The fact that humans do not immediately think of using their teeth and jaws for self-defense represents a deeply ingrained cultural taboo with power and influence that approaches that of religious dogma. One of the first behaviors mothers feel compelled to forbid is biting. I was browsing children's' books not too long ago, and i saw a colorful picture-book aimed at 3-6 year olds, devoted to the topic of biting:

"Sometimes, another kid may bite you. this probably makes you mad. you probably want to bite them back. but you must never do this."

A child will very naturally use his or her teeth and jaws as a weapon. when seeking evidence of child molestation, one of the signs for which police often look is child-sized bite marks on the suspect. Women and men will often revert to biting when they are victims of rape, or otherwise in a position where they feel extremely threatened. Generally, if a person has his or her civilization stripped away by the perception that s/he is in a desperate situation, then s/he will bite in self-defense, ignoring the instructions in that children's picture book.

Entering a kind of self-defense autopilot (as Mike Tyson did when he bit Evander Holifield's ear) was an essential ability as human civilization developed. However, the berserker instinct has been driven, civilized, and threatened out of us by thousands of years of our moral imperative. It can be argued that, from a collectivist standpoint, this has been a good thing; it's generally unhelpful to the development of science and art to have people running around biting each other. But from an individualist perspective, using the most effective weapon at our disposal for self defense makes perfect sense.

According to a variety of web sources, the human bite is exerted at between 100 and 400 PSI (pounds per square inch). Compare this to the domestic dog, which, surprisingly to me, seems to fall within a range that is only a little bit higher (with a few exceptions). Web data on this subject is various and shaky, but this is a pretty good search; results seem to return averages of about the aforementioned 100-400 PSI for both humans and dogs. Perhaps obviously, there have been no good, well-documented, comparative studies on dog bite pressure versus human bite pressure.

We humans have the teeth of a carnivore and the digestive system of a herbivore, owing this design to our omnivorous diet. As I run my tongue along my canines and premolars, I find that they are in fact noticeably sharper than my dog's (I might have particularly sharp teeth), and are clearly intended to tear flesh from bone.

An interesting feature of the human bite is its toxicity; compared to a dog bite, human bites carry with them a high risk of serious infection. There is a special kind of "bite," referred to as a "fight bite" by the medical community. A fight bite is the result of an attacker's fist coming into contact with the victim's teeth, breaking the attacker's skin. This is a much graver concern to a caregiver than any damage inflicted upon the face of the person hammered at with a dull, fleshy weapon. The real danger in these instances of body contact comes from the pathogens that spread rapidly across the intricate network of veins and arteries in the real victim's (the attacker's) fingers and hand.

Komodo dragons rely on a similar feature of their bite when killing prey. The 300 pound lizards bite their prey, wait for it to collapse of infection, and then simply track down the highly incapacitated or dead animal for leisurely consumption.

As animals learn not to eat poison oak, avoid biting into porcupines or run from fire, they learn to avoid the bite of another that will certainly be debilitating or fatal, even if not necessarily immediately so (although the possibility of immediate fatal damage inflicted by a human bite exists; certainly 400 PSI and carnivorous teeth are quite capable of opening a carotid artery).

Our teeth and jaws are by and large the most formidable weapons at our disposal. So why, across cultures and across history, is this fact not discussed, if not celebrated by systems of martial arts that date back thousands of years and purport to be effective? The answer is that the lethality of the human bite represents a taboo almost greater than we can fathom: that people are animals, that there exists no inherent quality that clearly separates us from other animals. Chimpanzees fashion and use tools, dolphins have an elaborate language, and we all bite (or at least we are all intended to bite).

This is why i refer to the taboo of the human bite as having a religious quality; the fact that our teeth and jaws are many times more lethal than "civilized" body weapons such as the fist represents a direct challenge to the cross-cultural, moral-religious doctrine of man and beast being inherently, spiritually and biologically distinct.