100 men are tasked with taking down a silverback gorilla with their bare fists, no weapons and in a closed arena. Who is winning? For the sake of this hypothetical, let’s assume that the men in this equation have a consciousness and aren’t merely vessels designed for killing. They’re human. Fear is a factor.

First, let’s look at some gorilla stats:

SIZE: The average male silverback gorilla weighs anywhere from 300 to 500 pounds, and is primarily composed of lean muscle, fluid and bones. Heightwise, they stand at around four to six feet. The heaviest wild gorilla recorded was a 6-foot, 589-pound silverback.
SPEED: Gorillas can run at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour, but endurance is the most significant factor working against them. Gorillas aren’t built for long distances; they’re better in short bursts of speed due to their abundance of fast-twitch fibers.
STRENGTH: Gorillas can lift ten times their body weight, and have a pulling force upwards of 1,800 pounds. Their punches can deliver up to 2,700 pounds of punching force, strong enough to shatter a human skull and break bones. The scariest thing about a gorilla is its bite force, about 1,300 pounds per square inch, which can break human bones, tear flesh and cause serious bleeding.
INTELLIGENCE: Gorillas are highly intelligent primates with problem-solving and communication capabilities. In terms of fight IQ, they’re not martial artists by any means, but they’re intelligent enough to defend themselves.

Next, let’s look at the men’s stats.

SIZE: The average adult man in the United States is five to nine, and roughly 200 pounds.
SPEED: The average man can sprint between 15 and 20 miles per hour. The fastest top speed ever recorded for a human is 27.78 miles per hour, but the average man is definitely not running the same times as Usain Bolt.
STRENGTH: The strongest men, elite boxers and martial artists, can pack a punch. If you had a guy like Alex Pereira among your 100 men, then he might be able to reach around 1,300 pounds of punching force. However, the weakest men in the group, if untrained, would likely not exceed 120 pounds of force.
INTELLIGENCE: Varies greatly. Some men are astrophysicists, and other men seriously believe they could beat the gorilla one-on-one.

The main argument I’ve seen in favor of the men, aside from outnumbering the gorilla 100 to one, is the “indomitable human spirit,” our unfailing ability to tough it out when the stakes are life-or-death. However, adrenaline can only do so much. The decision to attack a gorilla is deliberate in this scenario, and not a fight or flight response. The gorilla isn’t the aggressor; the humans are. Gorillas are gentle giants and are typically non-violent towards humans, unless they feel threatened. If he’s not allowed to flee, the gorilla is on the defensive, the men are on the offensive. Are the men really trying to survive the gorilla, or is he trying to survive them? Gorillas have no interest in fighting humans, but that doesn’t mean they can’t.

So, the hypothetical could be rethought as, “What’s the most effective way for 100 men to jump a gorilla?”

Humans aren’t hive-minded, and a power struggle would emerge within the group of men themselves. Conflicting strategies as to how to defeat the gorilla would greatly reduce their chance of success. Man 97 just proposed some dumb strategy, and it’s starting to gain traction among the others. Man six is making another convincing argument. Everybody is shouting over each other, but nobody can agree on the best way to do this. Meanwhile, their fear is building as the gorilla waits on the other side of the arena. The reality would start to set in that one way or another, they are going to have to fight him.

You would need to find men with a level of near-suicidal dedication. The first few guys are sacrificial lambs and have no legitimate chance of survival. Who’s going to want to be in the first wave of men? Nobody, except for that one guy who wants to be a hero and charges at the gorilla with reckless bravery. Unfortunately, the first man to get close enough is getting rag-dolled from the get-go. Morale would drop almost immediately. The men would get frightened. The next few men to approach would get badly maimed, and some of them would get killed. Some might die instantly and brutally. Man 48 just watched Man 29 get flung into the air and crack his ribcage. Why would he want to approach the gorilla after seeing what he just did to that guy?

One-by-one is the worst strategy imaginable, but even if all 100 men bum-rushed the gorilla simultaneously, no hesitation, only a few of them would be capable of being within a foot of the gorilla at one time, and that’s assuming the men are quick enough, and brave enough to land an effective hit on it. The gorilla would no doubt become exhausted and overwhelmed at some point, but not before deterring the waves of men from attacking him. The gorilla might do this by shouting, banging its chest, or standing upright to show its powerful chompers. If the men managed to tire out the gorilla like bullfighters, either by taunting or trying to dogpile a bunch of men on top of each other to try and suffocate it, there’s a chance the gorilla might straight up die from a heart attack.

But by the time the men muster enough courage to approach a 500-pound gorilla, he’s already bashed in a couple of skulls. He’s still gonna be tired as hell, but he’ll also have a few moments to recuperate after the last batch of men who tried to fight him met their fateful end.

The men’s best bet of damaging the gorilla is likely to be eye gouging, or sticking a finger in its ears and nose, trying to damage the gorilla’s senses. They could stick an entire arm down the gorilla’s throat or try pulling out its tongue; however, putting your hands anywhere near a gorilla’s mouth is a recipe for disaster unless you want to live as an amputee. I hate to say it, but someone is also going to have to target the family jewels of that poor gorilla.

You can rattle off any number of different tactics, and maybe, if executed correctly, most of them would work. But, what would realistically happen is that small groups of men would commit to a strategy, rush in, get slaughtered, and the rest would either hesitate or argue over a better way of taking the gorilla down. The surviving men would sustain extreme wounds from the bites and bone fractures inflicted by the gorilla. Not to mention, significant blood loss and pain would play a factor in the men’s ability to stay determined long enough to continue fighting through their injuries.

I suppose, if the men get depraved enough, they could utilize the limbs of their fallen comrades as weapons, but that’s a whole other philosophical debate I don’t even want to begin to unpack. Man 44 just tried to bludgeon the gorilla with Man 13’s left femur—the original neanderthal sin. Also, that might count as cheating, so don’t do that.

But let’s take a step back. Don’t think about the gorilla’s strength and stature for a second. Forget about how much pain they can withstand or how much pain they might deliver. Forget about the best-case scenarios. Why are so many people assuming the gorilla has pure venom in his heart and an unrelenting will to kill? Dude is literally just trying to defend himself.

We once revered Harambe, but now we’re trying to take him down again, painting him as some vicious beast of unruly anger.

This isn’t just a hypothetical—we did kill a gorilla, in a zoo, exactly 9 years ago.

And we justified it. If your rationale for this debate is, “Well, we managed to get gorillas into zoos, so we got the win in the bag,” then you’re thinking about it wrong. It’s not like 100 guys pushed Harambe into a zoo cage with their bare hands. The human race has been screwing over gorillas for decades.

Intelligence is supposedly our forte. Humans broke the evolutionary meta once we discovered how to utilize tools, and nature has been paying for it ever since. Humans created weapons of mass destruction and nuclear warfare, although once upon a time, we were primates too. We share around 98% of our DNA with gorillas. How can we be allowed to return to our primitive instincts while simultaneously existing as an evolutionary anomaly? An ancestral paradox, if you will. If we were truly “primitive,” like them, would our chances of success be higher? If the gorilla were more “human,” like us, would he have a better chance?

As history has shown, intelligence is a curse, and consciousness is our biggest sabotage. Humans evolved into our own form of cowardly savagery. The human race is destructive. Not just to nature but to each other. Individuals are selfish, and many are cowardly; it’s the human way. 100 men would manage to destroy each other in the process of taking down a gorilla. The gorilla doesn’t have a plan. Humans think they do. That’s what makes the gorilla dangerous and endangered. But more importantly, a “plan” is what makes humans doomed.

If they were coordinated enough to do so, physically speaking, 100 men absolutely could beat a gorilla simply by having significantly higher numbers. I bet 100 men could very likely accomplish anything they wanted to. But ultimately, they’ll still lose, not because they’re too weak, but because they’re too human. Consequently, the men would sabotage themselves with self-preservation out of fear. The gorilla would reveal our weaknesses. Everyone would want to survive, but only some would. This whole debate says more about us than it does about the gorilla.