Animal Strength Feats

[Shadow]

(11-24-2020, 10:36 PM)alexandro Wrote: Here I show you a more "scientific" article about body strength in Grizzly Bears. It was published as an entry in the official news site, of Montana State University, USA. Or so I believe.

At that site entrance, Doug Cairns and Jay Smith, tried to determine the body strength of a Grizzly Bear, with accelerometers, "a dynamic analysis laptop for testing", and various heavy objects, finding that according to their conclusions, "A calm Grizzly Bear is 2.5 to 5 times stronger than the average man". (Cairns and Smith were the men for comparison, as they were the ones who gave their strength results, using themselves as test and control subjects).

Quoted article:

-Ellig, T. 2006. MSU researcher tests grizzly bear strength for National Geographic. Montana State University News Service, Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana.




And what is so special about this? Simple, that the "simple" strength test was sponsored by the Natgeo, and part of this test appeared in one of the National Geographic Explorer short films (Natgeo's short film is called "Bear Power"). 

By the way @Shadow . Some time ago in the thread of this forum called "Bear Force", you passed a link to a small answer in a Finnish science magazine, and Heidi Kinnunen, a Finnish wildlife expert, said that to hold a bear with a snare cable, it would need to resist about 16.8 Kilonewtons of pulling force (This is the blue underlined part of the text).

As it turns out, I found the origin for such a statement. It's from a 2009 scientific article, where they estimate the pulling force that a brown bear or American black bear should be able to exert in theory, when trying to free itself from a snare cable. I'm sending you the cited article with the access link. According to this article, a brown bear or American black bear, weighing 250 kg, should exert 16.8 Kilonewtons of pulling force.



-Flaa, J. P., Michel, S. B., & Borstad, C. (2009). Building a reliable snare cable for capturing grizzly and American black bears. Ursus, 20(1), 50-55.

Yes I have seen these articles, but it´s one thing when a big animal puts all it´s weight and strength to one maximally strong jerk and another to keep that maximal force up more than a split second. Strongest men can deadlift 500 kg once by giving all they have for a short moment. They can´t do it again too soon. So it is one thing how much force some rope or chain has to be able to withstand and totally another when talking about dragging/pulling carcasses.

Or what are you trying to show now with that pulling force? I´m pretty sure, that even though that 16,8 Kilonewtons could be seen so, that a bear could drag 1700 kg heavy carcass, in reality it´s not the case. It might be able to move it slightly but it would be about very short distances. Maybe some huge Kodiak bear around 650-700 kg could move such carcass a bit more but still not long distances if "normal friction".

There is no doubt, that bears are strong but also animals have limits. Bears have shown impressive strength in some occasions, but moving big moose or bison is something which haven´t been seen in video clips in any way near what might be expected after reading some descriptions from the books. Reply