How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
I don’t want you to try and say it, fail slightly and go, ‘Aw no, give us another go. Come on man, don’t be tight. I bet you £10 I can say it.’
No, I want you to actually answer it. I want you to figure out how much wood a woodchuck could chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood. I want actual, proper guesses.
Let me start by giving you another look at what a woodchuck looks like:
Weird how they manage to look both cute and terrifying, like a butch rat hellbent on invading your house and holding your family ransom.
Now here’s some wood:
Hang on. F**k that. That looks quite heavy. Even I couldn’t throw that. Here’s some smaller wood:
Right. Now here’s world class Scottish tosser Daniel McKim flinging a caber:
Could a woodchuck do that? Very unlikely. Could it chuck half of it? Unlikely. Could it chuck a quarter of it? Slightly feasible. Depends how butch this woodchuck is, really.
No, but seriously, all jokes aside there is genuine scientific answer to this age old tongue twister.
According to research undertaken by wildlife biologists at New York’s Cornell University, the answer is ‘about 700 pounds.’
They wrote:
Compared to beavers, groundhogs/woodchuck are not adept at moving timber, although some will chew wood. (At Cornell, woodchucks that gnaw their wooden nest boxes are given scraps of 2-by-4 lumber.)
A wildlife biologist once measured the inside volume of a typical woodchuck burrow and estimated that – if wood filled the hole instead of dirt – the industrious animal would have chucked about 700 pounds.
So there we have it. The question on nobody’s lips can be considered a case closed.
You’re welcome…
