I might not enjoy the company of primates, but I'm certainly not going to go out of my way to fight one (a thought experiment which was recently reinforced on me when I watched Gladiator II with its bald-baboon fight sequence). And yet it seems to be an ongoing obsession with (male) zoo visitors that they could fight - and win - against a gorilla. Most people seem to think that the answer is obvious.
Mike Tyson being one notable exception, of course...
Which then led to a spin-off question - what if it was the gorilla, versus 100 men? For some reason this really taken off recently, with computer simulations and such renowned primate experts as Elon Musk (sigh) weighing in. So who would win?
Primatologist Tara Stoinski of the Dain Fossey Gorilla Fund was consulted, and have pretty much the answer that I'd expect. With sheer numbers of their size, the humans would win, especially assuming that they had no regard for personal safety (as one would expect from someone who would join this kind of endeavor)... but at least a handful of those people wouldn't be around for the victory party. To her credit, Stoinski did her best to turn this idiotic thought exercise into an educational message, saying "In this dialogue that's going on around gorillas fighting humans, I think one of the thing's that's missed is that gorillas are... more often than not, very gentle animals."
Still, if your fanciful animal fight club scenario requires your side to have 100 to 1 odds to win, that should probably tell you something about the advisability of picking a fight... and let's not even speculate about 100 men versus 100 baboons.
I don't know if your current zoo has gorillas or not, but during my gorilla observations at Buffalo Zoo today I heard A LOT of visitors talking about this question.
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