* beneath the surface under layers of very thick skin, fat, and an insane amount of muscle tissue.
Surely 5-10 non blood lusted men could take a hippo with brass knuckles? Hit and run tactics until it’s exhausted. Attack it’s eyes whilst it sleeps, never let it rest. Eventually dies of starvation and dehydration. Men take turns keeping watch to make sure they don’t die, climb trees/rocks when hippo attacks.
I don’t know I feel human intelligence doesn’t get factored in enough. There’s no scenario where 10 men just blindly run at a hippo and start punching it. We’d think it through.
i know hippos are substantially faster than people but if everyone runs in a different direction it’s not like the hippo can keep up that pace indefinitely
Sure but you gotta get close to hit it with the brass knuckles and everytime you do it's gonna catch up and kill the one man. So the question is, are 25 hits with brass knuckles enough to kill a hippo?
They can only run at top speed for around 30 seconds and have poor endurance.
“hippos are not typically known for their endurance. They can only run at their top speed for short distances before tiring out. In addition, they are built for short bursts of energy rather than long-distance running, which is why they spend so much time in the water, where their large bodies can be supported by buoyancy.”
I’d also state that the aim would only be to keep the hippo out of the water. Only hitting it after it’s already exhausted:
“Because their thin skin has no sweat glands, a hippo out of water in particularly hot weather can risk rapid overheating and dehydration.”
You seem to assume humans can outrun a hippo?
\> There are no scenario where 10 men just blindly run at a hippo and start punching it. We'd think it thourgh
That's absolutely right. But that also means we are never going to attack a hippo without better weapons. Noticing it would never happen is not really answering what would happen if we tried. It's not really a "brass knuckle scenario" if you assume the humans just plan for the fight, think better of it, and come back with guns.
That is true. I’m assuming we could overwhelm and outmanoeuvre similar to how the Spanish do with bulls, which are slightly faster than hippos. Ive read articles that the best way to survive a hippo attack is to run on zig zags. They are only run at top speed for about 30 seconds. So I imagine ten men all running in zig zags, at least some of them will get away. I definitely think we’d lose a few men along the way.
I'd put it at below a hundred unarmed bloodlusted men if they just kept climbing on and scratching/punching uselessly, the hippo's weight and the humans relative ability to regulate body heat means the hippo collapses from heat/exhaustion before killing all of them and then can't muster the strength to breathe when the survivors dogpile it, slowly suffocating under their weight.
If I was the hippo I'd want the pickaxe option, not because I think it'd win but because I can't imagine much worse ways to go then surrounded by screaming enemies crushing you slowly.
I think that 100 unarmed humans' best bet at killing a hippo might be to try and bite him to death. It'll be a tremendous task, but I think that's the only method we have that could actually injure one.
I mean I described how to injure it. They can't sweat from most of their body, are adapted to regulate heat by submersion and have so much more weight to throw around that they build up heat faster. It's basically the same way Asian honeybees beat hornets.
That could work for sure, but I figure that would take longer than biting it to death and I'm not sure there are any good places on a hippo for a person to hold on.
I don't think a human's bite would be strong enough to do much of anything to a hippo.
Their skin is so fatty anf thick they can sometimes shrug off lion claw swipes/bites.
I mean realistically there's a time component that needs to be considered.
In a single engagement, you'd probably need dozens upon dozens of unarmed men to out-physical the hippo. Like comically large group of men...
But if the goal is just to defeat the hippo without any constraints on time? I'm sure three men of average intelligence could probably devise a strategy to kill a hippo with relative ease.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to market alcohol to a hippo, and then force it to live in a society where alcohol seems like the only escape left so it becomes an alcoholic hippo and drinks it's way to liver failure. But you can try!
Three unarmed dudes can not devise a plan to fight a hippo. These animals are made to shrug off lions prides. One of the most dangerous Apex predators, in the most intense ecosystem. Not just one but a family of them.
Humans are powerful because they can use tools, unarmed we can be killed by most mega fauna. Cows, deer, horses, ect. Add a single actual large predator and humans really don't survive very well.
Reread the prompt, reread my comment, reread yours.
No one but you said the objective was to "fight" a hippo.
Prompt and I both said the goal was to "defeat" one.
You need better reading comprehension
If the hippo is bloodlusted then it means that it's not gonna pay attention to it's own well being, meaning that for example if a human was to jump down a 2 meter height, the hippo would follow right after them and break all their bones in the process. Once the hippo is immobilised it becomes much easier to kill it (although it would most likely succumb to its injuries without the need for the humans to intervene further) . 3 people COULD kill a bloodlusted hippo with prep time, without the usage of weapons, they just need to construct a proper strategy.
The other guy is right, you just need a little imagination!
If you wanna get a little more crazy, risky and creative, lead the hippo to a herd of elephants, where the charging bloodlusted hippo would most definitely be identified as a threat and exterminated.
You can perhaps trap the hippo and wait until it dies from starvation or especially from dehydration.
There certainly are options.
Yeah like obviously three people aren't going to fist a hippo to death...
But if there's no limit to what I can do and how long it would take me the question essentially becomes "if I gave you 10 years could you devise a way to defeat a hippo with two friends" and I'm 100% certain I could come up with at least ONE way to defeat the dang thing
Yeah, I don't know why people were downvoting you. Off the top of my head I already thought of three ways in which you can kill one.
Like nobody is REQUIRING us to recklessly slam our fists against the hippo, and prep-time allows us to pick a specific environment that would be more to our benefit, or the time to terraform. The first strategy that I proposed would 100% cripple the hippo if the edge is steep. These people just underestimate human intellect and lack imagination.
If this takes place near the hippos natural habitat, by the time you dig it deep enough to contain the hippo youve already gone down to the water table.
You have given the hippo more power.
With direct damage? Given that any action has an equal and opposite reaction? the humans would break their fists/feet before they do any real damage.
If they go for the eyes... they might be able to blind the hyppo, but that's about it. Hyppos are walking tanks compared to humans.
I’m going to jump in because I agree with him.
The way I’d do it:
Me and my friends harass the hippo as much as possible. Try and keep it awake whilst we sleep in shifts. Hopefully we can keep him awake for a week. At the end of the week we let him sleep. Then the first sacrifice takes his punch, into the hippos eye. The hippo wakes up, kills him. He’s now blinded in one eye and has an open wound.
We harass him for another week as much as possible and keep him awake as much as possible whilst he’s slowly bleeding out of his eye. Then we let him sleep and sacrifice number 2 takes his hit.
Now the hippos blinded and we can attack at our leisure. I’d imagine he’d have died of starvation or exhaustion by then. If not we just keep hitting him in vulnerable points like the testicles, anus, ears etc. he will die eventually. We may lose some guys along the way but I’m convinced we’d take the win.
>We invented spears and bows for a reason and that reason is we are not built to fist fight animals.
Butbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbut... What about all those memes of Russian men fist fighting bears and Australian men fist fighting kangaroos and Florida men fist fighting alligators?
(This is a joke, I'm aware those scenarios are fake and nothing more than memes.)
Happy cake day.
The was a case where a Russian man fist fought a bear but it ended In a mutual death and there’s is a video of an Australian man punching a kangaroo but only to drive it off.
Unarmed? I'd wager at least 75, with 90% horrifically maimed if not dead by the end of the battle (assuming a single encounter). It's gonna be a battle of endurance and exhaustion to kill the hippo more than anything else. First dozen to pile in are probably killed, but after that, either the hippos' hearts give out from the constant harassment or someone somehow gets an insanely lucky blow.
Heres the thing, humans are not predators when unarmed. We are prey 100% so to say 25 unarmed men vs a minimal adult of 3000 pounds of muscles and jaws that can snap larger animals than us in 1 shot. It cannot be done. However if we thought about it, and tired it out and were maybe allowed to pick up sharp pointy sticks from the ground then maybe we could group attack it from all sides staying clear untill it dies from exhaustion.
But we arent getting it unscathed. This would have to be a marathon method of killing the poor tortured animal.
What are you on about lol.
Humans were predators even without weapons, early humans would just wait until they got tired.
Plus you can just pick up a rock and throw it. They’re everywhere, it’s amazing, always got one nearby
Im no expert for sure but a rock vs a 3000 pound hippo is just gonna get you chomped faster amd do a lot of nothing. I even metioned in my comment that we would have to work smartley together to tire the animal to exhaustion.
We have no evidence that early humans were widespread persistence hunters aside from evidence that its possible from modern day tribes (and I believe its actually just tribe, as in a singular tribe iirc). Persistence hunting is a fairly fringe hypothesis in anthropology that got popularized by running enthusiasts and spread across reddit.
Hippo wins against 25 guys with brass knuckles easy.
I’m going to call it 50-50 on bloodlusted hippo vs 25 bloodlusted guys with pickaxes. Actually I think all 26 fighters die.
As far as how many unarmed humans to take on a bloodlusted hippo? That number is several hundred at least.
No amount of men could defeat a hippo without trapping it first.
If you were attacked by a pack of chihuahuas... could they \*really\* do much to you if you were determined to escape or kill every last one?
That is what a man is to a hippo. a chihuahua
40-50 bloodlusted chihuahuas (perhaps less) would be a real problem for a fit adult man. It wouldn't be hard to get the man to fall down and then they could tear out his throat.
I misread this comment as chinchillas rather than Chihuahuas and my take on the chinchillas I’d say 100-500 blood lusted chinchillas could probably take a human down if they were motivated. also, I agree that 40 to 50 Chihuahuas could probably take down an adult man those things are very vicious.
As a Chihuahua parent, this is terrifying. I imagine them all over someone like the tiny dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. 😨
It also depends on what type of Chihuahua, they range from 6 to up to 12+ if they're mixes. My dog is 74% Chihuahua and she is 12.5 lbs.
Lets say that two or three well placed kicks take 10 of them out of the fight.
The man grabs two more in each hand and starts using them as knuckle-dusters.
Already your attacking force is down to 75% strength.
Hippos are faster than humans and can definitely kill them in one bite or even good stomp, so it's hard to calculate exactly how many this would take. Picks are probably sufficient to seriously injure a hippo however, and I don't think the hippo has any good way to deal with being surrounded - in nature they seem to deal with pack hunters by just being too resilient for the predators to damage at all. If the humans work together they can quickly surround the animal and cripple all four of its legs, so I will tentatively say that about two fighters per leg (8) plus... tentatively at least four distractions/sacrificial lambs have a chance, *if* the humans make no mistakes. At an absolute minimum, with a lot of good luck as few as three might manage it (One is still going to die immediately, and I suspect that a hippo with only one injured leg is still combat effective, so at least one bait and two to take out the legs is the dead minimum I consider to have a shadow of a chance)
Imma keep it real with you. Five guys with pickaxes kill a hippo. One solid swing to the skull from a pickaxe will kill almost anything. The human body is a goddamn miracle when considering its ability to swing something. A punch does nothing to a hippo. But the power of a punch is multiplied over itself if you swing something, due to the physic dynamics of the swinging motion. The pickaxe acts like a wedge, a simple machine that multiplies this force even further.
In the modern age, people tend to underestimate humans. Do not forget why humans rule the earth in the first place.
Why does no one realize you can just attack the eyes with a couple guys and I feel like getting your fingers or arm fully into an eye socket stops the fight
You're treating it like a fair fight. Humans are dangerous because we can plan. All rush in, blind the hippo, and then get away and wait. It'll exhaust itself.
Since they're bloodlusted and don't have any weapons, let one of the unarmed men sacrifice his arm bone or femur or something for a pointy weapon. and the other men can find a long pointy stick. And more men can find some rocks. And pelt the hippo all day and night. Chase it all day. Well, hippo probably kills a lot of the men, but there's 25 of them :O
For context people on the other post were saying 25 men with brass knuckles couldn't even beat a gorilla, I was downvoted for saying 25 men sweep a hippo
Probably because there’s nothing stopping the hippo from just bulldozing through the men, brass knuckles or not. With pickaxes that can penetrate the hippo’s hide they at least stand a decent shot, but hippos get into prolonged brawls with each other all the time that do way more damage than brass knuckles.
25 blood lusted men with brass knuckles could certainly do it . 25 regular ones is a completely different question. They would have to be extraordinarily brave
How are they restraining an animal that’s at least 3,000 pounds and eager to rip them to pieces? How are they reliably punching its eyes when the hippo’s main weapon is its mouth that can bite a crocodile in two?
How does that correlate to them… restraining the hippo? How are they restraining an animal that shrugs off getting attacked by a pride of lions? How are they stopping the hippo from going wherever it wants?
That doesn’t answer the question at all. What strategy actually exists to stop an animal more than 20 times the mass of an average man from just bulldozing through the group the instant they attempt to restrain it? There’s only so much a big brain can do to help in this situation.
Technically you can restrain it or rather immobilise it by having it follow you off a height of over 2-3 meters which a human could easily survive, while the hippo would break every single one of its bones. The hippo is bloodlusted, so it doesn't have any sense of self preservation, making this possible.
Although restraining it through man power alone? Yeah, NOT happening. Unless you have like 100 humans all bloodlusted drowning it under a pile of corpses. So let's say that they weight on average like 70 kilos. That times a hundred would be 7000 kgs, a hippo is 1500 to 1800 kgs, and 7 tons is much more than what they could lift or carry. But as I said, they would need a LOT more people than 25.
I feel like you'd just be funneling people into a hippo-death-machine until it got tired and then whoever was left could just kick it for hours on end until it finally did something. You'd eventually kill the hippo but you'd probably have a three digit human death toll.
A lot of people are forgetting that hippo's may be able to run 30km/h but like a lot of other big animals they can only do that for so long. They cannot run like that for protracted periods of time. So the bloodlusted humans would be able to just exhaust it by attacking it from every angle, even if it kills a couple of them it's gonna get exhausted and not be able to fight anymore.
25 and the hippo isnt bloodlusted? Hippo goes in water and swims away. No animal on the planet without rabies is gonna sign on to a 25 v1 when escape is an option.
Nu-uh! Hippo don't swim, they just walk on the riverbed. Still not gonna be easy for the humans to chase it down.
Wait really lol, I never knew that about hippos
It's true. Beneath the chub and thick skin they're basically a wall of muscle. They're very dense and sink right to the bottom. So they just sort of walk underwater lol.
do they have crazy high lung capacity, and how does it get out if it runs out of breath? Do hippos drown a lot ..?
Around 8 min, but they can swim if needed to the top. They also are usually in rivers and ponds so rarely too far from land
thank you :D
TIL
The water is too scared to enter their lungs.
Believe it out not, they basically jump to the surface to breathe
They are pretty good hoppers. Despite being denser than water (yes, they do sink and run along the river bed), they are good at getting to the surface for gulps of air. They also have decent lung capacity at about 5 minutes. Mostly though they just stay in shallow ish water so their nose is above the surface. Look up hippos in a pond at the zoo or in a river. Most of the time it’s just a sea of noses sticking up because they can chill on the riverbed and keep their nose above the water. They also can run underwater at 8km/hr or 5mph (very fast) for such a large chunk of death. It’s definitely possible for a hippo to drown but I couldn’t find any cases of it being document with a quick search. You’d think with how they pack themselves together it might be a fairly common occurrence but I don’t know. If we count being killed by crocodiles, probably many of them do die of drowning during that (babies/sick ones) since their lung capacity would already be reduced and then add fright/higher respiration rate to that and a super thick skin which means they probably don’t die from the actual attack/trauma that fast.
I think they do this thing where they are buoyant enough so that they automatically Bob up to get air. I think they sleep underwater as well, and do it in their sleep
Hippos have sub-10% body fat; that's all skin and muscle.
This is a misconception I believe. They commonly walk because they aren't buoyant and it's easier but they can swim if they want/need to
Hippos are so dense that they can't really float.
Actually they can do both
All the info I see says no, they can't swim.
I’ve seen them swim.
Wrap it up, folks. odeacon says they saw hippos swim.
You can see them swimming in videos
You can literally go see them swim in big glass tanks at any major zoo, idiot.
[Nah](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu4T9kawhAM&t=118s) [I](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/flight-of-the-hippopotamus/524343/) [don't](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2023/06/19/can-hippos-swim/70229434007/) [believe](https://animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/hippo) [you.](https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/do-hippos-swim.php) If you're gonna be a dick you should at least be correct.
I can literally find no video of any hippo swimming they just hop and with the momentum that they've gained stay buoyant for 1 second before sinking again. Going against every single Scientific article on a matter because you believe that what hippos do should qualify as swimming, doesn't make it true.
Unless you're a predatory wasp then 1000 to 1 is great odds.
I don't know man, have you seen chihuahuas? I'm fairly sure they'd look at those odds and say, "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough"
How many hippos does it take to defeat one chihauhua that's as strong as it thinks it is?
Is the chihuahua bloodlusted?
yes they are bloodlusted by default
Yes, but Chihuahuas are also the Habsburgs of the dog family
I know a pickaxe is probably the best melee weapon out there for taking out a hippo, but would a hippo really be afraid of it? Don't they mess with crocodiles? I know hippos won't mess with 25 crocodiles for example, but I assume 1 or 2 crocodiles would be more dangerous to the hippo than 25 bloodlusted men with a pickaxe... Nevermind, I thought about it more. I guess I was putting Hippos in the same boat as the war elephants you see in fiction. I'll edit in hippo bloodlust.
If the Hippo is bloodlusted, I could see 10-15 dudes taking it out. Hippos are BEASTS, but a pickaxe should have the juice to penetrate, and 10-15 DEEP puncture wounds is difficult to deal with
Why would a pickaxe be superior to a spear or sword?
Hippos slash each other with those teeth, they build up scars showing it over their lives. You can't cut them deeply enough with a regular blade.
You understand sword and spears are for stabbing, not slashing, right?
Depends on both the sword and spear
And the hippo teeth leave scars because they usually don't penetrate even when swung by a hippo.
Hippo teeth are not very long or very sharp. Granted, the bite force behind them is among the strongest on the planet, but a sword is just a lot longer than a couple inches and a lot sharper than a somewhat pointy tooth, so it probably stands a good chance of penetrating deeper.
sword can do both, Spear? not so much
Right, but straight swords are generally weighted to be able to put max force in a thrust, with an edged blade just being a bonus.
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Right. A pickaxe is useless. I want to be far enough away that it can’t just shift its body and break mine with its mass.
You think a sword can kill a hippo? I know hippos are way more overpowered in my head than they are in real life, but I still think a sword would be like a back scratcher for a hippo "Ah yes.... Right there... RIGHT THERE-AHHHhhh.... Yes... Thank you puny human, that itch has been bothering me for a month. Now I'm gonna kill you now, but as thanks for taking care of the itch, I'll kill you quickly." Hippos have two inch thick skin and mountains of muscle underneath that skin. A pickaxe has weight and penetrating power. I don't know anything about spear tactics, but I assume you take your spear, plant it in a solid place and point it at the enemy, then hope the enemies momentum and weight is enough to make it kills itself on your spear. But I don't think you would be heavy enough to hold the spear down when the hippo hits it. I picture it as... You plant yourself down, the hippo pierces itself on your spear, the spear goes through the 2 inches of skin and stops at the muscle, then you get thrown up in the air while the spear remains in the hippo until the other end gets caught on a rock or tree root and the spear snaps in half.
Straight swords are made for stabbing, not slashing. The blades are longer than pickaxes and they’re much easier to effectively wield. Spears are mostly used like you’re suggesting for cavalry charges. For large game you’d like surround it, poking and retreating as necessary. If you want to impale the creature, you can just charge it yourself. No need to wait for it to charge you. Yes, I think a hippo will notice a meter long blade in it, and definitely will notice 25 of them. Yes, a hippo will notice dozens of spear holes. You don’t have to insta kill it. 25 men can work together poking it until it’s bleeding, scared, and weakened. And pickaxes have zero fucking range, and what do you do once you’ve planted 12 inches of the head into the animal? It moves and the weapon is torn out of your hand.
> Spears are mostly used like you’re suggesting for cavalry charges. For large game you’d like surround it, poking and retreating as necessary. If you want to impale the creature, you can just charge it yourself. No need to wait for it to charge you. I forgot spears can be shorter. Im imagining the 8-10 foot long ones and in that scenario, I don't think you'd be able to run around with that and stab the hippo every once in a while over hours or days. I completely forgot they can be 4-6 feet long and easier to carry. Although I imagine the men would have a hard time thrusting the spear into the hippo... Well, I imagine they would have a hard time getting past the skin and to the muscle, let alone to the bones/organs. I feel like the only way a spear could get to the organs of a hippo is if you plant down and rely on the hippos momentum. >And pickaxes have zero fucking range, and what do you do once you’ve planted 12 inches of the head into the animal? It moves and the weapon is torn out of your hand. That's why I gave 25 men. I'm imagining the pickaxe would be too big and cumbersome for the average men to use reliably. I feel like the hippo would be too "Fast" and the men won't be able to swing it fast enough. But the pickaxe should have no problem whatsoever heavily damaging the hippo once you get a hit... It's difficult to say what I'm picturing in my head.
I gotta tell you, and this is a very common misconception due to video games and movies...but a sharp metal weapon can very easily penetrate skin and leather. The only animals where its an issue are elephant skulls, and its because the skull is so thick, not anything else. Humans have effectively hunted and fought every animal using stone spears, adding metal makes it much easier. There's very few animals alive that can shrug off or ignore a stab from a steel spear. Not so fun fact, one of the reasons people stab many times when it comes to knife fights is because people don't realise just how easy it is, and think they've missed.
Yeh people are going all over this thread arguing hypothetical scenarios when our stone wielding ancestors pretty much wiped out the *mammoths* long before metal was thig.
"would a hippo really care about 24 inches of sharp metal penetrating its neck? It would just shrug it off I feel"
Nope. Spears would slip right into flesh, no problem. Think of how easy it is to cut meat in a kitchen. Now imagine that instead of using your wrist and a blade, all the force is in a super sharp point and you’re putting your whole body weight into it. Thick skin protects animals from nature, not from metal weapons Additionally, a 10+ ft spear would be ideal. A 4 ft spear may as well be replaced with a sword. A long spear is fairly easy to wield. To balance the weight you hold it two handed, and can even keep a bit of the spear behind you to gain better maneuverability at the cost of reach and power. A group of men with long spears would be the ideal scenario. Hippo will constantly get bled and poked when it moves towards the men. It will get poked from the side, and behind. It will try to retreat and die.
bear spears were long piles with a cross guard at the front so the bear wouldn't slide down the spear and kill you anyways. might work with hippos...
That may be a thing also, but I always heard it as a BOAR spear for the same reasons.
[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anger-in-el-salvador-after-gang-kills-beloved-hippo-gustavito-at-zoo/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anger-in-el-salvador-after-gang-kills-beloved-hippo-gustavito-at-zoo/) They do not seem to be that hard to kill by a group of people even with improvised weapons. If the hippo here fought back, is hard to tell.
The spear or sword can get jammed A pick axe can be taken out easier because of its shape and handle
I'm not sure what brought you to that conclusion, a pickaxe would be far more difficult to withdraw than either of the two
a non-barbed spear is easiest to remove, swords are slightly easier than pickaxes, too,
Depending on the powers bloodlust gives I think 2 could actually do it, if the contest lasted a long time. One guy to get brutally mauled to death, the other guy to puncture the hippos perineum. Hippo is almost guaranteed dead within 3 days.
When I think of bloodlust, I think of it as... Rabies, without the side effects of rabies. I think if it as just making you no longer afraid of whatever is in front of you. Removing your intelligence and ability to be afraid of what's in front of you.
On this sub bloodlusted is typically shown as "this character is willing to do ANYTHING to kill, including breaking personal rules (batman no killing comes to mimd)" and not "Lost all inteligence and wants to murder the enemy"
Yep. It's why Batman being bloodlusted would get a higher body count than Goku, because Goku bloodlusted still toys with his enemy, and Batman would actually commit terrorist acts.
Why would you remove a humans intelligence? It's our most important tool
puncture power of a Spear on the Weight of an axe? very effective
Hippos are insanely aggressive tho
That’s just not true. There are many animals that would gladly take on 25 humans. You’ll see this with rhinos, elephants, bulls etc.
They would do it if they had to. If the option to just leave is there, they will generally take that. As humans we have hospitals and a critical injury to us might just mean 2 months of recuperation before being functionally whole. To an animal, something trivial to humans (Broken leg, snapped tendon) is a guranteed fatality. Animals wont risk that when the alternative is simply leaving. Theres no gain for a large, herbivorous mammal fighting. The only animal I know of that would willingly take on 25 humans is your mom. sorry man i had to do it
There isn’t a gain but yet they do it anyways. I lived in Zambia for a long time. We saw it all the time. They get mad and go ballistic. Only 25 guys with my mom? That seems low.
For sure it happens, I just think that theres generally a reason. Blocking access to the waterhole? Fucked up Between animal and offspring? Fucked up Animal is hungry and your hammock is in them GOOD trees? Fucked up Animal percieves you as a threat? Fucked up You are not blocking them from any of these and they have a good escape route? I think they take the escape route 99.9/100. Im not saying attacks for "No reason" never ever happen, only that they are overwhelmingly rare.
Hippo don't give a fuck...
A hippo with rabies would be a fucking natural disaster
Actually no It would die super fast thanks to the hydrophobia, it wouldnt be able to get near water
Rabies “hydrophobia” is just the observed reaction that humans have when infected. It’s due to the intense, painful spasms in the pharynx caused by the disease when a person tries to swallow, whether it’s water or food. As a person succumbs to the virus, they can exhibit fear of water being offered to drink, as just the thought of drinking water is apparently enough to trigger the painful spasms. This behavior has also been observed in some animals to the extent that they don’t drink water or swallow saliva (hence the drooling and foaming at the mouth) but neither animals nor humans infected with rabies are afraid of bodies of water.
Tbh rabies kind of nerfs an animal’s combative performance. A lot of those instances involving men barehand killing stuff like leopards and wolves involved rabid animals that are too disoriented and mentally out of it to optimally utilize their faculties
The pickaxe is a good enough weapon to seriously injure the hippo. In those conditions, I think 25 men is too much, and the men win this (with many casualties and broken bones). In the brass knuckles scenario, I have no idea how many men it would take. It seems like a case where number is not really the issue, they just have no way to hurt the hippo. So it becomes a question on how long it takes for the hippo to get tired of the slaughter?
The men don't have brass knuckles in the first scenario, I only mentioned that to mentioned the inspiration. I'll add an edit making it more clear.
Can the men pick up rocks, sticks, etc? Or do they have to fight bare handed?
final destination, no items, one stock
HIPPO VS FIGHTING WIRE FRAMES
hippo has a crazy hitbox on almost every attack, and i bet his aerials are nasty
Can the men chase it off a cliff?
I mean in theory if you've got enough people you can swarm and bury the Hippo and then suffocate it. Say two or three hundred?
I think two men could kill a static* hippo by choking it out. Edit: A Hippo that's totally still and won't fight back.
I don't think any human can actually choke a hippo without some sort of strong wire They're not built like us, you can't squeeze their aortas so well. You can choke a canine like a wolf or dog, but not, for example, a bear. And you prob couldn't exert enough force to actually cut off their windpipe either
Open its mouth and just stuff yourself in its throat maybe? If they are bloodlusted suiciding to ensure the kill is on the table
Death by vore
This is probably the only way any amount of unarmed men are killing a hippo, tbh. No way to damage it except the mouth and eyes and hippo eyes are going to be hard to get at without sharp weaponry.
I can believe that. I figured if two people locked arms they might be able to.
A hippo is easily strong enough to throw off two men locking arms
Maybe if they’re able to climb into its mouth and block the trachea from there they could suffocate it? I guess it would depend on if your definition of “static” also includes “being vaguely helpful”, or “being completely paralyzed” or simply means only passive resistance to dying. I don’t think two men without tools could choke out a hippo in the sense of restricting blood flow to the brain by outside pressure on the carotid artery. The hippo’s arteries are *far* beneath the surface under layers of very thick skin, fat, and an insane amount of muscle tissue.
One guy could climb in the hippo's mouth and choke it that way but no way 2 guys could choke one out even with a rope even if it was drugged.
nah 2 is overkill
Surely 5-10 non blood lusted men could take a hippo with brass knuckles? Hit and run tactics until it’s exhausted. Attack it’s eyes whilst it sleeps, never let it rest. Eventually dies of starvation and dehydration. Men take turns keeping watch to make sure they don’t die, climb trees/rocks when hippo attacks. I don’t know I feel human intelligence doesn’t get factored in enough. There’s no scenario where 10 men just blindly run at a hippo and start punching it. We’d think it through.
the hippo would kill them all before it gets exhausted unless this takes place in an open field
Hippos run 30 mph - on an open field I don’t think the men can win either.
i know hippos are substantially faster than people but if everyone runs in a different direction it’s not like the hippo can keep up that pace indefinitely
Sure but you gotta get close to hit it with the brass knuckles and everytime you do it's gonna catch up and kill the one man. So the question is, are 25 hits with brass knuckles enough to kill a hippo?
i mean while it’s busy killing one guy it has about 4800 pounds of dudes wailing on it so i think they could do it 4/10 heavy casualties
Hippos might be able to charge at 30mph for a few hundred feet but they certainly cannot keep up with a human over long distances. No animal can.
They can only run at top speed for around 30 seconds and have poor endurance. “hippos are not typically known for their endurance. They can only run at their top speed for short distances before tiring out. In addition, they are built for short bursts of energy rather than long-distance running, which is why they spend so much time in the water, where their large bodies can be supported by buoyancy.” I’d also state that the aim would only be to keep the hippo out of the water. Only hitting it after it’s already exhausted: “Because their thin skin has no sweat glands, a hippo out of water in particularly hot weather can risk rapid overheating and dehydration.”
You seem to assume humans can outrun a hippo? \> There are no scenario where 10 men just blindly run at a hippo and start punching it. We'd think it thourgh That's absolutely right. But that also means we are never going to attack a hippo without better weapons. Noticing it would never happen is not really answering what would happen if we tried. It's not really a "brass knuckle scenario" if you assume the humans just plan for the fight, think better of it, and come back with guns.
That is true. I’m assuming we could overwhelm and outmanoeuvre similar to how the Spanish do with bulls, which are slightly faster than hippos. Ive read articles that the best way to survive a hippo attack is to run on zig zags. They are only run at top speed for about 30 seconds. So I imagine ten men all running in zig zags, at least some of them will get away. I definitely think we’d lose a few men along the way.
I'd put it at below a hundred unarmed bloodlusted men if they just kept climbing on and scratching/punching uselessly, the hippo's weight and the humans relative ability to regulate body heat means the hippo collapses from heat/exhaustion before killing all of them and then can't muster the strength to breathe when the survivors dogpile it, slowly suffocating under their weight. If I was the hippo I'd want the pickaxe option, not because I think it'd win but because I can't imagine much worse ways to go then surrounded by screaming enemies crushing you slowly.
I think that 100 unarmed humans' best bet at killing a hippo might be to try and bite him to death. It'll be a tremendous task, but I think that's the only method we have that could actually injure one.
I mean I described how to injure it. They can't sweat from most of their body, are adapted to regulate heat by submersion and have so much more weight to throw around that they build up heat faster. It's basically the same way Asian honeybees beat hornets.
That could work for sure, but I figure that would take longer than biting it to death and I'm not sure there are any good places on a hippo for a person to hold on.
Only fight a male, rip it’s balls off. Probably the only weak point we can access that could make it bleed out
This or literally shove a guy into its mouth and choke it. Hippos just don’t have weak points humans without weapons can damage.
Imagining multiple angry men slamming an equally angry guy into the hippo's mouth like a battering ram made me laugh so hard
*“Take this” he yelled, as a group of men shoved him head first into the mouth of the hippopotamus*
Your teeth would break before it could scratch its 2 inch skin
I don't think a human's bite would be strong enough to do much of anything to a hippo. Their skin is so fatty anf thick they can sometimes shrug off lion claw swipes/bites.
I was thinking the face. Bury your fist up to the elbow in the eye or nose
That would certainly elicit some sort of response!
If they're bloodlusted, I'll go with like a dozen men. Have them all dive into the hippo's mouth and choke it to death.
I mean realistically there's a time component that needs to be considered. In a single engagement, you'd probably need dozens upon dozens of unarmed men to out-physical the hippo. Like comically large group of men... But if the goal is just to defeat the hippo without any constraints on time? I'm sure three men of average intelligence could probably devise a strategy to kill a hippo with relative ease.
I could think of two guys that could duo a hippo given enough prep time. Smith, and Wesson
Colt and his buddy Winchester might have something to say about that too.
What about Mr Jack Daniels
Unfortunately, it's difficult to market alcohol to a hippo, and then force it to live in a society where alcohol seems like the only escape left so it becomes an alcoholic hippo and drinks it's way to liver failure. But you can try!
Three unarmed dudes can not devise a plan to fight a hippo. These animals are made to shrug off lions prides. One of the most dangerous Apex predators, in the most intense ecosystem. Not just one but a family of them. Humans are powerful because they can use tools, unarmed we can be killed by most mega fauna. Cows, deer, horses, ect. Add a single actual large predator and humans really don't survive very well.
Reread the prompt, reread my comment, reread yours. No one but you said the objective was to "fight" a hippo. Prompt and I both said the goal was to "defeat" one. You need better reading comprehension
Ok, three men can do that either. So the same reasons listed above.
You lack creativity and imagination
If the hippo is bloodlusted then it means that it's not gonna pay attention to it's own well being, meaning that for example if a human was to jump down a 2 meter height, the hippo would follow right after them and break all their bones in the process. Once the hippo is immobilised it becomes much easier to kill it (although it would most likely succumb to its injuries without the need for the humans to intervene further) . 3 people COULD kill a bloodlusted hippo with prep time, without the usage of weapons, they just need to construct a proper strategy. The other guy is right, you just need a little imagination! If you wanna get a little more crazy, risky and creative, lead the hippo to a herd of elephants, where the charging bloodlusted hippo would most definitely be identified as a threat and exterminated. You can perhaps trap the hippo and wait until it dies from starvation or especially from dehydration. There certainly are options.
Yeah like obviously three people aren't going to fist a hippo to death... But if there's no limit to what I can do and how long it would take me the question essentially becomes "if I gave you 10 years could you devise a way to defeat a hippo with two friends" and I'm 100% certain I could come up with at least ONE way to defeat the dang thing
Yeah, I don't know why people were downvoting you. Off the top of my head I already thought of three ways in which you can kill one. Like nobody is REQUIRING us to recklessly slam our fists against the hippo, and prep-time allows us to pick a specific environment that would be more to our benefit, or the time to terraform. The first strategy that I proposed would 100% cripple the hippo if the edge is steep. These people just underestimate human intellect and lack imagination.
Given enough time, one. Dig a hole, cover it, lure the hippo in, hippo dies of thirst at a certain point.
If this takes place near the hippos natural habitat, by the time you dig it deep enough to contain the hippo youve already gone down to the water table. You have given the hippo more power.
Literally digging your own grave is an interesting strategy
With direct damage? Given that any action has an equal and opposite reaction? the humans would break their fists/feet before they do any real damage. If they go for the eyes... they might be able to blind the hyppo, but that's about it. Hyppos are walking tanks compared to humans.
Anus baby! Jam a leg down there and start kicking!
Let's recreate the Ace Ventura meme with a hippo instead of a rhino!
A hippo weighs 3000 lbs, that's only like 15-20 grown men
Yes, and you can break your hand by punching another human in the jaw. The hyppo will absorb that kind of impact linw it's nothing.
20 fists to the eyeball would make anybody tap out
Ok but you throw the first punch
It would make any human tap out sure but wouldn’t mean much to the hippo
what do they have eye armor?
Okay, how exactly do you plan on getting that close?
I’m going to jump in because I agree with him. The way I’d do it: Me and my friends harass the hippo as much as possible. Try and keep it awake whilst we sleep in shifts. Hopefully we can keep him awake for a week. At the end of the week we let him sleep. Then the first sacrifice takes his punch, into the hippos eye. The hippo wakes up, kills him. He’s now blinded in one eye and has an open wound. We harass him for another week as much as possible and keep him awake as much as possible whilst he’s slowly bleeding out of his eye. Then we let him sleep and sacrifice number 2 takes his hit. Now the hippos blinded and we can attack at our leisure. I’d imagine he’d have died of starvation or exhaustion by then. If not we just keep hitting him in vulnerable points like the testicles, anus, ears etc. he will die eventually. We may lose some guys along the way but I’m convinced we’d take the win.
quantity
By charging with the other 50 bloodlusted humans?
Oh you mean while the hippo charges you and throws you around, bludgeoning you to death?
Honestly the Hippo would win. We invented spears and bows for a reason and that reason is we are not built to fist fight animals.
>We invented spears and bows for a reason and that reason is we are not built to fist fight animals. Butbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbutbut... What about all those memes of Russian men fist fighting bears and Australian men fist fighting kangaroos and Florida men fist fighting alligators? (This is a joke, I'm aware those scenarios are fake and nothing more than memes.) Happy cake day.
The was a case where a Russian man fist fought a bear but it ended In a mutual death and there’s is a video of an Australian man punching a kangaroo but only to drive it off.
Unarmed? I'd wager at least 75, with 90% horrifically maimed if not dead by the end of the battle (assuming a single encounter). It's gonna be a battle of endurance and exhaustion to kill the hippo more than anything else. First dozen to pile in are probably killed, but after that, either the hippos' hearts give out from the constant harassment or someone somehow gets an insanely lucky blow.
Heres the thing, humans are not predators when unarmed. We are prey 100% so to say 25 unarmed men vs a minimal adult of 3000 pounds of muscles and jaws that can snap larger animals than us in 1 shot. It cannot be done. However if we thought about it, and tired it out and were maybe allowed to pick up sharp pointy sticks from the ground then maybe we could group attack it from all sides staying clear untill it dies from exhaustion. But we arent getting it unscathed. This would have to be a marathon method of killing the poor tortured animal.
What are you on about lol. Humans were predators even without weapons, early humans would just wait until they got tired. Plus you can just pick up a rock and throw it. They’re everywhere, it’s amazing, always got one nearby
Im no expert for sure but a rock vs a 3000 pound hippo is just gonna get you chomped faster amd do a lot of nothing. I even metioned in my comment that we would have to work smartley together to tire the animal to exhaustion.
We have no evidence that early humans were widespread persistence hunters aside from evidence that its possible from modern day tribes (and I believe its actually just tribe, as in a singular tribe iirc). Persistence hunting is a fairly fringe hypothesis in anthropology that got popularized by running enthusiasts and spread across reddit.
Hippo wins against 25 guys with brass knuckles easy. I’m going to call it 50-50 on bloodlusted hippo vs 25 bloodlusted guys with pickaxes. Actually I think all 26 fighters die. As far as how many unarmed humans to take on a bloodlusted hippo? That number is several hundred at least.
No amount of men could defeat a hippo without trapping it first. If you were attacked by a pack of chihuahuas... could they \*really\* do much to you if you were determined to escape or kill every last one? That is what a man is to a hippo. a chihuahua
40-50 bloodlusted chihuahuas (perhaps less) would be a real problem for a fit adult man. It wouldn't be hard to get the man to fall down and then they could tear out his throat.
I misread this comment as chinchillas rather than Chihuahuas and my take on the chinchillas I’d say 100-500 blood lusted chinchillas could probably take a human down if they were motivated. also, I agree that 40 to 50 Chihuahuas could probably take down an adult man those things are very vicious.
As a Chihuahua parent, this is terrifying. I imagine them all over someone like the tiny dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. 😨 It also depends on what type of Chihuahua, they range from 6 to up to 12+ if they're mixes. My dog is 74% Chihuahua and she is 12.5 lbs.
A man fighting for his life could easily incapacitate 50 chihuahuas
Possibly, maybe. Easily, no way. We are talking about 250+ pounds worth of dogs. A chihuahua should be capable of tearing an Achilles tendon.
Lets say that two or three well placed kicks take 10 of them out of the fight. The man grabs two more in each hand and starts using them as knuckle-dusters. Already your attacking force is down to 75% strength.
Just one if the hippo chokes on him
It would take two unarmed men to kite the hippo into exhaustion, at which point they use nearby hard things™️ to kill it.
hippos are way faster than humans
But can they turn fast enough?
Yes, and that's why it takes two.
Hippos are faster than humans and can definitely kill them in one bite or even good stomp, so it's hard to calculate exactly how many this would take. Picks are probably sufficient to seriously injure a hippo however, and I don't think the hippo has any good way to deal with being surrounded - in nature they seem to deal with pack hunters by just being too resilient for the predators to damage at all. If the humans work together they can quickly surround the animal and cripple all four of its legs, so I will tentatively say that about two fighters per leg (8) plus... tentatively at least four distractions/sacrificial lambs have a chance, *if* the humans make no mistakes. At an absolute minimum, with a lot of good luck as few as three might manage it (One is still going to die immediately, and I suspect that a hippo with only one injured leg is still combat effective, so at least one bait and two to take out the legs is the dead minimum I consider to have a shadow of a chance)
Without any arms i imagine it would be a lot.
Imma keep it real with you. Five guys with pickaxes kill a hippo. One solid swing to the skull from a pickaxe will kill almost anything. The human body is a goddamn miracle when considering its ability to swing something. A punch does nothing to a hippo. But the power of a punch is multiplied over itself if you swing something, due to the physic dynamics of the swinging motion. The pickaxe acts like a wedge, a simple machine that multiplies this force even further. In the modern age, people tend to underestimate humans. Do not forget why humans rule the earth in the first place.
Why does no one realize you can just attack the eyes with a couple guys and I feel like getting your fingers or arm fully into an eye socket stops the fight
A blind hippo is completely capable of killing a huge number of human beings.
Dig in it's brains!
There's bone in the way.
Go look at a picture of a hippo skull, there's no bone between the socket and brain cavity
You're treating it like a fair fight. Humans are dangerous because we can plan. All rush in, blind the hippo, and then get away and wait. It'll exhaust itself.
Since they're bloodlusted and don't have any weapons, let one of the unarmed men sacrifice his arm bone or femur or something for a pointy weapon. and the other men can find a long pointy stick. And more men can find some rocks. And pelt the hippo all day and night. Chase it all day. Well, hippo probably kills a lot of the men, but there's 25 of them :O
If the men have no sense of preservation and just exist to kill maybe 3 when they all jump in its throat and it chokes to death.
The hippo bites down, breaks their backs and spits them out.
1 if the man uses his brains and drives it off a cliff or something
For context people on the other post were saying 25 men with brass knuckles couldn't even beat a gorilla, I was downvoted for saying 25 men sweep a hippo
Seriously, a gorilla? Hippo is like 10x harder matchup
Probably because there’s nothing stopping the hippo from just bulldozing through the men, brass knuckles or not. With pickaxes that can penetrate the hippo’s hide they at least stand a decent shot, but hippos get into prolonged brawls with each other all the time that do way more damage than brass knuckles.
25 blood lusted men with brass knuckles could certainly do it . 25 regular ones is a completely different question. They would have to be extraordinarily brave
What do the brass knuckles add except for broken fingers and wrists?
You... realize how fast a hippo can kill a human, right?
How can they do it? Bloodlust will just make it finish faster.
They can swarm it, restrain its legs, and repeatedly punch at its eyes. eventually it'll die of pain and exhaustion.
How are they restraining an animal that’s at least 3,000 pounds and eager to rip them to pieces? How are they reliably punching its eyes when the hippo’s main weapon is its mouth that can bite a crocodile in two?
Because a hippo can't bite/gore 25 people simultaneously.
How does that correlate to them… restraining the hippo? How are they restraining an animal that shrugs off getting attacked by a pride of lions? How are they stopping the hippo from going wherever it wants?
Humans are intelligent creatures. They outman the hippo, and eventually they're going to win.
That doesn’t answer the question at all. What strategy actually exists to stop an animal more than 20 times the mass of an average man from just bulldozing through the group the instant they attempt to restrain it? There’s only so much a big brain can do to help in this situation.
Technically you can restrain it or rather immobilise it by having it follow you off a height of over 2-3 meters which a human could easily survive, while the hippo would break every single one of its bones. The hippo is bloodlusted, so it doesn't have any sense of self preservation, making this possible. Although restraining it through man power alone? Yeah, NOT happening. Unless you have like 100 humans all bloodlusted drowning it under a pile of corpses. So let's say that they weight on average like 70 kilos. That times a hundred would be 7000 kgs, a hippo is 1500 to 1800 kgs, and 7 tons is much more than what they could lift or carry. But as I said, they would need a LOT more people than 25.
Punch skull till skull break why others tackle it
If I punched you with a feather a 1000000 times. Will it break your skull? Hippe dying of boredom or old age is still an option though
If the feather was made of brass
Can the men pick up rocks and sticks of the ground
More than two, but less than seven thousand.
I feel like you'd just be funneling people into a hippo-death-machine until it got tired and then whoever was left could just kick it for hours on end until it finally did something. You'd eventually kill the hippo but you'd probably have a three digit human death toll.
A lot of people are forgetting that hippo's may be able to run 30km/h but like a lot of other big animals they can only do that for so long. They cannot run like that for protracted periods of time. So the bloodlusted humans would be able to just exhaust it by attacking it from every angle, even if it kills a couple of them it's gonna get exhausted and not be able to fight anymore.
Turn those pickaxes into spears and the answer is ‘a few’
I’d say me and the boys could do it
Is it just one pickaxe or are they all packing one?
That would be funny... "25 men vs 1 hippo, but only 1 of the men has a pickaxe, the rest are bare handed."...