I’m thinking the animals would easily defeat us, since trying to get all 8 billion+ humans to agree on a plan of attack would be a near-impossible task. By the time we’d be done trying to coordinate a plan, I figure the lions and cheetahs would have already devoured us, not to mention the larger animals like the elephants.
Even so, I think we shouldn’t underestimate the smaller creatures like rodents and insects. Most of them carry diseases, so if they came in large numbers, they could easily wipe out a good percentage of humans.
However, if humans were allowed to use the military’s weapons, like tanks and canons, I think we might have a fighting chance. But if we went straight to using the nukes, it would result in no winner since the whole planet would die.
Would the animals win, due their sheer numbers and combined strength? Or would the humans win because of our combined intellect and vast knowledge of the animal kingdom? What do you think?
We wouldn’t need even close to that many humans. Just a couple of million people (the size of a medium-large military force) with the proper funding could probably kill off all of the large to medium animals within a few decades.
Killing of all the arthropods would be more tricky and we probably couldn’t completley eradicate them just because we wouldn’t be able to find them all.
Of course that’s purley for winning in a direct confrontation. Without any animals we’d probably go extinct not long after, so it’s not really a win in the end.