Gators blamed for some 10 fatalities in 55 years
Thursday, June 19, 2003 Posted: 4:42 PM EDT (2042 GMT)
Statistics show that dogs lead in attacks on people
(CNN) --While Wednesday's fatal attack on a 12-year-old boy in central Florida
has thrown a spotlight on alligators, several animals are known to take human
lives at a higher rate than those swimming reptiles.
Dogs, snakes, bears, spiders, deer and sharks are among the creatures that also
kill people with some regularity, and several with more frequency than gators.
From 1948 to 1999, there were 248 confirmed alligator attacks in Florida, with
nine fatalities reported from those attacks, according to the Florida Game and
Fresh Water Fish Commission.
But beyond alligators:
• According to a five-year study in the journal Pediatrics, there are 18
fatalities a year on average in the United States from dog attacks.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that roughly 800,000
dog bites are serious enough each year to require stitches. The American
Veterinary Medical Association reports that Rottweilers surpassed pit bulls in
the 1990s as the breed responsible for the most fatal attacks.
• The worldwide annual average of shark attacks against humans during the 1990s
was 54, according to the International Shark Attack File.
• Once nearly extinct, mountain lions mounted 37 attacks on hikers in the 1990s,
according to researcher Thomas Jay Chester. Seven of those attacks were fatal,
he said.
• Venomous snakes claimed an average of 15 lives per year in the United States.
According to the CDC, 7,000 non-fatal snakebites are reported annually.
• There have been 45 fatal bear attacks in North America since 1900, according
to the University of Calgary in Canada.
• Spider bites have killed 15 in Texas since 1980, according to that state's
agriculture department.
Ruthless human behavior often merits comparison to animals such as sharks,
rattlesnakes and pit bulls. If you go by the numbers, however, the most frequent
domestic killer of human beings is the white-tailed deer.
According to estimates by the U.S. Department of Transportation and the
insurance industry, collisions between cars and deer result in an average of
more than 130 human deaths per year.
It doesn't come cheaply to the deer: Such accidents took the lives of 47,555
deer in Wisconsin alone last year, according to that state's transportation
department. The average insurance bill for a deer run-in is $2,100, according to
the American Automobile Association.
Worldwide, even the mighty deer takes a back seat to the king of the killers:
Through its transmission of malaria, the West Nile virus and other diseases, the
mosquito claims thousands of human lives each year.
CNN's Peter Dykstra contributed to this report.
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