Nature
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An amateur Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter has claimed he's been offered over $500,000 to fight a chimpanzee.
Whilst a nice offer (financially, rather than ethically) many are concerned that were the fight to actually go ahead, he wouldn't really be able to enjoy the money once he's been torn to shreds by an ape.
Every now and then, someone on the Internet will start the discussion of what animals a human could successfully beat in a fight. This usually leads to people wildly overestimating their own strength, or underestimating the raw power and determination of a goose.
But that's people on the Internet chatting nonsense, right?
The unwavering confidence of men
In 2023, more formal polling on the matter (yes, this is a topic pollsters will look into) revealed that humans are indeed surprisingly confident in their ability to fight animals one-on-one. For example, 16 percent of men thought they could take down a wolf and 7 percent believed they could clobber a grizzly bear.
Bizarrely, a full 8 percent of men (because it's always men) have the confidence that they could beat up an elephant, an animal with skin 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) thick and the size of an actual elephant.
While only 8 percent of women and 9 percent of men thought that they could take down a gorilla (spoiler alert: no they can't), a whopping 22 percent of men believed that they could take down a chimpanzee.
This was from a pool of survey respondents, who, unless there was a serious error at the polling company YouGov, were not trained MMA fighters. Cole Johnson, however, may have more reason to believe that he could beat a chimpanzee in a fight.
The amateur MMA fighter from New Zealand has spent many a video on TikTok explaining his reasoning, even if it is entirely misplaced and laughably ludicrous.
“I 100 percent wholeheartedly believe that I could beat a chimpanzee in a fight,” the 24-year-old said in the first of these videos.
“And all that’s going to piss a lot of you guys off who don’t have a fucking brain. But listen to me, alright? ‘Oh, it’s six times stronger than a human.’ First of all, no it’s not. You’re hearing shit from the internet and regurgitating it.”
Following that, he showed off a few questionable moves, demonstrating what he would do if, for example, the chimp attempted to rip his face off.
Human vs Chimp
Unfortunately, the video that was clearly meant as a joke reached a wide enough audience for him to apparently receive offers from mysterious people claiming to be able to turn it into a serious case of animal cruelty reminiscent of Ancient Romans fighting bears in amphitheaters.
In an interview with Instagram user santacruzmedicinals, he explained that he was initially offered $500,000 to fight a chimp in an unnamed country. While he agreed to explore the idea, Johnson said that the offer turned out to be from a “bullshitter”.
Since then, however, he claims that he's been offered more money for a human vs chimp fight.
According to Johnson, they even have a chimp in mind, one which already has a track record for biting people. He went on to say that the people who he is working with now are “less sketchy”, which is frankly a bizarre thing to say about a group of people able and willing to secure a chimp for a cage match with a human fighter for entertainment.
“They’re not going to cut the teeth, they’re not going to cut the claws or anything like that, and there’s going to be people with tranquilizers as well,” he told santacruzmedicinals.
“I want to go against this wild animal and test myself against it. I don’t want to kill this wild animal, and I don’t want to die. We are going to fight until I see, obviously, I’m winning. If it’s killing me, it’s going to get tranquilized.”
The strength of a chimpanzee
It should go without saying that chimpanzees are very strong animals (although, maybe it doesn't to that 22 percent of men). There have been various attempts at figuring out just how strong they are compared to humans, with a study from 2017 running the numbers.
“Our results show that chimpanzee muscle exceeds human muscle in maximum dynamic force and power output by ∼1.35 times,” the study explains.
It is also important where this muscle is located, though, with chimps having almost twice as much muscle mass in their forelimbs compared with humans. But muscle strength alone is not what Johnson should be worried about.
A recent study found that chimps have a bite force of between 1251 and 1908 newtons, which is around 2 to 3 times that of a human bite, were Johnson to attempt to reciprocate.
Another big factor is that chimpanzees are currently unaware of MMA rules, or the rules to any sort of human sport for that matter.
While by and large human competitors know when to stop beating the shit out of their opponent, a chimp wouldn't know to stop when Johnson inevitably tries to tap out. Tranquilizers would only be useful if the ape hasn't already (for example) ripped out his jugular.
Tactical fighting
But that hasn't, apparently, stopped Johnson from workshopping the fight anyway.
“I’ve weighed out the risks, I’ve weighed out the benefits. I got a couple game plans here,” Johnson added on Instagram.
“The first plan, I’m going to be keeping it at distance, seeing if I can keep it off me. We’ll go for a couple minutes, I’ll get this thing exhausted and then I’ll go in for a slam or something. Or, which might be the more likely scenario, this thing jumps on me right away, then I have to try as hard as I can to knock this out with a slam.”
As you can probably gather from the tone of this article (amusement at a man thinking he could take a chimp out one-on-one, rather than abject horror and concern for the chimp), we're rather skeptical that this “fight” will actually go ahead.
Which is maybe a shame for anybody out there who is interested in seeing just what kind of funeral $500,000 will buy you.
