Thursday, July 12, 2012

The Deadliest Animals in the United States

What are the deadliest animals in the United States? Dr. Joseph Forrester and some of his colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently answered that question in a paper titled "Fatalities From Venomous and Nonvenomous Animals in the United States (1999–2007)."

If wondering which animals and critters to avoid, here's a list of the top 10 most deadliest animals:

1) Mammals, including cats, cows, horses, pigs, raccoons, and other hoofed animals.

2) Hornets, wasps, and bees.

3) Dogs.

4) Nonvenomous insects or nonvertebrates.

5) Nonvenomous snakes and lizards, alligators, or crocodiles.

6) Venomous spiders.

7) Venomous arthropods that weren't spiders, scorpions, centipedes and millipedes.

8) Venomous snakes and lizards.

9) Marine animals.

10) Crocodiles and alligators.

Interestingly, bears didn't even make the top 10! The Outisde Magazine blog has a break down on the number of deaths associated with each of these categories if you wish to look more in depth at the study.



Sedona HIking said...

Honestly the list surprised me. I was thinking the venomous creatures would be on top of the list. I suppose they're dangerous only when we stumble into their territory and don't have the good sense to leave them alone.

Jack McCarron said...

Being horse people (no, we don't look like them, we ride them) we were surprised to see that the highest percentage of deaths is due to mammals, including cats, cows, horses, pigs, raccoons, and other hoofed animals, averaging about 200 deaths/year, Checking your reference plus a few others, we learned that within this category, the highest percentage was from farm animals (surprise!) - specifically horses and cows. However, the numbers did not include the deaths resulting from accidents where the people were riding the animals, or were in a vehicle pulled by an animal. Those totaled over 100/year. Added to this is an average of 217 fatalities a year due to vehicle crashes with animals on roadways.

To put this in perspective, there are about 54 deaths/year due to lightening, over 32,000 due to highway accidents, and 2.4 roughly MILLION due to illness and disease. Makes me a bit less worried about getting tossed off my horse, and more concerned about a healthy diet, exercise and vitamins!

Do you know which trails in the Smoky's permit horseback riding?

Jack McCarron

The Smoky Mountain Hiker said...

Jack - yes, you always have to look at the data that supports a statistic. Numbers can "lie".

There are more than 800 miles of trails in the Smokies - I would say at least half of those miles allow horses. Your best bet is to purchase a Nat Geo map or obtain Nat Park map when you enter the park to see which trails allow horses - it's a laundry list!


raul chitna said...
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