Anyone know how many people have been killed by their captive snake in the United States ever? I am trying to find a statistic to compare it to the number of people killed by dogs to show the overratedness of snake deaths. Can anyone help me out?
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Snake Deaths
Agoudi
Oct 27, 2003 09:54 PM
Replies (1)
oldherper
Oct 28, 2003 06:50 AM
I don't know that, and I'm not sure how you'd come up with an accurate number. For that matter, I'm not sure you you'd come up with a number for how many people have been killed throughout history by other pets.
If you were to come up with reasonable accurate numbers though, you still would not have a meaningful comparison. You also have to take into account that there far, far fewer people keeping snakes than there are keeping dogs. It would have to be expressed in a deaths per 100,000 type of thing. Then you have to take into account what percentage of the dog related deaths involved trained attack type dogs, etc. and what percentage of the snake related deaths involved venomous species, how many were legally held, how many were illegally held, etc.
Big undertaking (no pun intended).
