I was reading about this escaped chimpanzee in California, Moe, and this part stopped me in my tracks:
Over the Davises’ protests, Moe was taken to an animal sanctuary in Kern County where the couple visited him regularly. But in 2005, when they took a cake to celebrate Moe’s birthday with him, the couple was viciously attacked by two other chimpanzees who had escaped their cages.
The chimps nearly killed St. James Davis, chewing off his nose, testicles and foot and biting off chunks of his buttocks and legs, before the sanctuary owner shot the animals to death.
They chewed off that guy’s nuts! His nose too! Damn!
They’re also very, very strong, and the old ones can get mean. Chimps are wild animals, not cute small people, and forgetting that can be fatal (as your post proves).
Wait, these people had a cake to celebrate a chimp’s birthday? And then the other chimps attacked these people and instead of eating the cake, they went for the guys balls?
When we had chimps on the set (for Free Stuff), we were explicitly told never to look them in the eyes, lest they take it as a challenge and charge us. If a chimpanzee decides to go at you, you’re not going to win.
Goofball libertopian sci-fi author L. Neil Smith has a whole series of alternate-earth books where the great apes not only have inalienable civil rights, but are also all heavily armed. I don’t think he ever had a scene where they chewed off some poor bastard’s face and groin, though.
the average chimpanzee has over 5 times the upper-body strength of a human male.
So how much can a chimp bench?
This is interesting to me because of its implications for superpowers within existing physics and a basically human-sized frame. I always had trouble believing that Mr. Spock could be 5 times as strong as a human (or whatever it was), but if a chimp can do it…
By the way, that’s a rather unpleasant image to link directly to (no offense to the unfortunate noseless guy in the picture).
These stats have haunted me for years. I’m not sure they’re going to help you with the superpowered implications, since a chimp is built very differently from a human being, but whatever helps through the night…
Goofball libertopian sci-fi author L. Neil Smith has a whole series of alternate-earth books where the great apes not only have inalienable civil rights, but are also all heavily armed. I don’t think he ever had a scene where they chewed off some poor bastard’s face and groin, though.[/QUOTE]
David Brin also wrote about intelligent chimps and dolphins in his Uplift trilogy. But there was no cake.
I was also surprised by the 5x strength quote. It seems to be all over the internet, and there are lots of anecdotal examples of displays of chimp strength. I can only find one relatively rigourous measure supporting this though. Bauman records some really phenomenal pulling forces in this paper from 1926. This would fit the 5x measure.
However, this paper from 1946 seemed to indicate that their chimps were really trying hard but didn’t get anywhere near these forces. They gave the chimps something like a 50-80% advantage in terms of force per body weight.
I have a really hard time understanding how a chimpanzee could really be 5x stronger than a larger fit adult male human. They get an advantage due to larger upper body relative to their body weight, denser bones and perhaps some mechanical advantage due to shape of their arm bones. All that adds up, but 5-7x is really pushing what I could believe in terms of biomechanics. So I’m really skeptical of that unless I can find more real experiments.
I’m no biologist, but you would think that lifting such weights would put terrible stress on the chimps’ tendons and such even if their muscles can handle the strain. Maybe they are really careful about proper stretching when people aren’t looking.
