Life-or-Limb Decision

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"The chain in those handcuffs is high-tensile steel. It'd take you ten minutes to hack through it with [a hacksaw]. Now, if you're lucky, you could hack through your ankle in five minutes. Go."

— Max, Mad Max

A version of the Sadistic Choice when a person is forced to make a terrible choice — they need to remove one of their appendages in order to escape with their life. Sometimes a villain or '90s Anti-Hero imposes this choice as a punishment, but in other cases, a character is simply trapped.

Many animals will do this to escape traps in real life. Note that even if a person manages this, realistically they will bleed to death (which might be just what the villain has intended) in a few minutes unless they are able to close the wound, so only try this if you have a plan for doing that. If you're lucky (in a sense), one of your Artificial Limbs is the limb that got trapped, so you can pull off a Fake Arm Disarm without any real injury to yourself and then get a replacement later.

Amputation Stops Spread is similar but to stop poisoning or infection instead of escaping. Compare Disposable Vehicle Section, when a similar thing happens with vehicles, as well as the somewhat less drastic Giving Them the Strip, where escaping requires abandoning at least one article of clothing.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

In the manga Torikago Gakyuu, Mikage, after he's kidnapped by Yuikai, is given the choice of having his ears cut off and becoming Yuikai's slave or being pushed out the window of a secret room in the school's clock tower (tied up, no less). He chooses the latter. Fortunately, Yukan arrives just in time to catch him, but Mikage still gets a good deal of discomfort from his decision.
In Baccano! the... helper to the heroes, Claire, forces the villain Ladd into one of these to save his bride, Lua, to preserve his vow that no one will kill her but Ladd himself. Claire put a noose around Lua's neck while the trio stood on top of a moving train, and attached the other end of the rope to a stationary post not connected to the train, thus forcing Ladd to either abandon his fight with Claire and save her or continue the fight and let his fiance be decapitated. Hardly a choice at all, since Claire had picked up on just how much Ladd's vow to kill Lua himself was worth to him.
Battle Angel Alita does this a lot, although due to Alita being a full conversion cyborg the amputations or dismemberment are less than permanent.
During the Eclipse in Berserk, Guts has to chisel off his own left forearm — which is caught in a demonic Apostle's jaws — with a broken sword in order to save his love Casca, who is in the middle of being raped by Femto, the Godhand who used to be their former captain, Griffith. When Guts severs his arm completely, he charges Femto and nearly stabs him in the eye, but the Godhand simply tosses him into the air and he is shortly after dogpiled by Apostles. That doesn't make the moment any less badass. What makes the scene even more badass is that Guts doesn't seem to be grunting in pain: more like in annoyance that any other time in the series, appendages are flying like confetti, but when he needs his arm detached right then and there...

This proves to be rather fortuitous, though. He gains the Arm Cannon after he heals, which has saved his life pretty much every single time he's clashed with dangerous foes. The ironic thing is that it was his left arm that was always the most protected throughout the series up until the Eclipse.
Bleach:
- Byakuya is fighting a villain that can control Byakuya's limbs. Zommari first attempts to control Byakuya's left leg. Byakuya doesn't hesitate to sever the tendons and muscles of his own leg to render his limb useless. When Zommari tries to take advantage of the fact Byakuya's now stuck fighting him one-legged, he learns Byakuya's speed is still incredible but manages to take control of Byakuya's left hand and tries to strangle Byakuya with his own hand. Byakuya again doesn't hesitate and immediately severs the tendons and muscles in his left hand as well. Byakuya's then forced to finish the fight one-legged and one-armed.
- See also Soifon, who rather than let her body be completely taken by Barragan's power to age her to a skeleton, has her lieutenant cut off her arm. It helps that Barragan had already broken the bones in said arm earlier with his Rapid Aging powers, so it wasn't like she was losing much.
- Hachi faces the same situation, but manages to turn things to his advantage by not just cutting off his arm, but teleporting it inside Barragan, causing him to rot under his own power, killing him.
- Kenpachi tears his right arm off when Pernida takes control of it.
In A Certain Magical Index, Acqua of the Back completely dominates Touma Kamijou in a Curb-Stomp Battle, then tells him if he cuts off his right arm (and thus, gets rid of Imagine Breaker) in a day, then Acqua will spare his life. Of course, Touma refuses to do this and instead helps his allies beat him in the rematch. Not to mention Acqua would have had his work cut out for him dealing with the Invisible Thing sealed in Touma's body by Imagine Breaker.
In a chapter of Claymore Claire is obliged to make this decision for her fellow renegade Uma when the Nigh-Invulnerable Dolf got ahold of the latter's leg.
Erza of Fairy Tail was prepared to amputate her arm to stop the poison from a snakebite spreading through her body, but was stopped on the premise that Wendy had healing magic. Unfortunately, she had been kidnapped by the members of Oracion Seis with the intent of having her resurrect Jellal, so it was a race against time for the rest of the alliance to save Erza's life.
Fullmetal Alchemist:
- Prior to when the story begins, Ed sacrificed his arm to seal Al's soul in a nearby suit of armor during their botched human transmutation attempt.
- And even before that (in-series time), Scar's brother transmuted his right arm to Scar to keep him from dying.
- Later on, Lan Fan cuts off her (at this point already useless) arm to distract King Bradley from following her and Ling. Of course, given the existence of auto-mail, this isn't quite as life-changing as it might be, but it's still an extremely brave choice to make.
In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Kimblee transmutes Scar's left arm into a bomb. Rather than wait for it to detonate, Scar destroys the arm completely and takes advantage of Kimblee's shock to kill him. Soon afterward he sacrifices his remaining arm to save Al from suffering the same fate, resulting in a few unintentionally humorous scenes of an armless man running around Lior luring in Ametris soldiers.
High School D×D has Azazel cutting off his left arm when Katrea Leviathan ensnared his arm to kill both him and her when she was about to self-destruct before he runs her through with his light spear. He regrows it later anyway.
This trope crops up every so often during fights in Hunter × Hunter. The best example is when Hisoka fights Kastro in Heaven's Arena. He, quite willingly, loses both arms and uses that as part of his strategy to unnerve his opponent.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Part 3: During Iggy's battle with Pet Shop, one of his front legs is frozen in place by the latter's ice powers, so he's forced to gnaw it off in order to escape death.
- Part 5: Leone Abbacchio, trapped in Illuso's Mirror World, severs his hand (his Stand's hand in the outside world) so Moody Blues can deliver a key to Giorno while Illuso is distracted. In the same fight, Illuso uses a portal to the human world to sever the arm that Giorno had just infected with Purple Haze's deadly virus and escape. Unfortunately for him, Giorno was planning on that, cause guess who's waiting for Illuso outside the mirror world?
In Kaiji, the title character plays a game called E-Card in which he is given the choice of wagering his ear or his eye. He chooses the ear, to which a device is attached that contains a drill bit that moves closer to his eardrum with each hand he loses. The device also sends vital signs to his opponent which tip him off to when Kaiji is planning to play an important card, and once he realizes this, he cuts off his entire ear and continues the game. And immediately after that, he wagers four of his fingers in a lot-drawing game which he loses.
In Le Chevalier d'Eon, Durand prevents Mr. Whitehead from taking control of him via the Psalms by cutting off his own arm before the effect of the Psalms could spread any farther than that.
Rin from Mnemosyne breaks her own wrists with such nonchalant indifference, it makes you wonder just how many handcuffs she escaped this way in her very, very long life.
My Hero Academia: In Chapter 282, Aizawa cuts off one of his legs after it's hit by a Quirk-Eraser bullet.
Naruto
- During Orochimaru's initial attack on Konoha, He ends up fighting the Hokage, who as a desperation tactic attempts a technique that will draw both of their souls into a demon's stomach, there to continue fighting forever. While Orochimaru's spiritual arms are in the demon's mouth, he uses his tongue to wield a sword and cut them off, leaving the limbs paralyzed.
- The Fourth Raikage attacks Sasuke while he is being protected by extremely hot black flames, and is forced to sacrifice his arm to prevent the rest of his body from being burned up.
- Practically the same happens later to Tobi: his arm is infected by The Virus an enemy spreads by touch so he (nonchalantly) snapped his own arm off, then he punt kicks it into his enemy's face. We later find out that Tobi/Obito was so nonchalant about losing his arm because he can grow or attach a new one as needed since it's actually Artificial... and he can switch out his left eye as needed since he gave up his original to Kakashi and he keeps a spare Sharingan there as a sacrifice to perform Izanagi.
One Piece
- Zoro is dead set to escape from a giant birthday cake (long story) by cutting off his feet and then engaging the enemy. Luckily he's only about halfway through by the time the cavalry arrives.
- Zoro likes this trope: his go-to solution for problems is "cut a limb off". Luckily when he's handcuffed to Usopp and suggests they do rock paper scissors to decide who cuts off their hand, Usopp is able to squash this idea before he begins. Zoro apparently thinks this is a good idea because he's sure their doctor can reattach the thing just fine.
- "Red Leg" Zeff on the other hand was forced to sever his own leg in order to avoid starving to death by eating it (manga) or in order to save a drowning Sanji (anime). Badass either way.
- "Chapter 0" shows that Gold Lion Shiki escaped the sea stone shackles in Impel Down by cutting off his own feet, which he replaced with swords.
- Similar to Zeff and Shiki, Kyros, who isn't a Devil Fruit user, cut off his leg, which was shackled by a sea stone shackle, to save King Riku from Donquixote Deflamingo. Unfortunately, Sugar transformed him into a toy before Kyros could save the king. Somehow, hopping around on one leg (not even getting so much as a peg-leg like Zeff's) doesn't even slow him down in the slightest.
A more voluntary example in The Promised Neverland. The protagonists have trackers planted in their ears that they need to get rid of in order to escape. Most of them are able to have theirs precision removed with the help of some tools stolen from the clinic. Emma is in a hurry, however, and goes for the quicker option. This leads to a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome when she collapses a few hours later due to an infection and spends several days recovering.
Inverted in Rave Master. Shuda could have allowed Haru to save his life, but opted cut off the hand Haru was holding and fell to his not quite death.
In the fourth Slayers novel, and in the corresponding scene in the Slayers: Revolution anime, fleeing villain Zuuma blocks Lina's Flare Lance spell with his remaining arm (having already lost one in the preceding fight) and manages to escape while completely armless. Lina is fairly stunned. Leads to a quick conversation in another novel. Lina discovers Zuuma is back... and has all his arms. Gourry's response? Shit.
A flashback in Symphogear XV reveals that the Custodian Enki was forced to cut off his own left arm in a battle against Shem-Ha Mephorash, in order to prevent his whole body from being transmuted into silver. Said arm would later be turned into the Relic Airgetlam, which would be used by his descendant, Maria Cadenzeva Eve.
In the first Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann Compilation Movie Yoko and Adiane's Designated Girl Fight ends with Yoko pinning down Adiane's scorpion tail that she used to deflect a bullet, but before she can get the finishing shot in, Adiane cuts her own tail off to escape.
In Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- Kurogane chooses to cut off his own arm in order to save Fai's life when they were trapped in the collapsing world of Ceres, making most KuroFai fangirls shriek "CANON!" and CLAMP snicker at their own evilness.
Ushio and Tora: at one point, Hakumen no Mono recalls his first encounter with the Beast Spear back in the past: it was a Curb-Stomp Battle so one-sided the only way Hakumen had to get away was to turn his eigth tail in molten lead, encase the Spear in it, then bite the tail off so he could run away to another continent while the Spear was left behind.
In the Action Prologue of Vexille, the villain chops off his own leg to escape the heroine in Powered Armor who's grabbed onto his foot. It serves as a form of Robotic Reveal.

Comic Books

Green Arrow:
- In The DCU, he got his arm stuck in a bomb and was offered a choice between losing his arm (meaning he could never use a bow again) or dying. He chose to die. (Don't worry. He got better later.)
- Within the continuity of The Dark Knight Returns, he has lost his arm and has learned to pull his bow with his teeth. He blames Superman for it, which matches the event shown later in mainstream continuity, but it is unclear if it was this trope or not, since it is implied that Superman did it as punishment for his pursuing his vigilantism against government orders.
Batman foe the KGBeast cut off his own arm with a fireaxe after Batman snared it in a loop of cable and was holding him pinned until the police arrived. Since the cable was too tough to cut with an axe...
In an issue of Marvel's The Initiative, trainee superhero Komodo's legs are injected with poison, which will kill her when it reaches her heart. Her teammate Hardball decides that the best way to deal with this under the current dire circumstances is to amputate the legs. Komodo can regenerate, of course, but this still triggers a phobic reaction, as her civilian form lost her legs as well.
In Deadly Class, Shabnam handcuffs Saya to a pipe near a spreading fire. Her sword is in arm's reach and she's about to throw it at him before he tells her she's going to need it. It won't cut through the cuffs or the pipe, but there's another way... After a Time Skip or two she’s seen alive with a stump at the end of her right arm.
Invoked for laughs in De Cape et de Crocs, where Armand, a fox, waking up in jail, briefly freaks out and attempts to gnaw his leg, "as any self-respecting fox should do".
In a variant, Two-Edge from ElfQuest has his feet trapped in solid stone by the rock-shaper Ekuar, whom he's kidnapped. He somehow gets free, leaving the empty, foot-shaped gaps drenched in his blood, but precisely how much of his feet he'd also left behind isn't clear.
In Hitman, Hakan gets bitten by a zombie penguin and immediately cuts his hand off to avoid infection. Subverted when he later learns that it wasn't infectious.
Another Marvel example: in an issue of Iron Man: Director of Shield, Tony Stark cuts half of his foot off with a laser in order to remove a power-suppressing anklet so that he can access Extremis and beat the Mandarin.
In The Metabarons series, Aghnar (the second metabaron) has implanted a lot of miniature bombs in his body and set them to go off if he is mortally wounded. When he faces off against a beast impervious to all his attacks, he shoves his arm down its throat and lets it get bitten off. The bombs in his lost arm then make the creature collapse into a small sphere.
The first issue of Micronauts: The New Voyages has Arcturus Rann forced to remove his hand to avoid certain death.
In the Planet Hulk storyline, Miek chops off his own arm to avoid getting pinned down during a fight with another alien monster. Being a giant insect, Miek has arms to spare, but it doesn't grow back.
In the comic book backstory for Lieutenant Jean Rasczak from Starship Troopers, the young marine is the only soldier survivor of the first encounter with the bugs. As he hauls ass back into the dropship, one of the Warrior Bugs traps his arm with its mandibles and attempts to pull him back out. He orders the terrified civilian survivor to seal the door — doing so severs his arm but saves his life.
In Transmetropolitan, Spider decides that chewing his arm off at the shoulder is the obvious means of escape when he wakes up in bed next to Yelena.
The Walking Dead — Several times. Most notably, the character Dale is bitten and needs his leg amputated. Also happens earlier in the series with Allan, however, the amputation doesn't save him.
In Watchmen, crazy Anti-Hero Rorschach tracks down a kidnapper who had killed a young girl, handcuffs him to a furnace, and sets his house on fire with him inside, leaving him with a saw. He tells the kidnapper not to bother trying to cut through the handcuffs since he wouldn't be able to make it in time, and then he stands outside, watching to see if the guy manages to escape. He doesn't. They changed this in the movie because they were worried that people would be reminded too much of Saw. Instead Rorschach simply cleaves his head open, which is the same thing he just did to the man's dog ("Men get arrested. Dogs get put down.")

Comic Strips

In one Dilbert strip, Dilbert finds himself trapped in his cubicle in a conversation he has no way out of and contemplates chewing his arm off to escape. Afterwards, Dogbert, not surprisingly, sounds surprised that that worked — if only because people tend not to hang around when you start chewing on your own arm.
In a Garfield storyline, Jon is on a blind date with a woman who was literally Raised by Wolves. At one point she says she's going to have to gnaw her foot off because her shoes are too tight. Fortunately, Jon quickly offers to help her.

Fan Works

In Fate: Gamer Night SE, Shiro severs his own arm and offers it to Ibaraki-douji to distract her long enough for himself and Waver to escape.
In Shades of Grey, a Troll allows his arm to be cut off so a human rogue can poison it and they can feed it to the Devilsaur that's trapped them in a cave.
Becoming a True Invader: During the climax of the fighting on Oberox, Dib is pinned to a wall by metal bindings via Togan's psychic powers. Desperate, he cuts off his left hand with a discarded metal claw so he can slip free and grab a blaster to attack Togan with while he's otherwise distracted. Afterwards, he gets a new robotic replacement installed.
Boldores And Boomsticks: With its good arm caught in Nebby's jaws and Team RWBY readying their weapons to put it down, Grendel severs the limb with its mace hand and escapes through an Ultra Wormhole just before it closes.
Essentially features in the Marvel Cinematic Universe/Harry Potter crossover "Strange Potter"; when the news goes out that all suspected Death Eaters will be checked for the Dark Mark after it's confirmed that the Mark was only given to those who accepted it of their own free will, Lucius Malfoy stages a confrontation with another Death Eater so that he can cut off his own arm to get rid of his Mark and claim it was lost in the fight.
Downplayed example in the My Hero Academia Monster. A teenage Aizawa and Hizashi are held captive by a sadistic guy who’s primarily interested in Hizashi but who grabs Aizawa when Aizawa comes on the kidnapping in progress. The guy eventually tires of Aizawa and tries to sell him but not before chaining him to a bed and raping him. Aizawa makes a desperate escape by breaking his own wrist to get it through the handcuff and makes an escape through an upstairs window so he can make a terrified plea for help to a neighbor. Luckily it works and both are rescued.
Pokémon Reset Bloodlines: Non-lethal example during the Indigo League. When Ash's Muk is caught by an electric attack from Cross' Lycanroc, he cuts off his hand to minimize the damage, before dripping underground. Subverted since by that point Muk knows he can reabsorb his severed limbs and grow them back without issues.
Invoked in the final battle with Voldemort in The Power of Seven, when Harry basically does this on Dumbledore's behalf; when channelling his mother's protection into Dumbledore's body while he's possessed by Voldemort, Harry is able to use that power so that it only burns out Voldemort's influence while leaving Dumbledore basically unharmed, apart from destroying the hand where Dumbledore wore the resurrection stone/the ring horcrux that Voldemort uses to possess him in the first place.
In Purple Days, Joffrey, in his role as the Dawn Legion Commander, is grievously wounded in an arm. Through the haze of pain, the medics tell him they need to amputate or he'll die. For about a second, Joff contemplates the idea of allowing himself to die and wake up whole and healthy back at King's Landing, where he doesn't have to bear the burdens of the Legion's command or the impending threat of the undead. However, he realizes that giving up would mean he's still the same awful shit he was at the beginning of the loops... so he opens his eyes and unhesitatingly orders the doctors to proceed, going down with his Band of Brothers.

Films — Animation

In the 2007 film Beowulf, during the fight with the dragon, the title character ends up severing his arm to get himself in a better position to attack. There's a twist since he didn't do it for survival, but to kill the dragon as it was threatening people he loved. By the time he severs his arm, it become clear that he has no intention of surviving the fight.
Discussed in Brother Bear. When Koda sees Kenai caught in a rope trap, he claims the only way to escape is to chew his foot off.
Subverted in My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea. Assaf gets his legs caught under a bookcase, and Dash believes he has to amputate them, only for Assaf to tell him to just lift the bookcase.
Assaf: My legs are caught under the bookcase.
Dash: I gotta amputate!
Assaf: Dude, just lift the bookcase.
Dash: Oh yeah. Ok. It's kinda heavy.
In The Transformers: The Movie, Starscream's foot gets caught in a closing gate during the Autobot City attack. He blasts his foot to get free (although what we see damaged is his lower shin). He's intact later in the movie — being a robot, and everything.

Films — Live-Action

In a monster example, the Xenomorph Queen from Aliens tears loose from her own egg-spawning abdomen, both to escape being burned to death and to furiously pursue Ripley and Newt.
Battle Beyond the Stars (1980). Sador finds out almost too late that a Nestor hand can be controlled by the Nestor Hive Mind even after it's been cut off and implanted onto his own arm. His Torture Technician is able to stop Sador from cutting his own throat by quickly chainsawing off the limb.
The Blade (1995) has this as the backstory of Ding-on, the one-armed swordfighter - caught by bandits while infiltrating their hideout, his hand accidentally ensnared in a Bear Trap, he must either hack off his arm with a broken sword or get captured alive by bloodthirsty marauders ready to kill him. He chose the former, and returns later seeking revenge.
Subverted in The Blob (1988), when the as-yet-tiny Blob engulfs Can Man the tramp's left hand. He tries to cut off his own hand with a hatchet, but after the first cut, the Blob stretches out to coat his forearm also, with the implication that trying again will just make it spread over his entire arm.
The Boondock Saints: The titular heroes, Connor and Murphy MacManus, have been captured by the Mafia and left handcuffed to chairs awaiting torture and execution. When their captors leave the room, Connor breaks Murphy's hand to allow him to slip the cuffs and get the drop on the goons when they return.
In the 2020 film Boys From County Hell, Eugene Moffat and his father Francie are being attacked by an ancient vampire who can only be killed if staked in the heart and then buried under a mass of rocks, but have no weapons and the vampire is armed with an axe. With Francie having sustained a serious leg wound earlier, he forces Eugene to take off his leg and use it as an improvised stake to immobilise the vampire so that he can bury it in a cellar.
In Buried, Paul Conroy is forced to sever his finger on video, or else the terrorists keeping him hostage would kill his wife and son.
In Cabin Fever 2, the hero, having already had his prom ruined by a schoolwide outbreak of necrotizing fasciitis (it's complicated), gets some infected blood on his hand and so, to prevent himself from getting infected, goes to his school's shop classroom and cuts his hand off with a chop saw. It doesn't work.
Day of the Dead (1985): Miguel gets bitten on his arm by a zombie, and Sarah immediately amputates it to prevent him from turning. Unfortunately, Miguel is Driven to Suicide before we can get a chance to see if Sarah truly saved his life.
Played for Laughs in Deadpool (2016), where the titular character only does this so he doesn't have to be lectured by Colossus (he even references 127 Hours as an inspiration). Colossus is left holding a severed hand that's flipping him off. Then again, this is a lesser example, since Deadpool has a Healing Factor and regrows the hand within a few hours.

In Dead Snow, one of the characters gets bitten by a zombie, and, to save himself from zombification, cuts the arm off and cauterizes the wound. Unluckily for him, a zombie pops up with a bite-based Groin Attack shortly thereafter.
Subverted in District 9. An infection has gotten hold of Wikus, the first effects of it showing up in one of his arms. Distraught, he takes an axe with the intent of cutting off the limb, presumably to stop it from spreading any further. It looks like he's going to do it, but he cuts off a thumb first and the pain prevents him from chopping off anything else. Wikus eventually loses his human life, becoming one of the prawns, but it's doubtful cutting off the entire arm would have saved him anyway.
Escape Room (2017): Opening what appears to be the final door to the escape room involves reaching inside a stuffed bear's head and pulling a handle to unlock the door. However, a person must remain holding the handle while the door is opened, and as the door is opened, a blade descends which will cut off the hand holding the handle. Tyler yanks the door open; cutting off Natasha's hand and leaving her to die.
Evil Dead:
- Ash in Evil Dead 2 has to cut off his own hand, possessed by evil, with his chainsaw. Unfortunately, that is not enough for the hand to stop attacking him.
  Ash: Who's laughing now? Who's... LAUGHING... NOW!?
- Evil Dead (2013) does it rather differently. The demonic abomination flips a jeep onto the Ash expy (Mia), whose hand gets pinned under it. With a chainsaw lying just out of reach and the abomination steadily approaching, the trapped hand must be pulled off. There's also a scene where Natalie cuts off her own infected arm to try to keep the demonic corruption from spreading. It doesn't work, possibly because the demon kissed her and forced its blood down her throat.
In Evolution (2001), Dr. Block finds himself host to an alien fly that is burrowing into his leg. He refuses to let doctors cut off the leg in question until he learns that it's headed for his testicles. (Ultimately, they pull it out of his rectum instead.)
The Final: The football star and the cheerleader are forced to cut off each other's fingers in a Sadistic Choice and are then left to live with the consequences.
Flyboys; pilot Eddie Beagle crashes his plane in No Man's Land and gets pinned under the wing. After failing to dig him out (and coming under increasingly heavy fire from the Germans), Blaine grabs a nearby spade and lops Eddie's hand off.
In Gamera 3: Awakening of Irys, the heroic turtle finds his arm pinned to a building by one of his foe's spiny tentacles. His response? To blow his own arm off with a fireball, use said fire breath to light his stump on fire, and then plunge this bloody, flaming mess into his foe's chest(!).
In Hannibal, Starling handcuffs both Lecter's wrist and hers to a fridge to prevent him from escaping. Lecter grabs up a cleaver, remarks that this is going to hurt, and hacks through his own wrist, allowing him to evade capture.
In Jack Reacher, the Big Bad claims to have done that during his time in a Siberian gulag. Since then, the only quality he respects in a person is the drive to survive at any cost. When a Mook fails him, he gives him the option of removing his own fingers in order to prove himself. The guy seems to agree at first and asks for a knife. The Big Bad demands that he chew off his fingers, as he has done. The guy can't bring himself to do it and is shot.
In Knucklebones, after Lisa realises that the demon she and her friends accidentally summoned is going after her little sister, she cuts off her own left hand and burns it so that she can create a new set of 'knucklebone' game pieces to banish the demon back by reversing the summoning ritual (the demon having destroyed the original pieces to prevent this exact scenario).
The probable Trope Codifier and page quote provider: Mad Max ends with Max handcuffing the last gang member to the car whose gas tank he set up to explode before giving him the saw and said line. It's particularly cruel because if you watch the movie closely you'll notice that it doesn't matter which choice the cuffed bad guy makes, there isn't time for him to do either: From speech to explosion is about 3 minutes tops. That said, it could be just movie time — not like it even matters, he'd bleed to death before he could possibly find anyone to treat the wound. This is a particularly special bit of ironic punishment as well — the gang member in question, Johnny the Boy, crippled Max's best friend Goose by forcing him to lose control of his vehicle and then setting him on fire via the leaking fuel while Goose was trapped inside and struggling to free himself. Once Max chains Johnny to the wrecked car he was gutting, he rigs it to explode using the stream of leaking gasoline and Johnny's own lighter.
127 Hours is based on the true story of mountain climber Aron Ralston. See it in the Real Life section.
The Taiwanese martial arts film, One Armed Swordswoman, have the heroine fighting off a legion of enemies early on, only to be struck by a poisoned dart in one arm. She recovers, but unfortunately the poison is eating away her injured hand and she must choose between cutting off a limb around the shoulders, or let the poison claim her. No prize guessing her choice considering the movie's title...
One mook resorts to this in Phantasm II after his hand is pinned to the wall by one of the Big Bad's flying Sentinel spheres.
In Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Barbossa reveals that he cut off his leg to avoid being drowned by a voodoo-controlled rope. Apparently, he didn't even think to cut the rope itself (presumably, easier than a limb).
The Prestige It's more a case of Life Or Livelihood Decision, but the decision by Borden to cut off his twin's finger so that they would have matching disfigurements.
Prey (2022): Naru and her brother are tied, and so she remembers a beaver chewing off his leg to escape as moves closer to a bear trap... but she activates it in a way it only cuts the rope, as "I'm smarter than a beaver".
In Repo Men, Remy and his multiple-recipient girlfriend must scan the barcodes of their implanted artiforgs to remove themselves from the To-Be-Retrieved list. The scanners won't work through flesh, and both of them have internal artiforgs, so...
In RoboCop (2014), Murphy shoots off one of his arms when it's pinned under an ED-209 and two more are bearing down on him (although the arm he shoots off is the purely artificial one, as opposed to the one still attached to his surviving organic hand).
Saw:
- The first movie has two people chained to pipes in a Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere. The only visible way out is a rusty hacksaw too weak to cut through the chains, but sharp enough to cut through their feet. Lawrence cuts off his own foot, and crawls out of the room to get help. He isn't seen for six movies, but revealed to have survived in the last one. Even as Jigsaw's traps get more elaborate in the sequels, they generally come down to "How much pain are you willing to go through to save your life?"
- Saw VI opens with two people in cages who are told that they must remove "a pound of flesh" and deposit it on a scale. The first to hit the weight limit, or whoever puts the most weight on the scale by the end of the time limit, doesn't get two screws drilled into their skulls, killing them. The fat man of the two begins cutting off chunks of his stomach. The skinny girl cuts off her arm... and wins.
In the 2007 film Scar, when Joan is faced with her niece being tortured by a copycat of the killer who tortured her as a child, she manages to cut off her thumb so that she can escape the handcuffs he's using to keep her trapped (although based on the film's closing scene the hospital has at least made an attempt to reattach it).
The opening of Scary Movie 4 parodies the Saw example with Shaquille O'Neil and Dr. Phil about to be killed by nerve gas. After being suckered into cutting off his own leg, Phil realizes it's the wrong one and they die anyway.
In Scream and Scream Again, Keith is handcuffed to the bumper of a police car and escapes by tearing his hand off at the wrist.
Done "backwards" in Se7en, where for the Pride murder, the killer cuts off a fashion model's nose and then leaves her locked up with a phone and a bottle of sleeping pills, so she can decide whether to call the police and survive (with a deformed face) or take the pills and kill herself. She kills herself.
In Slugs, Harold cuts off his hand with an axe after he puts it in a glove with a killer slug inside it. Kinda over-the-top, but so is the following explosion from a single gas canister that destroys his whole house.
A particularly complicated example from the Hong Kong comic-book movie The Storm Riders. Brooding Badass Bujing Yun uses a skill very much like waterbending from Avatar: The Last Airbender, and carries his dead lover to a mausoleum located conveniently in the desert, where the Big Bad, played by Sonny Chiba, lies in wait. With the arid climate crippling his powers Yun is beaten by the Big Bad's earthbending-esque skills, and Yun even gets the bones of his left arm shattered in a Shout-Out to Chiba's Street Fighter movies. What does Yun do? Promptly TEAR OFF HIS LEFT ARM, using the torrent of blood to pull off a bloodbending strike on the Big Bad, and secure his escape. See the whole thing here.
Terminator:
- In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the T-800 has his arm trapped and crushed between two gears, and pries it off above the elbow with a metal bar so he can defend John and Sarah Connor from the murderous T-1000.
- In Terminator Salvation, a T-600 sacrifices its foot to free itself from a rope trap.
Truth or Dare (2017): Several of the dares require one to choose between losing a limb or dying. It starts with minor maiming, like having your hand burned or being kneecapped, but escalates to outright amputation.
In Tyler Perry's Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Medea is under house arrest and is trying in vain to get the electronic ankle bracelet off when her brother tells her about coyotes and says, "Want some hot sauce?"
In Whiteout, Carrie ends up getting two of her fingers frostbitten, and her doctor friend has to cut them off in order to save the others.
Gerry had to cut off the female Israeli soldier Segen's hand since she was bitten by a zombie in World War Z. Her life was saved as a result.

Gamebooks

The third Sorcery! book, The Seven Serpents, can have this happening early in the adventure when you're confronted by the powerful Earth Serpent, who will try to swallow you into the ground. In the worst outcome, the Serpent managed to swallow your right foot, and then decide to leave you. If you lack the means to escape (such as calling your Patron Goddess, Libra, for help) you'll be forced to either hack off your leg, or to remain on the spot until starvation kicks in, either way it's one of the worst Game Over scenarios in the books.

Jokes

A handyman returns home to find his wife in bed with another man. The handyman is furious, but rather than pitching a fit, he quietly grabs his wife's lover, drags him off to his workshed, and tightly traps the guy's wedding tackle in a locking vice. The paramour freaks out when he sees the handyman reach for a hacksaw and says "Oh God, you're not gonna cut it off, are you?!" The handyman tosses him the hacksaw and answers "Nope, you are... I'm just burning down the shed."

Literature

In his biography About Face, during an exercise an officer radios David Hackworth about a soldier pinned under a burning vehicle. Hackworth orders him to cut the limb free with an axe, but fortunately another vehicle turns up and tows the burning vehicle free. Afterwards Hackworth wonders why the officer felt the need to pass the buck to his superior instead of making the Life-or-Limb Decision himself.
Happens twice in the Age of Fire series. First, in Dragon Champion, AuRon tears off most of his tail after the end is bitten by another dragon with lethal venom, to prevent it from killing him. Later, in Dragon Strike, Nilrasha chews off her own wing, pinned under rubble, to escape being killed while trapped.
This is used by Rachel of the Animorphs in The Solution, Book #22. She's in rat morph and has to chew through her own tail in order to escape being locked in the cage with Sixth Ranger Traitor David.
Stephen Maturin is forced to amputate many limbs in the Aubrey-Maturin books. At the time this was generally the only option for serious limb injuries, especially with the risk of gangrene. Unlike many surgeons though, Stephen did his best to preserve limbs, only amputating as a last resort. Jack Aubrey suffers a serious arm injury during the battle between the USS Constitution and HMS Java, and his arm is only saved due to Stephen's skill and patience. Stephen is also forced to apply this trope to himself when he suffers frostbite in his toes whilst crossing the Andes, informing the crew (during dinner) that he "removed the peccant members" with a chisel.
Played straight and later subverted in The Clone by Kate Wilhelm and Theodore L. Thomas when the titular synthetic organism gets on two different characters' arms. The first time, it works; they lop off the guy's half-absorbed arm and he survives. The next time, though, the clone adapts and gets into the second guy's body under the skin and eats him from the inside out, which they only discover after they've already cut the arm off.
Lampshaded in Red Nails when Conan the Barbarian is caught in a leg trap while rushing to save Valeria from being sacrificed on the altar. He is prevented when he realises he dropped his sword when the trap closed on his leg and it is now out of reach.
In a Destroyermen novel, a young man is accidentally pricked by a plant, which turns out to be Alien Kudzu. The pricked finger starts to quickly turn black, and the resident doc makes a decision to cut off the finger. It works, and the boy survives. The plant is later weaponized, although it's stated that it's too risky to use it on the mainland, as it could make it uninhabitable.
Discworld: In Pyramids, Pharoah Pteppic shakes a stonemason's hand in an attempt to be friendly. His ideas of kingship are a little different from those in his country, and he is shocked when the man backs away screaming and clutching his arm. It's explained to him that for the man to use his hand would be a blasphemy against the divine pharoah, which is probably punishable by death. The man's hand is amputated by the priests. When Pteppic protests this the high priest tells him that if he hadn't been restrained the man would have done it himself, with his chisel.
Dune has a form of this in the test through which Reverend Mother Mohiam puts Paul. The Bene Gesserit nerve induction box inflicts an enormous amount of pain on the order of third-degree burns, while the gom jabbar ("High-handed enemy", which she will plunge into his throat if he pulls his hand out) will kill almost instantly.
Mohiam: You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.
Paul: Why are you doing this?
Mohiam: To see if you're human.
The Fionavar Tapestry: In The Summer Tree, the immortal Big Bad has freed itself from confinement by losing an arm, but due to the nature of his immortality it cannot heal and just drips blood and ooze continually.
Stephen King loves this one. In Gerald's Game, a woman is Chained to a Bed in the middle of nowhere when she manages to semi-accidentally kill her husband. A particular version of this trope is how she eventually manages to free herself — she breaks a glass and effectively scalps her hand, pulling the resulting bloody mess through the cuff. Well, it is Stephen King.
Goblins in the Castle: At one point, Herky's tail gets caught between a couple of rocks, and Fauna initially wants to cut it off to get him free, to Herky's great distress, as he begs her not to do so. In the end, she just settles for using the flat of her knife to pry the tail loose.
In Hammerjack, Lea slashes Avalon's arm with a poisoned dagger. In order to survive, Avalon amputates the arm before the poison can spread.
Not his own limb, but possibly worse: Hawk from Simon Green's Haven novels once had to sever the foot of a (mercifully unconscious) little girl, to free her from the rubble of a collapsed building. Subverted in that, at the book's end, he meets the girl and her mother, and learns that the local wizards have successfully re-attached the child's foot.
Known Space: In The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton, Gil is being held at gunpoint by an organlegger who is careful to keep himself out of reach. Knowing just how much his body is worth in organ parts, Gil jams a lit cigarette into his own eye so the organlegger will rush over to stop him.
In Max Barry's Machine Man, Dr. Charles Neumann is forced to sever his left arm at the shoulder. It had already been mostly torn off, and it was either that or bleed to death.
Appears in the short story "The Mangler". The victim has his hand caught by the eponymous machine and is slowly pulled in. Another man discovers that the machine cannot be turned off, so he lops the victim's arm off with a fire axe.
Mindstar Rising by Peter F. Hamilton. The main character and his friend mangle each other's hands so that they can slip them through handcuffs; describing the whole sequence of events, in squicky detail, takes several pages. The hero can use his neural implants to minimize the pain, but not his friend.
Downplayed in The Murderbot Diaries. In Network Effect the title character, a cyborg, finds itself suspended upside-down over a pit with its arms taunt so it can't break free. Murderbot detaches a hand which involves individually disconnecting circuits and tearing loose some flesh and nerves (fortunately it can dial down its pain sensors), then walking the hand by the fingers up onto the arm, which is then torn free of its cuff whereupon the hand is reattached. Murderbot is then easily able to break the other cuffs. The main risk involved dropping its hand during all this, which would have left Murderbot screwed.
During the climactic fight in Drew Hayes's NPCs, Eric (the rogue) has his arm pinned by the Big Bad. He decides to cut it off in order to surprise and kill him. It works, but he bleeds out. He is revived by Grumble, the god of the henchmen, as part of a deal, who also gives him a new arm.
Old Kingdom: At the climax of Abhorsen, the decision is made by someone other than the new amputee to avert a Heroic Sacrifice. The spell that binds Orannis the Destroyer gives It the chance to strike back at the one breaking it. Lirael is willing to make the sacrifice, but the Disreputable Dog bites off her hand at the wrist and takes the burden herself, saving Lirael's life but making her in need of a prosthetic. The Dog is not quite dead, however, being a remnant of one of the Seven who made the Charter.
In The President's Daughter series by Ellen Emerson White, a kidnapped Meg faces this problem in the book Long Live The Queen when she's handcuffed in the middle of nowhere. She ends up smashing her own hand to bits with a rock in order to escape. Did I mention that she's already had her knee smashed before this as well?
In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Lost, Miranda recounts how they were driven from Milan by sorceresses — one of whom set serpents on their soldiers. One soldier chopped off his leg trying to free himself from the snake.
In the Ravenloft novel Death of a Darklord, an elf's lost arm is regenerated by the powers of a young sorceress. Unfortunately, the sorceress has been tapping into dark forces to heal people, and when the bandaged arm is unwrapped, it's become a grotesque wormy tentacle that attacks everyone in sight. The horrified elf immediately begs his companions to cut it off. Possibly a subversion, as the elf may not even have survived the amputation.
Shannara: In The Druid of Shannara, Walker Boh's right arm is petrified, and he has to smash it off to prevent the rest of his body from being petrified as well.
This is how Maedhros lost his right hand in The Silmarillion. He was captured by Morgoth and hung off a cliff by a metal shackle around his wrist, a very painful experience. When his cousin Fingon comes to rescue him, Maedhros begs for a Mercy Kill because Fingon can't break the shackle. Fingon opts to free him by amputating his hand above the shackle instead since he can cut that.
In Stephen King's The Stand, the last survivor of a city steps on a rusty nail, and gets gangrene. Because all the doctors are dead (and the hospitals are ransacked), he can't figure out how to treat it. He tries to saw off his foot, but faints from the pain and bleeds to death.
In Super Powereds, during the Final Battle, one of Charles Adair's guards fires a blast of disintegrating energy. With seconds to react, Vince reaches out with his hand, even though there's no guarantee he'll be able to absorb this unknown type of energy. Indeed, by the time he manages to analyze and figure it out, his arm is half gone (admittedly, he does it pretty quickly, only a second or so). Fortunately, there are healers on stand-by, including the world-famous Hallow, so his arm is restored after the battle.

At the beginning of Swan Song, a colonel trapped in a bunker orders the soldier and civilian boy who are trying to free him to first cut off his hand and then cauterize the flesh with heated instruments he had them prepare first.
Sword of Truth features a sorceress named Adie who had to cut off her leg after being attacked by a magic resistant armadillo/leech hybrid. Subverted later, when she gets infected with a magical disease. When she asks a wizard to cut the infected limb off, he explains the disease is already all over her body.
The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin: Nutkin gets captured by Mr. Brown the owl, who intends to skin and eat him for being so annoying. Nutkin escapes by straining so hard he pulls off his own tail.
Vorkosigan Saga: In Komarr, Miles (brittle-boned from before birth) is chained up by his enemies. He recalls that on one spectacularly unpleasant occasion, he broke the bones in his hand in order to get out of cuffs; unfortunately for him, since that time he has had nearly all of his bones replaced with synthetic ones, even less breakable than normal.
Warhammer 40,000: The Greater Good: When a Tyranid spore's tentacle gets hold of Cain's leg, he can't get a clear shot at the tentacle ... but has a very clear shot at his leg. He orders Jurgen to get the medical kit and revs up his chainsword. And then the Reclaimers play Big Damn Heroes and kill the spore just in time.
In The Warlord Chronicles, Derfel faces a variant where, due to complicated circumstances that have grown up over the course of decades, his best hope of saving his wife from a Knight Templar sorceress is to cut off his own hand. He goes through with it and manages to save his wife.
Part of the backstory for Kline, the protagonist of Brian Evenson's novel Last Days. He cut off his own arm to get the drop on a Serial Killer in his last case, which sets the stage for him investigating a dark sect of voluntary amputees.

Live-Action TV

In the 3rd season finale of 24, the final canister of the virus ends up being handcuffed to Chase. With only seconds before the timer is set to go off, he gives Jack Bauer permission to chop his hand off with an ax so the canister can be removed and tossed in an airtight refrigerator to keep it from spreading.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
- In the Season 2 premiere, Hartley touches the Obelisk and her hand begins to turn to stone. Hunter manages to cut it off to save her life, but she gets killed shortly after anyway.
- In the Season 2 episode "The Writing on the Wall", Ward dislocates his thumb to escape from a pair of handcuffs.
- In the Season 2 finale, "SOS", Director Coulson catches an impure Terrigen Crystal just before it shatters on the ground and its mist kills every human in the room. The impure crystal begins to turn his hand to stone, and it is immediately cut off by Mack using a fire ax. It works this time.
American Gothic (1995): Magnificent Bastard Lucas Buck does a copy of the Mad Max situation to a bad guy in "The Strong Arm of the Law". Except the man is handcuffed to his brother, and it's his limb he has to cut off.
Lucas Buck: I don't think this knife will cut through handcuffs, but maybe a… wrist.
Lowell Stokes: C'mon, man, you know we can't cut through a wrist!
Buck: Guess that depends on how motivated you are.
Arrow: In the Season 8 episode "Purgatory", the plane where Roy Harper, René Ramirez, and Dinah Drake are traveling to Lian Yu gets shot down. When they find Roy he has an arm trapped under the wreckage. Unfortunately, the team doesn't have the luxury of time to try and remove it due to the high potential for an ensuing explosion from the remainder of the wreckage and the approach of enemy soldiers, so they are forced to amputate it so they can all escape with their lives.
Chicago Fire has this happen in the 4th season after a shipping container falls on an unfortunate victim. Moving the contain would kill the man via crush syndrome so a surgeon is called out from Chicago Med to perform the surgery in the field.
Variant in Chuck, when the eponymous hero is Chained to a Bed: he probably wouldn't have been killed, but the bad guys would no doubt have done some very nasty stuff to him. Casey tells him that handcuffs are a cinch to get out of — all you have to do is snap one little bone in your thumb — but Chuck manages to get hold of the key instead. Later in the episode Casey's forced to follow his own advice.
CSI
- One episode begins with finding a dead woman who was missing a hand. They eventually find that she had bitten it off to escape from a psycho's basement.
- In "Consumed," it looks like a cannibalistic serial killer chewed through his own wrist in order to escape, leaving his hand handcuffed to the inside of a car. It was actually staged to allow the killer to exaggerate his mystique.
CSI: NY does this in "Til Death Do We Part," except they find the hand before they find the body. Turns out the man, who was an ex-con, had been lured to an abandoned church by his old partner in crime, knocked out, and chained to the church wall. He died from a mix of blood loss (from biting off his hand), starvation, and hypothermia. According to the killer, he was going to let him out eventually and wasn't at all expecting him to bite off his own hand.
Doctor Who: In "The Angels Take Manhattan", the Doctor reads in a book written from his future that River breaks her wrist. It turns out that she has to do that to escape from a Weeping Angel. This has a fair amount of plot relevance. The Doctor also infers from the chapter names that Rory dies. He insists that River not break her wrist to escape from the Angel. The fact that she did is a bad sign since it means that the events of the book are going ahead as written. And, indeed, Rory does die. He gets better.
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Dr. Quinn prepared to do this to rescue her son Matthew from a mine collapse. Luckily, it doesn't come to that.
Farscape. In "Out of their Minds", Zhaan is able to yank her hand free of the shackle keeping her restrained. Her biology is based on plant matter rather than animal matter, so she finds it easier that a human would, but she mentions afterwards that repairing the damage will take time.
Grey's Anatomy: After an injury to her leg (from a plane crash) becomes seriously infected, Arizona Robbins asks her wife Callie not to let them cut it off, no matter what. However, when the infection takes a turn for the worse, Callie is forced to go back on her word and makes the call to have it amputated.
Hannibal:
- The fake Chesapeake ripper escapes police custody by dislocating his thumb to escape his handcuffs.
- In a later episode, Will remembers this and uses it to escape police custody in a similar way, albeit non-lethally.
In the House season 6 finale, the victim of the week gets her leg crushed under a building. To avoid crush syndrome (even though by then, it would have set in...), House and Cuddy decide to hack her leg off using a scalpel and a crude anesthetic. She was very hesitant to let them, and House agreed with her. She dies of a fat embolism on the way to the ER.
Played for laughs in a sketch on The Kids in the Hall. The sketch revolves around stereotypical French fur trappers who canoe around an office, trapping people and killing them for their suits. When one of the people chews off their own leg to escape a trap:
Francois: Shall we go after him, Jacques?
Jacques: Let that one go, Francois. He has spirit. Someday he may be vice president!
Legends of Tomorrow: Snart is handcuffed to a wall railing in Chronos' time ship and has been left unattended. He manages to reach his Cold Gun and freezes his own right hand to a solid block of ice, then smashes it against the floor. There's no bleeding, but enough pain from both the freezing process and the shattering to make the ever-stoic Snart scream out loud. Gideon's able to grow his hand back, but he didn't know that when he did it and he barely hesitated.
A variation plays out in an episode of M*A*S*H in which the OR is overloaded with casualties and some of the doctors are out of commission, where the decision is between saving one man's limb or a different man's life. The unit has developed a procedure to give them a better chance of saving limbs, and Hawkeye could probably save a patient's leg using this techique, but the delicate and complicated procedure would take time, and with the OR so understaffed, that would delay care for other patients which would probably end up costing lives. He reluctantly decides he has no choice but to just amputate the leg rather than try the procedure, as he knows he can't in good conscience prioritize saving this man's leg over saving other men's lives.
In a Season 3 episode of Nikita, Nikita and Michael are pursuing Amanda in a car chase that results in a crash with Michael's arm pinned and the car on fire and about to explode. Unwilling to leave Michael to die, Nikita is forced to cut his hand off to drag him to safety just in time.
In season 2 of Prison Break T-Bag was forced to re-sever his reattached hand to evade recapture by the police after he was left tied to a radiator by Bellick and a colleague, who were after the D.B. Cooper money he had taken.
Red Dwarf: In order to save Dave's life from the Epideme virus, they get him to agree that they'll amputate his LEFT arm, hoping to force the virus into that limb with various antiviral injections. Unfortunately, the virus migrates into the right arm, and it proves a pointless sacrifice as enough of epideme's viral pathogens remain in Lister's body so that he's only brought himself barely another hour or life.
Subverted in Rizzoli & Isles; One episode has Maura opt to have Jane cut her leg open rather than lose it to compartment syndrome following a car accident. Jane is reluctant to do this for obvious reasons, namely fear of nicking an artery and causing Maura to bleed out but is able to do so with neither life not limb being lost.
Stargate:
- In Stargate SG-1, RepliCarter attempts to flee through the Stargate, but Teal'c holds her by the arm. Being a robot, it's a simple matter to detach it, though she presumably does not feel any pain. In addition, the next time we see her, she has regrown it.
- A variant occurs in Stargate Universe, where Eli is forced to stick his arm through the event horizon of the Stargate, risking a potential Portal Cut if it deactivates, in order to keep it open and prevent the ship from jumping to FTL. If he doesn't, the team carrying the mineral needed to fix the oxygen recyclers won't make it back and they will all die of asphyxiation. Luckily, neither the team nor his limb is lost.
On Teen Wolf, Kate Argent shoots Derek in the arm with a wolf's bane bullet which, since he's a werewolf, causes an infection that will kill him if it reaches his heart. He is literally seconds away from forcing Stiles to help him cut off his arm when Scott arrives with the antidote.
Downplayed in The Holocaust docudrama Uprising (starring Hank Azaria, David Schwimmer and Donald Sutherland). During one round of deportations, several female university students are forced to have their legs broken to avoid being sent out for the current round of deportations to the death camp.
The Walking Dead (2010):
- In the first season, the zombies arrive at the rooftop where Merle Dixon has been handcuffed and abandoned by the rest of the group, and he escapes by amputating his hand with a hacksaw from the bag of tools that was conveniently dropped next to him.
- In season 3 this happens to Hershel, who is bitten on the leg, forcing the group to amputate it in an attempt to save him. It actually works.
In a round of the dating game on Whose Line Is It Anyway? (US), Wayne Brady's character is a frat boy who has woken up chained to an ugly woman (Colin Mochrie). He attempts to gnaw his arm off to escape, but fails, and is dragged all over the studio by Colin (whose character is an incompetent 1930s gangster).
The X-Files:
- The inhabitants of an isolated Russian village use amputation to render their citizens and Krycek unsuitable as test subjects for the Syndicate's black oil experiments.
- Downplayed in "Leonard Betts". It's Freedom or Finger Decision in this episode. Betts is handcuffed to a car handle and tears off his own thumb in order to escape. His choice is made easier as he knows the finger will grow again due to his accelerated Healing Factor.
Z Nation: In "Welcome to Murphytown", the Man is captured by Murphy's followers and handcuffed to his makeshift throne for interrogation. They then all go off to watch the power to their town fortress being restored, but as they return from celebrating, they find that the Man has cut his hand off to escape. And for creative points, he even took the time to ensure the hand was flipping Murphy off after being cut off.

Music

In Rob Cantor's "Shia LaBeouf", you are forced to make the decision when your leg is caught in a bear trap. Since you're lost in a forest with a murderer who's still looking for you, you gnaw off your leg to escape the trap.

Myths & Religion

Norse Mythology: The gods are finding Giant Wolf Fenrir hard to control and thus decide to bind him, claiming to the enormous wolf that it is a game. As a gesture of good faith, the god Tyr puts his hand in the wolf's mouth and when Fenrir realizes he cannot escape, he bites off Tyr's hand. The story definitely shows the god as honorable and brave, given that Odin, Thor, and others certainly didn't volunteer their limbs.
There is a Native Alaskan totem depicting a boy with his hand in the mouth of a monster. It's a giant oyster that caught him while he was fishing. According to the story, he was given a choice between losing the hand (and his chance to be a hunter) and death. He chose death.
"If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is much better for you to lose one of your limbs than to have your whole body go off to hell."

Podcasts

Merle from The Adventure Zone: Balance gets exposed to rapidly-growing crystal, forcing Magnus to chop off his arm to save him. Fortunately, he quickly gets a magical wooden replacement that he can control independently of his body.

Roleplay

Ruby Quest has the one-handed Filbert. He explains that his left hand was exposed to The Corruption, and he had to amputate it in order to remain pure. He is quite thoroughly infected regardless, but remains deeply in denial about it, even when the Body Horror starts setting in.

Tabletop Games

Deadlands: "Hogleg" Dunstan, the sheriff of Lost Angels, was handcuffed to the bed inside his own jail cell and the office set on fire around him. He escaped by cutting off his right hand.
Shadowrun's mega-badass Kid Stealth was given cement overshoes and tossed into Puget Sound by his enemies. An implanted air tank kept him from drowning long enough to tie ligatures around both legs, then blow them off at the knee with plastic explosives. (He got better... legs, that is.)

Theater

In Hanoch Levin's Everyone Wants to Live, Poznavokha tells her husband Pozna, whom she caught cheating on her with a travelling actress, to choose: either he gets castrated and she agrees as planned to allow the Grim Reaper to take her life in exchange for Pozna's, or keep his jewels till he dies by the Reaper's hand. He chooses the former. It is not pretty. Then, when the time comes, she decides not to go through with it, having felt the undertaker's muscular body...
In Peer Gynt, an individual chopped off one of his fingers not to be recruited.
Shakespeare uses this one in Titus Andronicus, albeit with a twist: the villainous Aaron tells the title character that his sons, condemned to death on false charges, will be spared execution if Titus cuts off his hand. Titus does so (after arguing with his brother and son over who gets to have their hand removed), but Aaron is just screwing with him and his sons are executed anyway. (This leads to the fabulous stage direction Enter Messenger with two heads and a hand.)

Trading Cards

All-New Series 5 of the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards has card 13 Inmate Nate/Last-Leg Luke, which depicts a prison convict sawing off his feet that have both been chained to the wall of his prison cell.
Piranha Enterprises' Killer Cards has a card named "Steel Trap" that shows a hunter with his hand stuck in a steel trap desperately trying to saw his hand off while a bunch of vicious woodland animals are approaching him.

Video Games

Happens twice in the mission Fishing in Baku in Battlefield 4. Your squad leader has one of his legs pinned under debris, which the team cuts off in order to get him to safety. Later on, the SUV you're driving plunges into a lake, and said squad leader orders you and the rest of the team to escape and leave him to his fate, instead of risk drowning with him trying to get him out with them. To that point, he hands you his revolver, and orders you to shoot out the windshield so you can escape the sinking vehicle.
In Darkest Dungeon, the Shieldbreaker was a dancer who was Made a Slave. In her attempt to escape, she ended up pinned by wreckage and had to cut off her pinned arm to free herself.
Dead Space: Extraction, just after the final boss, the main character gets impaled to the ground (well, to the hull of the Ishimura), and has to cut his arm off to break free. And it isn't a Cut Scene. The dumb part of this example is the fact that this happened in vacuum... even if he remained conscious after cutting his arm off, his suit would have depressurized long before he made it to an airlock.
The Dig has a memorable section where Brink's hand becomes stuck in the rock as it shifts while he tries to grab a life crystal in the rock, and the player has to figure out how to set him loose before gangrene or starvation sets in. Solution? Use a jagged-toothed alien jawbone to saw his goddamn hand off. He uses one of said life crystals to heal the stump but doesn't get his arm back.
An Easter Egg in Fallout 4 at the BADTFL^note regional office: one of the desks in the interrogation area is smeared with blood and has a skeletal forearm and a pair of handcuffs on it.
Heavy Rain: "Are you prepared to suffer to save your son?" You have five minutes to cut off the last section of one of your fingers in front of the camera." You have options. Some are far less pretty than others.
A drunken encounter on Kingdom of Loathing's analogue of Saint Patrick's Day can end in a "coyote moment":
You've gnawed one of your own arms off. It's gonna take a while to grow back. (Muscle -5)
In League of Legends, Twitch initially believes he'll have to do this in one of his lines when he's rooted by Caitlyn's Yordle Snap Trap:
Twitch: Now I have to gnaw my leg off... oh, no, I'm good.
LISA: The Painful plays with this trope cruelly multiple times. In one instance, Brad is forced to choose between his arm or one of his party members' lives. Losing the arm means drastically reducing Brad's stats, leaving him with only half of his combo potential, and increasing the frequency of his Joy Withdrawals, which severely limit his damage output. Losing the party member means they're permanently dead and gone forever. Later on, Brad is forced into a Sadistic Choice between the life of all his active party members or ones Buddy's nipple.
In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Raiden gets trapped under rubble during the escape from Shadow Moses Island and has to cut off his own arm to escape. Although by that point, Raiden is a human head and a spine attached to a robotic body, and he has a new arm by the end of the game.
In Mother 3, when the party first meets Kumatora, her leg is caught in a trap, and she decided to try and cut her leg off to get out of the trap. It's a good thing that your party came along when it did.
[PROTOTYPE] has General Randall, head of BLACKWATCH forces, who's left arm is missing. Diving into the Web of Intrigue, you learn that he was part of the initial operation in Hope, Idaho, and got infected with the Redlight virus. He managed to hack off the affected limb before it could spread to the rest of his body.
A complex, inverted example occurs in Resident Evil 6. During the final act in Chris Redfield's campaign, Piers' right arm is completely destroyed by debris inflicted by the enormous B.O.W. Haos, leaving Piers pinned to a wall while Chris is slowly being crushed to death by Haos' tentacle. Seeing the advanced C-virus strain out of reach, Piers chooses to sever the remnants of his arm, crawling over to the virus strain and then injecting himself with it, gaining a new bio-arm that shoots electricity, enabling himself to save Chris but dooming himself into slowly mutating beyond recovery, until he commits suicide once he ensures Chris' survival.
General Warfield from Starcraft II was hit in his arm by hydralisk spikes. He returns to base to have that arm cut off — and replaced by an Arm Cannon.
In the prologue of the Sith Warrior storyline of Star Wars: The Old Republic, it's possible to spare Overseer Tremel by telling him that all you need is a hand as proof that you killed him. He'll nonchalantly chop off one of his hands and brags that it barely tickled. Granted, this is a setting where cybernetics are readily available so it's not exactly a big deal.
The oculus from Subnautica has a tail that's split into five parallel strands. The databank's text suggests this is a defense mechanism, allowing individual strands to break off in a predator's grip while the rest of the fish swims to safety.
Tales from the Borderlands has a very unusual example of this come up in Episode 5. After Helios is destroyed, Handsome Jack uploads himself into Rhys' subsystems and takes control of his cybernetic arm, trying to use it to strangle Rhys and kill them both. Rhys is left with no choice but to pull off the arm off so Jack can't kill him with it, and then use a piece of glass to cut out his robotic eye and temple-port implants and remove Jack from his systems for good. Unlike most examples, this is a lot less permanent, as, being cybernetic, they can be (and are) later replaced.
Until Dawn: In the Sanitarium, if you examine a box with an arm sticking out of it, it turns out to be a bear trap, which clamps down on two of Mike's fingers. You must then choose whether to use a machete to cut those fingers off or open the trap with it, which breaks the machete, leaving you unarmed.
Comes up often in The Walking Dead video game:
- At the very start of Episode 2, the protagonist Lee finds a man caught in a bear-trap, with zombies being drawn to his cries for help. You can choose to either leave the man to his fate or cut his leg off to free him. Doesn't matter in the end, as he ends up dying from blood loss if you cut off his leg.
- The player is presented with this choice again early on in Episode 5. This time, the choice is whether or not to cut off Lee's bitten arm. Again, subverted in that Lee eventually dies, either by turning or having Clementine shoot him, no matter what choice is made, probably since he and whoever you brought along with you to save Clementine waited too long to even consider cutting it off.
- In Episode 3 of Season 2, the group meets Reggie, a man who was in this situation before and had his arm cut off quickly enough so that the infection didn't spread. At the end of the episode, Clementine is given the option of doing this to Sarita when she's being attacked by a walker, though regardless of your decisions, she dies in the next episode, either from being eaten by walkers or blood loss/sepsis.
- Comes up in Episode 4 of The Final Season, but with a very unique twist in that although it's your limb, someone else decides for you. Clementine, while escaping a group of walkers with AJ, is bitten on her leg, which is already heavily lacerated. She immediately accepts her fate, but AJ is devastated at the idea of either executing the girl who's been with him and taken care of him since birth or watching her turn into a walker. The two of them make it to a barn, with Clem looking like she's on death's door, and after she prepares AJ to go find his way back to their friends and goes over with him the fundamentals of surviving, she gives him instructions to other kill her or leave her. Cue a Smash to Black, and you're suddenly playing within a flashback sequence, all while thinking that Clem has died. But once the game returns to present day, you find out that no matter what you told him to do, AJ decided to Take a Third Option and instead bring down his axe to the lower half of Clem's leg, stopping the infection in the nick of time. She's grateful that chose to do what he thought was right and "make the hard call."
Warcraft:
- Zul'jin is revealed in the Zul'Aman cinematic to have cut off his own arm to escape from High Elves who had captured him and had been torturing him (the torture is how he lost his eye). This is an odd case in that Trolls of the series can normally regenerate limbs including arms unless cursed or forsaken by their Loa Gods, but Zul'jin is still missing the parts years after the event, making it unclear as to how much a sacrifice he thought he was making.
- The Orc hero Kargath did something similar, cutting off his own hand in order to escape from a set of shackles that the ogres had used to enslave him. He then grafted a Blade Below the Shoulder onto his wrist, inspired the other orcs who were enslaved with him to do the same, led those who did in a revolution against their ogre masters, and founded an orc clan known as The Shattered Hand.
Rudy from Wild ARMs cuts off his own arm to free himself from the grappling hook-like thing which the demon Ziekfried has ensnared him with when he realizes his sword can't cut through the cord. In the remake, wherein he doesn't use a knife, he uses his gun to blow his arm off, instead.
Played with in Xenoblade Chronicles 3. In the second fight with D, Eunie manages to pin him down by his arms with her Ouroboros weapons, and he simply tears them away by struggling (not expecting to be impeded due to a Healing Factor). Eunie simply responds by stepping hard upon his head afterwards, and tears her own leg away (having the same factor) to leave him pinned against a piece of machinery that is falling away and exploding.

Visual Novels

The choice is made on behalf of one character in Shito Shoujo. In order to save Kuchiki Toko, the hospital opts for limb removal due to her poor condition. However, by this point, most of the limbs probably wouldn't have worked well anyway.
In Virtue's Last Reward, all players of the Nonary Game are outfitted with bracelets on their left arms that will inject them with a lethal dose of muscle relaxant, disabling their lungs and suffocating them to death, if they either break a rule or lose all of their Bracelet Points. You can see where this is going. On one route, Dio extorts Sigma into picking Ally against him in the following AB Game, knowing full well Dio will pick Betray. This brings Dio up to 9 BP, which allows him to open the Number 9 Door and escape, and brings Sigma below 0. Sigma uses the closing Number 9 Door to chop off his left arm before he recieves the injection. For some reason, he needs to learn that his arms have been replaced with cybernetics on a different route first, or else he'll never think of doing this, even though it would work just as well with a real arm. And for those wondering, the cybernetic arms consist of enough artificial flesh and blood that a lethal injection would still be lethal to him, so yes, he did need to cut it off to save himself here.

Web Animation

This happens once in Glitchtale Season 1 where after getting his knife arm pinned in place by Flowey to allow Sans to get a hit in, Chara simply tosses his knife to his free arm and slices the other arm off to avoid the attack, HATE makes this a temporary issue.
The Happy Tree Friends short "Out on a Limb" has Lumpy get his leg stuck under a fallen tree, forcing him to cut it off with a freaking spoon. Made worse by the fact that he accidentally cuts off the wrong leg. The short ends with him biting down on his severed leg and begin to cut off the other leg with a paper clip.
HFIL: Cell attempts this in episode 2 by taking gardening shears to his leg to get rid of the Power Limiter keeping him in the titular HFIL, only to find out that souls are indestructible in the afterlife. Raditz noted that he tried the same thing. The funny thing is that while it's downplayed with Cell since he can regenerate new limbs, Raditz doesn't have that luxury.
RWBY: This happens to Ironwood in volume 7. In a fight against Watts, Ironwood finds himself trapped in a Hard Light shield. Trying to free himself flays the skin off his non-cybernetic arm. He ultimately pulls himself free, burning his arm to a crisp in the process, to catch Watts off guard. Ironwood claims he will sacrifice whatever it takes to achieve victory, and his permanently scarred arm is used as a visual indicator of such. Later, at the start of Volume 8, it's revealed that his burned arm had to be amputated and replaced with a cybernetic prosthetic.

Webcomics

In Bite Me!, the gang faces off against a magical mechanical monstrosity. At this point, cowardly main character Hunter is the most useless member of the group, since while his True Companions Chuck, Andrew, and Haruka have flame-spewing gloves, earthquake boots, and spinning guillotine blades, respectively, he cannot even lift the massive sword he was given (nor does he believe it's sentient, which it is, and it thinks he's a dumbass). After his entire team is slaughtered by this monster, in his first act of heroism, Hunter plunges his hand into the monster's mouth to grab the heart-shaped artifact giving it life. The creature promptly bites his hand off, but thanks to his unexpected distraction both sides live to fight another day. Naturally, this event kicks off his Taking a Level In Badass.
Girl Genius:
- When Dimo is hit in the hand by a spray of Corrosive Poison from glowing slug-like monsters, he feels it moving up his arm and urges Oggie to "Hurry!". Oggie dutifully chops Dimo's limb with his axe. Oggie shortly wonders if it was the right arm, but seeing it literally melt a few seconds later confirms there was no mistake.
  Lars: Remind me to never tell you guys when I have a headache.
- Tweedle takes a poisoned smoke knight dagger to the left hand. He eventually cuts it off to stop the poison, and Agatha creates a prosthetic replacement for it while sleep-sparking (as she'd be unlikely to voluntarily help the brute).
Goblins:
- Biscuit cuts off his own leg with an axe after being infected by Mr. Fingers' flesh-rotting curse.
- Well, more like Someone Else's Life-or-Limb Decision, but Dies-Horribly cuts his metal arm after it goes out of control and tries to kill Saves-a-Fox.
- Big Ears cuts off Complains's hand when Complains has a pearl magically stuck to it that's about to explode.
It might not be a life-or-death decision, but in Homestuck Caliborn frees himself from his sister's chain by chewing his own leg off.
Jack: Faced with being dragged down into Drip's reach, Megan tells her rescuer to chop off her tail to allow them to escape. Notably, she isn't the one screaming about it after the deed is done.
Looking for Group. Warlock Richard is bound by a set of enchanted shackles that are drawing their power from him. The group's healer severs his arms in order to deprive the shackles of their power source, rendering them inert. Subverted in that Richard doesn't appear to be able to feel pain, and that Benny's powers make reattaching his arms a simple matter.
In Schlock Mercenary, a murder case where an arms dealer's severed hand seemed to have died several minutes after the rest of him turned out to be an instance of this. The victim was actually his clone who had attempted to assassinate him, he got fried but during the fight, the original's hand got trapped under a fallen cabinet so he had to cut it off.
In the Team Fortress 2, Zhanna cuts her hand off to escape handcuffs so she can save herself and Soldier from being tortured and killed. This is, of course, Played for Laughs.
Two Lumps: Played for Laughs after Snooch gets a claw snagged in Mom's new couch.
Eben: ...the TRAPPED leg, lardbrain.
Unsounded: Duane wakes to find his body well restrained and suspended with Ana about to Core Leach him, he quickly detaches one hand to free himself of the anti-spellwright cuffs so that he can cast back at her. Given his Undead state removing a hand is a less daunting task than it would be for some.
A variation occurs in Within a Mile of Home, since Jinjo was unconscious and could not make the choice himself, Frim decided to amputate Jinjo's crushed right arm in order to save his life.

Web Videos

In Glove and Boots' video "Jigsaw Puzzle", in order to get out of the handcuffs, Mario cuts Fafa's arm off with a hacksaw.
Fafa: Did you have to cut it off at the shoulder? I don't even got no nub!
Mario: A difficult decision had to be made!
In Star Trek: Renegades, during one of the visits Chekov's granddaughter pays to him, his Number Two detects the presence of a molecular explosive in her hand, programmed to go off in Chekov's presence. Unfortunately, the device is already active and is about to explode. The only thing left to do is phaser her hand off. She agrees after a moment's hesitation, and Chekov then performs an emergency beam-out with her to Starfleet Medical. She survives.

Western Animation

American Dad!:
- "Tears of a Clooney" features Stan chaining Francine to stop her from killing George Clooney. She reappears, confusing Stan, and then she shows off her lack of a hand.
- Parodied and played for laughs in the episode "She Swill Survive": when the CIA sends agents to kill Hayley, one of them gets his foot stuck to the ground with maple syrup. Another agent tells him to "leave it", so he nonchalantly shoots his leg off and hops away.
Parodied in Animaniacs when Yakko, stuck shaking hands with Pip Pumphandle, starts gnawing on his arm in desperation after trying numerous other means to free himself.
The Biker Mice from Mars episode "Verminator" has Modo forced to remove his robotic arm to avoid getting run over. After his robotic arm ends up too damaged for Charley to repair it, he's forced to wear his damaged prosthetic in a sling until Vinnie can trick Dr. Karbunkle into giving him a replacement.
In the second-to-last episode of Castlevania (2017), Trevor gets a hit on Dragan with his morning star whip, which is consecrated and causes any vampire it strikes to undergo rapid combustion. As soon as he notices what's happening, Dragan tears of the arm Trevor hits and throws it as a grenade, handily taking Trevor out of the battle.
In DuckTales (2017), Della Duck gets her left leg trapped under wreckage after her rocket ship crashes on the moon. She tries pulling it out, but it doesn't work and another piece of wreckage is about to fall on her. She frees herself by amputating her own leg (offscreen) and sports a metal leg for the rest of the series.
On the El Tigre special "The Good, the Bad, and El Tigre", Manny tried using his extendable arm to catch Django of the Dead, only for him to set the chain on fire, leaving Manny no other option than to cut it off. Good thing he has a spare at home...
This "coyote moment" comparison was used for great fun in a chapter of The Fairly OddParents! where Timmy, accosted by his neurotic, overdemanding crush, began to nervously chew the arm she is holding, and the girl immediately quotes the coyote metaphor and correctly guesses his intentions. Albeit no limb was chopped, the intention was there.
Parodied on Futurama, when a hopelessly Slurm-addicted Fry makes a Soft Drink or Limb Decision and attempts to chew off his own arms so he can fit through a grating in pursuit of the Royal Slurm.
In Justice League, Orm shackles Aquaman and his son to a boulder that is slowly sliding into a lava crevice. Aquaman manages to break the chain binding his right hand, takes his belt buckle and starts trying to use it to cut through the other chain. Seeing that this is taking too long, he quickly realizes he could get through his own wrist much faster.
Love, Death & Robots: In "Helping Hand", an astronaut is adrift in space, having been separated from her craft. Her propulsion and oxygen systems are damaged, so the only option she has left is to take a glove off of her spacesuit and hurl it away, hoping that Newton's Third Law will push her back to the ship. It doesn't quite work, so she tries again with her now-frozen hand.
Subverted when the squad are forced to wear tracking devices in The Penguins of Madagascar:
Private: How long will it take to saw through the bracelet, Skipper?
Skipper: Bracelet? I was just going to saw off my foot. But you might have something there, Private.
The Simpsons:
- Subverted when Homer has his arms trapped inside two vending machines. The fire department are about to cut one of his hands off, when it's revealed that he just won't let go of the can.
- A Treehouse of Horror episode parodies the Aron Ralston incident (see Real Life section) when Homer gets his arm trapped under some boulders while hiding in the Springfield badlands to eat some Halloween candy and has to chew off his own arm. After many pain-filled hours, he notices he chewed off THE WRONG ARM and has to do it all over again. Then he somehow chews off his leg. Then he discovers that Bart and Lisa took the candy, since it was theirs in the first place, and replaced it with vegetables.
South Park: Although it happens offscreen, at the start of one episode, Cartman is being reprimanded for handcuffing a kid to the school flagpole then telling him he slipped poison into his milk and he would have to saw through his own ankle to get to the antidote. Just because the kid called him fat.
Played for laughs in SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Idiot Box", when SpongeBob and Patrick decided to play Mountain Climbing Adventure! Their constant yelling and laughing triggered an avalanche.
Patrick: SpongeBob! My legs are frozen solid! You're going to have to cut them off with a saw!
SpongeBob: No Patrick, I can't do that!
Patrick: Why not?
SpongeBob: Because I already cut off my own arms!
Patrick: NOOOOOO!
Wander over Yonder:
- Played for laughs in the episode "The Hole Lotta Nuthin'", when Lord Hater ends up getting his finger stuck in a black hole, and decides to pull his own skeletal arm out of its socket and leave it there rather than put up with any more of Wander's insufferable cheeriness. He ends up getting a bionic replacement visually identical to the original at the end of the episode.
- It's played straight for a moment in the episode "The End of the Galaxy", when Lord Dominator yanks Wander close to her and holds him captive. Rather than fight back, Wander attempts to gnaw off his own arm and escape.

Real Life

This deer. Having escaped from a trap and lost both back hooves, it then proceeded to agonizingly walk around on its exposed leg bones for weeks, maybe even months, until it was (mercifully) shot by a hunter.
- Speaking of deer, occasionally a stag will get its antlers inextricably tangled in branches, fence wire, or other debris. While this can easily spell death by thirst and starvation for the encumbered animal, in rare springtime cases it may shake itself loose after all, because its antlers are due to fall off naturally at that time of year.
Coyotes are supposed to chew their own leg off if they get caught in a trap. This leads to the expression "coyote moment". Probably irrelevant, it's about dating: "When you wake up with them sleeping on your arm, and would rather chew it off than wake them."
Many lizards have tails that cleanly break away from their bodies when a predator grabs them by it. Often the tail continues to twitch after such self-amputation, as a further distraction for the predator. Interestingly enough, this can sometimes be a win-win for both the lizard and the predator; not only does the lizard escape with its life, but the predator will occasionally settle for eating the lizard's tail after it breaks off.
Sloughing off the skin of one's tail when it's grabbed or caught on something is a common defense for many long-tailed rodents:
- The skin around a gerbil's tail can fall off to let it escape from predators. The internal skeletal structure falls off a couple days later.
- If you see a squirrel with a less-fluffy tail than usual, that's probably what happened to it.
- This (along with terrible pain) is why pet rats should never be lifted by their tails.
Truth in Television: Aron Ralston, number six on the Cracked article "7 People Who Cheated Death (Then Kicked It in the Balls)". While mountain climbing, one of his arms got trapped under a fallen boulder... so he cut it off. With a penknife. A dull penknife. It was sharp when he started out, but he first tried to use it as a lever to get the rock off, dulling the blade. He had to snap the bone completely in two before he could start cutting. Even worse, Aron decided to wait a few days, hopeful that someone would come and rescue him. No one ever came. So he had to cut off his own arm, with a dull penknife, while dying of thirst. And then he had to survive climbing back down the mountain! Word of God is he waited the exact right amount of time. Any longer, and he would have been too weak to reach help before dying of blood loss. Any earlier, and the search would not have been developed enough to get him medicated in time once he did find help to save him from bleeding out. This incident has been made into a 2010 movie: 127 Hours, starring James Franco.
In 2010, a similar thing happened to a man named Jonathan Metz, whose arm became trapped behind his boiler when he tried to clean behind it. He realized that not only was he going to die if he didn't cut his arm off, so was his pet beagle Portia, who was wandering around upstairs, hungry and confused as to why he had disappeared and whose barking fits were becoming shorter and less frequent, coinciding with his own weakening state. Much like the Ralston example, his timing was perfect—the arm had become gangrened enough that it was relatively painless, and police and EMS crews were converging on his house, alerted by friends who were alarmed by his disappearance.^note
During the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bomb, it was stated that if you accidentally poked a limb with a plutonium-contaminated tool, the only recourse was swift amputation.
There was one instance of a man who caught a ball of cobalt-60 and had his hand amputated. This would not have been necessary as Plutonium nuclides are actually pretty benign, as far as radiation goes. However, this was not known at the time, like most of the properties of plutonium (which was only just available in macroscopic quantities and only because of the bomb effort itself). The two incidents with the Demon Core only served to further elevate fears about the lethality of the stuff.
Any war before WWII, when antibiotic drugs were invented. Before antibiotics, gangrene was almost unpreventable when wounds got infected. In fact, the civil war hospital where a guy gets a shot of whiskey and a block of wood to bite on while they saw off his legs should be a trope of its own. Considering the effect that .75 caliber Civil War-era bullets would have on an arm or a leg, you could get shot today in the most advanced hospital available and still lose the affected limb.
Horrifically subverted in Sierra Leone's own civil war, when rebel war criminals would ask their victims, "Short sleeves or long?", then amputate their hands at either the elbow (short) or the wrist (long). Either way, victims' survival depended on whether the bleeding could be stopped, not on what they chose. Some rebels practiced a straight version of the trope, merely asking "Hand or head".
Crossed with Dark Comedy in the warnings on some large woodchippers — something to the effect of "Do not stick arms or legs into machine — machine can pull you in faster than you can let go of limb."
Occasionally invoked by rescue workers to retrieve victims of auto pileups or collapsed buildings.
Emergency medical responders have the basic rule "Life over limb." While this doesn't usually involve amputation, it does mean that given the choice between risk of death by not moving them because they have an unsecured spinal injury as opposed to moving them out of the immediate life-threatening situation and risking spinal damage, well, they might end up in a wheelchair but they'll be alive to do so.
This news story about a man who was forced to cut off his own arm when it was caught in a hay baler in order to stop himself being dragged in.
Frostbite occurs when someone's physiology makes a Life Or Limb Decision of its own, withdrawing blood flow from the extremities in a desperate attempt to keep the body's core, and the vital organs inside, from freezing. Better to sacrifice digits, earlobes, nose, or even whole hands and feet than to lose the brain or viscera.
Bella Swan: N-n-n-nobody really n-n-n-n-needs all ten t-t-t-toes.
"If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away," etc. (see the Religion section above). Well, the Church Father Origen took this advice quite literally. However, it wasn't his hand that was doing the sinning.
Octopuses can regrow arms, so they've been known to leave an arm to get eaten and swim away, or even to eat their own arms in times of extreme starvation.
This crayfish in China detached its own claw to avoid a death in a boiling soup pot. He was later adopted as a pet.
For years, it was believed that this would be the case if one had to apply a tourniquet for more than a few minutes. Tourniquets will stop bleeding by cutting off circulation to the limb, and it was long assumed that this would result in loss of said limb (or at least part of it) if left in place long enough. For this reason, tourniquets were only recommended in cases where a person's life was in danger from bleeding out of a wound (a literal life-or-limb situation). However, recent research conducted by the US military has proven that a tourniquet can be safely left in place for up to 45 minutes without requiring amputation. Tourniquets are now recommended in cases where direct pressure has not controlled the bleeding, and the patient will reach the hospital within 45 minutes.
Downplayed: At least some bugs are able to detach a limb to save themselves without too much fuss. They've got more of them to spare than we do, and some — spiders, for example — are able to regenerate lost limbs. This is demonstrated often by pest control glue-traps, in which it's not uncommon to find a lone cockroach leg with no sign of its original owner.
This is often why glue pads are not considered to be a humane alternative for mouse traps if you want to catch the mouse without killing it. If not found and released in time, a desperate mouse might try to chew its limbs off to escape, and consequently bleed out, and that's if it doesn't die from the stress.
During the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a portion of the upper deck of the Nimitz Freeway collapsed. Rescue workers had no choice but to cut through the body of a woman to extract her son from their crushed car, eventually amputating his right leg as well.
When she was an infant, young British girl Tilly Lockey had to be amputated of both hands, which were necrotizing due to meningococcal septicaemia, so it wouldn't spread to the rest of her body. She went on to demonstrate prosthetics made by Open Bionics.

Life-or-Limb Decision

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Life-or-Limb Decision

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