Who Would Win: A Goose-Sized Rhino or a Rhino-Sized Goose?

“All models are wrong, but some are more wrong than others”

Back in the day when I went to Boy Scout camp, the camp counselors would always try to ask us absurd questions as part of an icebreaker thing or a group bonding activity. You know, the kind like “if you could be any kitchen appliance, what would you be and why?” or “you’re locked in classroom with twenty third-graders appearing out of thin air every five minutes, and they all want to kill you; how long can you survive?” or “Hey kid why are you covered in duct tape do I have to get an adult?” You know, the usuals. The staffers would ask us, and we’d go around in a circle and give our answers, and there were two types of kids; the ones who thought about it analytically and pragmatically, and the ones who tried to give the most outlandish answers possible. Guess which one I was.

Regardless of the answer, my favorite was also some variation of The Chicken Question: who would win between an elephant-sized chicken or a chicken-sized elephant? Or, who would win; one hundred chickens versus one lion? Or, a variation with penguins; a penguin the size of a house or a regular car. Why was this one always my favorite? Well, because birds, of course. It had birds in it, and none of the other questions ever had that. So the choice was obvious for me, too, and I always went with chickens or penguins or geese or whatever bird was up on offer that day. And of course, in the back of my head, I would be daydreaming about riding around on giant chickens like they’re horses, because if that isn’t the first place your mind goes to after thinking about enormous game fowl, what even are you?

Today, however, I finally want to discover who would actually win in that great battle, the war for the history books, and put to rest the endless questioning of who would win: giant chicken or tiny elephant. “But the title of this article is none of those things!” you might be thinking. “Geese are not comparable to chickens and rhinos are not comparable to elephants.” Well, clearly you didn’t research that statement very well, because it is patently false, my good straw-stuffed friend. But while geese and chickens are likely interchangeable for most things, I choose instead to study the standard Canadian goose because they have one major advantage over chickens; pure, unadulterated fury. The scourge of every Midwest golfer is a much better candidate for this experiment because they’ll actually put up a fight; chickens, on the other hand, might just run away. Because they are cowards (though anyone who’s ever had to care for a rooster would probably disagree). And why rhinos, or to be more specific, the southern white rhino? Because elephants would be too easy to defeat, since their main advantage is usually sheer size. Strip that away, shrink them down to size, and you have just a fleshy, hairless cat. But rhinos, on the other hand, have a built-in weapon sticking right out of their head. Makes for a more even fight.

Alright, we’re really doing this. Let’s get our standard metrics squared away; on average, a Canadian goose is about 2.5 to 3.5 feet long from tip to tail, weighing in at somewhere between 6 and 20 pounds (we’ll go with 13 pounds on average), and with a wingspan of around 5 feet, or a meter and a half for the rest of the world. On the other hand, the average southern white rhino stands at around 6 feet tall and 12 feet long, and weighs in somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 pounds, or . We’ll say 6,500 lbs for the purposes of this study, or roughly 3000 kilograms. Okay, this is already shaping up to be a weird match. Obviously, under normal conditions, the rhino would win. By a lot. But also under normal conditions, the white rhino and the Canadian goose would never cross paths and, if they did, rhinos don’t usually pick fights with waterfowl.

But we aren’t talking about animals in their normal sizes, we’re talking about animals that have grown or shrunk to be the size of some other creature, like a weirdo mad science experiment, or chihuahuas. Chihuahuas are only a couple thousand years removed from wolves. Think about that for a second. But then stop thinking about it and think about geese again. Because if we want to get real numbers here, we need to look at the density of these animals, not just their sizes and weights. That’s right, we’re getting into some real hard numbers now. I tried looking up the density of a goose but I just kept getting sample questions from someone’s physics homework, so I’m gonna do the math myself, but really, really rough. Let’s assume that a stretched out goose, wings tucked is about 3 feet long and a foot wide. They’re kind of football shaped, anyway, so let’s say that their meaningful volume is stuffed into a football-shape (or an oblate spheroid for you math folks) that’s 2 feet (r=0.30m) in diameter at its semi-major axis, 1.25 feet (r=0.19m) in diameter at its semi-minor axis. That’s a big football. That ends up being a volume of about 2.53 cubic feet, or 0.071 meters cubed, which is really the more valuable measurement here. And given an average mass of about 13 pounds, which becomes 5.90 kilograms, we find that the rough density of a goose is… 83.1 kilograms per cubic meter, or about 8.3% the density of water. Huh. That… doesn’t sound right.

My initial estimate ranged from actually put the goose at about 5 times denser than that to five times less dense than that, even, which both seemed even more unlikely, but my biggest sticking point here is the volume. I don’t know the volume of a goose and until I do, my answers will sadly be limited to conjecture. But that won’t stop me from trying to find out the density of other animals, too. Side note: even if geese are more dense than I suspect they are, they could likely still float (as observation proves them to do) because of the fact that their feathers are waterproof, and allow them to trap air in between their feathers and their body. Also, their bones are hollow, so that probably helps, too. I’m not sure exactly how accurate my estimate is, or if I’m even in the right ballpark at all. Could someone, perhaps a person who’s held a goose, tell me if they feel very light or incredibly dense, like the hearts of dying stars trapped in the feathery bodies of living poop machines? I’d really appreciate your help on this, because without access to a live goose, this is as accurate as I get. Unless my math is just wrong.

Okay, well, let’s try this again with rhinos. I have a better idea of what their volume is, since their sizes are a little more standard. They’re kind of rectangular, too, so I’m going to go with a rectangular prism. They are pretty block, after all, and built like a brick shithouse, so I don’t think I can go wrong this time. Most of their mass is in their bodies and heads, so normally I’d try to do something to cut them off at the legs and get a more generic result, but their heads are narrower than the rest of them, so I think we can pretend to cut their legs off and fit them around their head in a rough rectangular pattern, like we’re playing some sort of awful game of Tetris except in a world where all hope and beauty has been obliterated. So, I’m going to drop their height by two feet and pretend they’re slabs of meat on the ground. That should be easy.

Normally, the southern white rhino is 6 feet tall, though we’re going with 4 feet this time, and 12 feet long. That measurement doesn’t have to change. Since rectangular prisms are easy to calculate and it’s just base times height times width, we’ll assume they’re also 4 feet wide, give or take. That gives us a 4 by 4 by 12 foot box, ending up with a volume at 192 cubic feet. Or, in metrics, it’s a 1.22 by 1.22 by 3.66 meter box, with a volume of 5.45 cubic meters. And with a weight of 6500 pounds, or 2950 kilograms, we get a density of… 541 kilograms per cubic meter. That seems slightly more accurate for an animal that’s probably all muscle. For reference, the density of water is about 1000 kilogram/meter cubed, or double the density of a rhino, and the density of pure muscle is around 1090 kilograms/meter cubed, whereas a person is about 985 kg/m3. Oh, and the density of gold is 19,300 kg/m3. Their lungs must be pretty big or something.

Ok, so my densities may not be super accurate. I’m probably adding in a lot of extra empty space by assuming the animals are a) regular polygons or spheroids and b) evenly distributed throughout that entire shape. So my study is a bit limited here, but I think that these numbers could still give us a pretty solid benchmark for what a battle royale between a goose and rhino might look like. Cut me some slack. Randall Munroe gets paid to do this.

So, to recap, because we’re getting into some real heavy numbers here, a goose has the density of 83 kg/m3, the base weight of about 13 pounds, and a body length of around 3 feet. Rhinos have the density of 541 kg/m3, weigh roughly 6500 pounds, and about 6 feet tall and 12 feet long. But what does this mean for a battle royale where their sizes are switched? And what does it mean to have a goose-sized rhino or a rhino-sized goose? Size in terms of mass, density, or volume? Because most people think of size as volume, let’s start with that; a goose-sized rhino, clocking in at about 2 foot tall and 2 feet long for illustrative purposes, would probably weigh close to 122 pounds if we’re assuming density maintains and the rhino is a 2 by 2 by 2 box. So, hey, about the same size of a goose, but much heavier. For pure conversions of volume regardless of shape, a rhino at 0.071 cubic meters would be 38 pounds. Let’s call it 80 pounds and meet in the middle, huh? The goose, on the other hand, is a football that’s 6 feet on its minor axes and 12 feet along its major axis (or basically a Volkswagen Microbus), would weigh in at about 1,062 pounds. Again, not counting for shape, a goose at pure rhino-volume would be roughly half that, at 452.9 pounds. How’s 750 pounds sound?

Lord almighty, I had my money on the rhino for this, but I’m not so sure anymore. A goose of that size would be completely unable to fly and very likely unable to walk (due to their bones being, you know, hollow), making it the proverbial lame duck, but it wouldn’t be defenseless. Geese have teeth, or at least something like them, and they bite hard enough to cause major bruising. Imagine that sized up ten or twelve times and you’ve got something capable of realistically decapitating someone, I’d reckon. And if it could walk, it’d be pressing down with hundreds of pounds of force. It would be like being run over by your mom’s camping trailer; all of the pain and none of the fun. On the rhino’s side, though, they can run at 30-40 miles per hour at their regular size, and shrinking them down probably wouldn’t change that much. Normally all they need is to trample someone with their massive, grass-fed feet, but remove that size and they’ve still got speed and that horn. Though that horn is made of keratin, same as hair and fingernails, and at an angle that isn’t useful for direct attacks.; at that size, they’d probably still be able to stab you, as there are documented cases of rhinos impaling other creatures, but to a goose of that magnitude, the damage would be negligible, at least initially. The rhino could get some good broken bones and a few stabs in, but I suspect that, ultimately, the goose would crush the downsized charger and/or fling it around. I’m going to call a goose win for this, namely because I had a hard time figuring out just how much force a rhino could gore a goose with, and impalement is usually a secondary function of the horn, ironically.

But what about some alternatives? Well, to borrow from Bill Nye, consider the following: what if it was a change of size by mass, not by volume? So, consider the rhino. Picture this beefy wall of skin and shrink it down to about 13 pounds of pure muscle and near-sightedness. Assuming for unchanged density, a 13-pound rhino would have a volume of 0.0109 cubic meters. In American, that’s about nine inches tall. Density really isn’t on the side of the rhino here; to maintain that same mass of the goose, it would end up the size of a small dog, losing a little from the previous transformation. But the converse is absolutely true of the avian menace; a goose of 6500 pounds, scaling up to the size of the rhino, would have a volume of 35.5 cubic meters, more than six times the volume of your standard rhinoceros. It would be a football that’s 17 feet tall and 8 feet wide, an even more incredibly massive lad than before. Forget it, the difference is even greater here. That’s really just now a small dog with a cone on its head attacking a feathered, elephant, except the elephant has a bad temper and teeth on the end of its trunk. The goose wins, hands down. And could you imagine if that monstrosity could walk, let alone fly? And there were millions of them? We’d be done for. That’s it, humanity lost. Game over, man, game over. A rhino-sized goose is literally a dinosaur.

So I guess that settles it, then. If you were to size a Canadian goose up to be the size of a southern white rhino, both in volume and in mass, you’d get an indestructible blob with beartrap teeth on the end of a super-flexible neck, and that neck could be like fifteen feet long! Whereas a goose-volumed rhino, or even a goose-weight rhino, would have the efficacy of a middle-school football kid going up against the entire defensive line of the Chicago Bears, and that’s the best case scenario. Maybe the kid’s got a knife or a machete or something, or he’s on a go-cart, he can do some damage, but he won’t last very long. So the numbers don’t lie, and I can finally give a methodically-calculated, scientifically-proven answer; a rhino-sized goose would win against a goose-sized rhino.

Man, it’s fun to dabble in the absurd. As weirdly exhausting as doing this ad-libbed math proved to be, it was really refreshing. And I got to ponder something. Like, what psychopath came up with this question in the first place? Who put these two animals together? What do they have in common? I don’t know, but a possible answer is one that may surprise you; they both have been, or are at, near-extinction population levels. Believe it or not, the Canada goose definitely doesn’t exist in an alternate universe timeline of Earth; they were so close to extinction at points in the 20th century that they were considered rare. The fact that they’re so numerous now is thanks to their stupidly-successful recovery program and limitations on hunting, but you’d never guess they were a hairs-breadth away from total obliteration. And now, so is the rhino facing the same struggle. Not the northern white rhino, specifically, they’re mostly ok, both most other rhino species; subspecies of rhinos seem to disappear like every year.

While the power of a monster goose and a regular-sized rhino are terrifying forces worth contemplating, what’s perhaps more terrifying is the notion that it doesn’t actually matter how big or small these animals can get, because humanity will find ways to kill them off if it produces a profit. I make light of millions of massive geese terrorizing the countryside, but if dinosaurs still existed today, they would be hunted for sport like elephants and probably going extinct anyways. Think that wouldn’t happen nowadays? It happened with bison. It’s happening with elephants and whales. There’s no reason to believe giant geese, or dinosaurs, or any other preposterous animal, wouldn’t be driven to extinction, too. Maybe size matters in a one-on-one fight, but when something’s up against human exploitation, size is irrelevant. The tank treads of profit and progress will crush them all, whether they’re a goose-sized rhino or a rhino-sized goose, and the machine will move on to the next victim.

Let’s hope we can stop it before it gets to us.