Silverback. Yeah mambas should be scared and stay away, but one crazy one and you can’t hide anywhere. With the gorilla I just need to stay somewhere closed off, like on top of an elevator car. But also silverbacks understand conciliatory gestures. If you’re submissive they won’t attack you. Literally the opposite of a black bear encounter. Make yourself small, look away, and slowly move away.

All the people who are not choosing to chill with a usually calm intelligent mammal because “snakes will get out of your way” apparently don’t know shit about black mambas:

Skittish and often unpredictable, the black mamba is agile and can move quickly. In the wild, black mambas seldom tolerate humans approaching more closely than about 40 metres (130 ft)

When confronted, it is likely to engage in a threat display

During the threat display, any sudden movement by the intruder may provoke the snake into performing a series of rapid strikes, leading to severe envenomation

Give me a big strong dude intelligent enough to leave you alone after you’re demonstrated that you’re not a threat any day!

Gorilla might come at you because fuck you. Mamba is scared shitless of you.

Gorilla. No doubt in my mind. It’s a hell of a lot easier to keep track of where one gorilla is compared to 5 black snakes.

One gorilla will probably ignore me as long as I keep my distance. Keeping distance and even putting a wall or 3 between you and the gorilla is trivial in a place as large as a mall.

On the other hand, snakes might mostly ignore me, but since I don’t know where the fuckers are, it’s a lot easier to accidentally startle or threaten one.

My new best friend friend Coco isn’t coming through pipes, air ducts, holes in walls, etc. Big strong boi isn’t hiding in the corner of a closet waiting to bite me as I reach in to grab a snack.

I’d go to the food court, put out a cornucopia of food, make sure the gorilla sees me leave it there for them, bow respectfully and slink away, then spend the rest of the 24 hours clear on the opposite side of the mall.

This all assumes that the gorilla isn’t enraged for any particular reason or starving. But even if so, I think gorilla is the safer answer, just the evasion technique changes.

I mean if we’re gonna take this goofy post at face value and get addmitedly WAY too into the breakdown…

The context of if they are agitated or otherwise hostile for some external reason is actually kinda critically important here lol.

In a situation where they are just passively existing and you need to choose which species to just co-habitate with I’m choosing the monkey FOR SURE.

• Any snake is going to be hard to spot, an ambush predator, specifically one (or 5!) as deadly and teritorial as a black mamba, is going to be nigh impossible to keep track of, sneaking around and catching prey off-guard is literally their whole thing. On top of that, while gorilla’s vary greatly in personality (just like humans) odds are decent that if you just leave them alone they will leave you alone.

• Hell, maybe if you manage to find some fruit you might even be able to AT A GREAT DISTANCE establish some sort of basic report with the Silverback. Like, don’t pet the guy, but if they know you don’t have hostile intentions and occasionally provide snacks they probably will keep their “territory” reasonably small, letting you scavenge more areas.

But if the script is flipped and we are in a full blown survival setting? Where for one reason or another the animal(s) has our number from the moment we step foot in the mall? You are fucking insane if you choose the Silverback Gorilla.

• Those things are ludicrously fast, Huge, have great senses, and will literally rip you in half. You would be dead within minutes of entering the mall no matter how far away that gorilla starts from you.

• Snakes you can at the very least survive longer, if not outright just escape them and hide somewhere relatively hermeticly sealed. Maybe find a cabinet you can squeeze into and close the doors to let oxygen in but too small for snakes, maybe find a tall shelf or rafter and collapse the furniture used to climb on your way up to prevent the snakes climbing it as well.

• A Silverback gorilla however is not only far faster both climbing and on land, but has enormous fucking gorilla arms to rip away any sort of door or cover you try to use to hide.

If we’re being generous and assuming this is taking place in the largest mall in the USA, The Mall of America, and the gorilla starts on the opposite side of the mall from where you enter. It would need to clear roughly 1 mile (assuming the 1 mile-ish exterior wall of the mall is circular (it’s not but just humor me), in order to get to you. A silverback gorilla’s top land speed is roughly 25mph, that means 2200 feet per minute, that means you have just over 2 minutes to get into a meat freezer or something equally tough before it catches you. So you not only need to know where one is, but it needs to be close enough to get to in such a short time. Hell no, I’m taking the snakes.

Anyway thanks for coming to my Ted Talk