Tim Urban's Druthers
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One of my squeezes, Tim Urban (waitbutwhy.com) republished an earlier blog titled Mailbag, a collection of questions his readers sent him, and his answers thereto. Below is one of the questions, along with his response.
^^^^^^^^^^^^Would you rather be attacked by 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this.
I’d go for the 100 little horses. Here’s why:
The duck would be terrifying. Have you seen how ducks act when you throw a piece of bread in the water? They turn into ravenous psychos. They use their wings, beaks, feet, and anything else they can to violently knock the other ducks out of the way. Then they lunge at the bread with their big hard duck beak. Now imagine a huge duck and you’re the bread. You’re done. That cock will charge at you and try to bite your head off. And you can’t run away—because it can fly. And its beak is still narrow enough that if you try to hide somewhere it can probably wedge its beak in there and pull you out. You’re done. It’s over.
The horses would be bad. But not as bad as the duck. Angry horses are pretty angry. And their bite could probably take a chunk out of your leg. Or maybe they’d kick you with their hind legs, which would give you painful little ankle bruises. All of that would be painful, but not lethal. Lethal happens when you’re frantically kicking them one by one and you accidentally fall over. Falling over would be a huge disaster with the little horses. They’d be biting your neck open and kicking you in the crotch and jumping up on your stomach. Done. But unlike with the duck, you could probably escape the horses. You could just climb up on a bench and now what? They’re screwed. They can charge the bench and jump up on their hind legs all they want, but you’re a full foot above their highest jump, and they can’t climb or fly, so you can just lay down and nap on the bench while they tire themselves out. Then when you wake up, you can carefully grab them one at a time and bring it up to the bench and use its tail to tie its back legs together, neutralizing that horse. It would take a while, but eventually they’d all be neutralized, hobbling around on the ground, in the shit with their leg situation, and you could just step over them and walk away.
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Kind of a fun "thought" question.
There is a website somewhere I came across long ago that let you put in certain limits (age, weight, height, overall health, etc) and then calculated how many 3 year old kids you could take on at once! LOL
