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Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

To put this in a perspective,

   1 Mosquito       1,000,000
   2 Human            475,000
   3 Snake             50,000
   4 Dog               25,000
   5 Tsetse Fly        10,000
   6 Assassin Bug      10,000
   7 Freshwater Snail  10,000
   8 Ascaris Roundworm  2,500
   9 Tapeworm           2,000
  10 Crocodile          1,000
  11 Hippopotamus         500
  12 Elephant             100
  13 Lion                 100
  14 Wolf                  10
  15 Shark                 10

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-animals-that-kill-mo...

View on HN

   0 Traffic        1,350,000

Sort of weird to limit the Human category to, apparently, conflict, war, murders, and acts of terrorism. Also, it's horrible that conflict, war, murders, and acts of terrorism are in the same ballpark as traffic deaths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... (2016)

The human category is limited, I believe, to intentional killing. Otherwise you open up a whole can of worms about macroeconomic trolley problems. (Am I killing people right now by making insufficiently-optimal donations to charity?)

Presumably if you're speeding or driving while intoxicated, you're doing so intentionally. It's not as if someone is forcing you to drive too fast or too drunk. These things (especially speeding) dramatically increase the likelihood of being in a collision.

Your aim isn't to kill anybody. A careless maintenance worker in a factory also doesn't intent to kill someone when he intentionally skips a job. Or a shopkeeper when he sells cigarettes to a customer. You would end up including nearly all deaths as caused by humans if you go down that road. The bus driver who gave an overweight person a ride instead of making them walk.

Well, my point was that most automobile collisions aren't 'accidents' in the true sense of the word, and most automobile related injuries (and deaths) occur when someone does something negligent. The vast majority of collisions are caused by some combination of being distracted, intoxication, speeding, or just being reckless. Deaths (or serious injuries for that matter) rarely occur at low speeds, it's most often in situations that involve speeding.

There's a lot of data[0][1][2][3] to back up the correlation between speed and deaths, that's the whole focus of vision zero[4].

[0]: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...

[1]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding

[2]: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safe...

[3]: https://www.curbed.com/2017/7/28/16051780/us-traffic-death-s...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero

Negligence implies a standard of reasonable care.

Is it appropriate to apply a universal standard, or the standard of the person who was involved in the event?

It depends on what you want to calculate. I think in a way, the latter is more objective than using an arbitrary single standard.

But how do you exclude all those other causes? We know that cigarettes kill people too so if you intentionally sell them to somebody, you're being reckless or negligent too. It's a continuum so where do you draw the line? At breaking the law? That's arbitrary and depends on the country.

It's difficult issue.

While I think that we should totally put the blame on drunk drivers, I would still make a distinction between negligence and intentionality.

Saying that drunk drivers intentionally kill people opens the door to saying that bad doctors kill people, bad medicine teachers kill people, people who vote for the wrong politicians kill people, politicians who enact bad laws kill people, etc.

At that point the discussion devolves into "your party kills people because your ideology is wrong", "no, yours is"

"Malfeasance" is the general term for doing something bad (usually professionally) for your own gain (or your own laziness), that can end up harming others, but where this is not the goal per se, just something that is an "acceptable loss" for your gain. An engineer who doesn't bother to verify the safety of a design before signing off on it, is committing malfeasance.

We distinguish this from "malice", which is when you do something with the direct intent to cause harm. An engineer who verifies that a design causes harm, and signs off on it because they want to cause harm, is being malicious.

Malfeasance is a crime, but it's one we actually can't catch very well, which is the reason we can't "do statistics" on it. Unlike with murder (where we almost always know that somebody caused someone's death, even if we don't know who; and therefore we can work out the statistics even without resolving the perpetrators); we have no idea (without thorough, expensive investigations that don't usually happen) how many of the e.g. buildings that fell over, fell over because of malfeasance, rather than because of a complex accident.

It doesn’t have to be this abstract, though. This will likely change in the next 20 years.

Consider the move from horse drawn carriages to vehicles.

It was an acceptable risk that anyone might be permanently disabled due to being kicked in the head or trampled by a horse.

This might be a horse you are simply walking past. Or one that is spooked and running down the street. The owner of the horse beared little to no responsibility.

Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.

It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”

In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.

Just as it does not make sense that a horse would be tied up outside Trader Joe’s and due to a spook permanently disable you as you exit the store.

It will seem so primitive to have such loose controls on cars that if you chose to drive a manually controlled car killing someone will likely be seen as dangerous enough of a choice that a person would be held liable for manslaughter.

I don’t disagree with the principles you’re standing up for here; but we’re not having an ethical argument, we’re talking about what went into the author’s analysis. And AFAICT, in said analysis, they just took for “human deaths caused by humans”, the set of deaths where one human thought “I want that other human to die”, and then caused that to happen. Situations with legal mens rea for killing.

Ok, but that makes it incompatible for comparison with the other animals killing humans. In some cases maybe (sharks, wolves, lions, crocodiles) the animal could be actively wanting the human to die, but in others (freshwater snails, tapeworms, mosquitoes), that's probably not the case.

Peace talks sometimes work. Asking sharks to tone down the chomping does not. There is no point to differentiating ‘attack vs incidental’ animal deaths in the same way as w humans...

I'm not sure if you are equating horses and cars or not. Are you saying the risk of either is unacceptable?

I don't know if horses were statistically more or less dangerous than cars, but I feel like when I read about a random historical figure from before cars it's pretty common they died from a riding accident.

Today, horses are allowed on public streets and not regarded as particularly deadly, at least in my locale. In particular, the police ride them during public events.

I have, on occasion, ridden a horse, a bicycle, a motorcycle, driven a car, and ridden in planes. The only time I was seriously injured was on a bicycle.

> In particular, the police ride them during public events.

Horses give excellent visibility, they can stand and walk slowly, the take less space than a car, they are fast if needed and people tend to move away from a moving horse quite naturally

I feel like maybe I misread your post. Perhaps I didn't understand the larger point you were making.

> Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.

There were many years at the beginning of the automobile where laws were created[1] to save humans, horses, and livestock from being run into by automobiles or locomotives. After enough of society was normalized to the existence of large guided missiles, these ways were dismantled.

> It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”

It's not 1st degree murder (usually), but the circumstances of a traffic collision do sometimes bring felony convictions. Society has absorbed the risk and people have adapted.

Interesting note: US and Euro cars can't be homogenized because the US NHTSA tends to assume that passengers don't wear seatbelts (so manufacturers optimize for fewer injuries with that assumption) whereas the Euro equivalent assumes that all passengers do wear seat belts and optimize for that assumption.

> In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.

I think future people will be capable of some amount of empathy with people who came before them who had to deal with inferior technology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws

A million people killed by cars prevents five million from dying how?

Cars are obviously important for the economy which provides money for all life saving things. Stopping all driving would certainly cause many deaths.

American has three times the traffic death rate of the Britain and six times of Norway’s. What’s the benefit?

Based on the statistics I have seen, if the US took Sweden's approach to the current epidemic (which has been recently held up as a model on HN and elsewhere) and got similar results, an additional 30,000 people would have died thus far. I haven't seen anyone bring this up and ask for an accounting of the benefit that is greater.

While there has been a high death rate in Sweden, especially in elderly homes which weren't isolated properly, you have to be careful when comparing stats between countries. Sweden seems to file more deaths as COVID, instead of just attributing it as death by age, heart attack, or some other unexplained reason, including those dying in elderly care and not only those in hospitals.

Here is a more complete summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945974 NYC had 30% increase of unexplained deaths recent months, whereas Sweden had -4%.

Ranking countries is not the point; the point is that people who endlessly lecture on why the US is inferior have no particular preference for whether 30,000 more or fewer Americans die, so rhetoric pretending to be concerned about highway deaths seems vapid and insincere.

You seem to be confirming that you are one of those people for whom a conversation that mentions the US can have no fixed point other than how inferior it is to Europe or the Nordic countries. Which is what I'm annoyed by. It's the lack of genuine dialog that is the issue.

Agreed. If you just believed it all, you'd think Nordic countries never do anything wrong and other countries should just do what they do. But they're in a league of their own. And sorry to say but it's minor leagues in the world stage. You can't just mimic what might work there if you're in a completely different league.

Uh huh, I said Norway. The point is that not every cost has a benefit. If you're so offended by international comparisons, check out US states:

https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/states/occupant_death...

I don't know that California (4.2 deaths per 100,000) would be somehow more productive if people died form cars at the rate of Missouri (10.2).

Inventing just about everything ever? America also has 50% more GDP per capita than the UK. Perhaps the extra 200% traffic deaths are needed to provide that boost.

I'm not going to argue this directly, but I can provide evidence of how vital I think ordinary people consider highway transportation. It reminds me of a scandal in the US that you may or may not have heard of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lee_lane_closure_scandal

What makes you think mosquitos are deliberately spreading malaria?

One of them told me so.

Oh, they probably talk too fast for me to understand. I just heard a high-pitched buzzing sound.

There were several interviews on CNN. Apparently some mosquitos do talk to press.

I mean it’s pretty clear that traffic deaths are humans killing humans. We don’t need to wring our hands over some imagined slippery slope.

Personally I think they should just skip the human category. I mean, if I die of old age aren't I sort of being killed by a human? ok maybe that is a stretch, but how about if I catch the flu from another person? Is it the flu or the other person that got me?

Here is what the article from worldatlas.com meant, in context:

> Approximately 475,000 people die every year at the hand of fellow man. In a world filled with conflict, war, murders, and acts of terrorism, this is unfortunately not that surprising. Deaths among humans are intentional and pre-calculated making them beyond tragic.

    1.5  Suicides   800 000

The traffic, and suicides, are the two main dangerous things for younger people in non-malaria and not-a-war zones.

I was in an a little bit conflict zone recently, and people asked if I was worried and said I should be careful. They didn't know -- the local people living there -- that the traffic is 100 times more dangerous than the slightly ongoing conflict. They just look at the news and feel worried about whatever the newspapers write about, which is _not_ the traffic.

Reading you, I wonder what would be the collective psychological effect if the relative risks were correctly assessed in our day-to-day routine.

I think people would realize they're not that different from those other people in that other place -- they all share the same main problems.

And maybe people would realize they're being manipulated by media and the "presidents" who own the media -- those presidents tend to get more votes, the more afraid people are for each other.

> collective psychological effect

Maybe peace?

And fewer traffic accidents, more subways and trains. Better mental care

It's clearly from the result of attacks. Like Rabies.

Traffic is not an attack.

Cows or the sugar plant depending on who you believe if we are counting anything. We attack them and we die.

Poor sharks, they get one of the worst raps for how little damage they do to humans. I'm surprised to see dogs so high up on that list.

Well, think about it. A mosquito bite seems harmless, while getting torn to pieces by a shark, in a medium where you cannot even run it is scary as hell.

I suspect dogs aren’t particularly deadly, it’s just that there are so many of them and they collectively spend so much time near humans. Sharks on the other hand almost never interact with humans.

The only reason housecats aren't at the top of the list is that they are so small.

Or they cover their tracks very well!

Whenever I talk to people that think it would be cool to have a pet tiger, I tell that to imagine what a pet cat can do to a person. Now imagine if it was 500 pounds. And this is with an animal that has been domesticated for thousands of years.

I am not sure about that. In developing countries, rabies kill a lot of people. They might not directly kill people as much but their bites sure do.

https://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/health/2020/jan/1...

There Are No Such Thing As Shark Attacks

https://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=03214697...

I actually saw this standup bit recently and after Googling, it looks like it was borrowed ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLwYkZUNvKo&feature=youtu.be...

To clarify, it's actually the other way around, the standup came BEFORE the blog. Should have realized the upload date is not the performance date.

https://www.espn.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/3722/shark-atta...

I'm thinking, that data is more of a heat-map of interactions. Any human interaction with a shark in its environment, shark wins. So as a per-capita, they might be near 100%?

I'm not sure. Plenty of people swim in waters where sharks are regularly observed. And still the attacks are low. And further, with many attacks, I think in particular great-whites, they back off after the first bite, which allows for much greater survivability. So the ratio of "shark contact" to "sharks win" is probably low. And if you also add in fishing for sharks (such as for fins) humans probably kill a lot more sharks than the other way around.

Hm. Not convinced. Contact with sharks vs contact with mosquitoes, or with dogs, or anything else on that list?

Most people spend maybe hours a year in shark ecosystem. Vs 365 days a year in dog country, or mosquito etc.

Certainly the amount of contact plays a roll. That's why dogs are so much higher than wolves for instance. But it's also true that most of the time people spend swimming around sharks, they don't get bitten. How the ratio of attacks to contacts compares between sharks and dogs or other animals I don't know; agreed that would be somewhat interesting!

> Contact with sharks vs contact with mosquitoes, or with dogs, or anything else on that list?

Swimming with reef sharks vs taking a hike in a malaria infested jungle? Swimming with reef sharks please.

I know it's not the point you were trying to make but

> Any human interaction with a shark in its environment, shark wins.

this is straight-up wrong. Humans and sharks interact all. the. time. They're not killing machines.

I imagine you probably know that, so I'm not trying to patronize you (honestly). But this is really important.

SHARKS KILLED 4 HUMANS IN 2018. HUMANS KILLED 100 MILLION SHARKS IN 2018.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/01/28/shark-a...

So what you're saying is, "yes, they are killing machines", with "they" being "the humans."

Well, not by swimming with them.

I've dived with sharks for years now. Most of them are some of the gentlest, shiest creatures in the water. In years of these interactions, neither I nor the shark won because literally nothing happened. They just run away from you if you get too close.

Most sharks will run away from the human as the human and their bubbles look far bigger than they are. They are more intimidated by us than we are by them.

https://xkcd.com/795/

I was expecting this one before I clicked: https://xkcd.com/1252/

That's just like flight safety records.. the issue with sharks is that when something happens you're 99% about to lose a limb or life.

You run into mosquitoes 30k times a year, one of them may kill you, and most of the time you could have saved yourself on your own.

Uhh, maybe? Shark attacks are quite rare, but I think you might be underestimating how many bites just result in stitches. Talking about "shark attacks" here. Not "Great White shark attacks". Likewise you're certainly underestimating how many airplane "accidents" don't result in any injury (again, not talking about "commercial airline accidents").

Gruesome wikipedia page with detailed Circumstances

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_t...

The pattern appears to be, very young child, or older adult, attacked by either a pitbull or pack of dogs.

*neglected/abused dogs of various breeds

Many dogs involved in attacks are erroneously typed as pitbulls (which is, in fact, a designation encompassing at least 3 different distinct breeds); genetic testing later reveals that they were not. Pitbulls are the "Moors" of dog breeds.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109002331... https://dogbitesohio.com/are-pit-bulls-unfairly-being-design...

Unfortunately, the stigma surrounding pitbulls is influenced by shaky notions of racial and behavioral genetics that mirror eugenics and its progeny.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/08/racism-and-the-americ...

Someone always pops up to save "pitbulls have a bad rep" but they also account for > 80% of all bites and deaths by dog.

That's not an accident.

I used to belive that, but I have since come to believe that the explanatory variable in vicious dog attacks are the type of owners, and the breeders who supply those owners, not dog breed. If you banned pitbulls they would just switch to buying and abusing alsatians.

I've been around many alsatians, and many pitbulls (never had one, but many friends have). Given equal training, equal education (or whatever you want to call what some people do to their dogs), most pitbulls will be different from alsatians in temperament. When they are in attack mode, they're much more likely to not let go, and to bite much harder. There's a spectrum among breeds regarding the agressiveness of their attacks, and that's something you can't argue, I think. You can abuse the hell out of Yorkshire Terriers, they just won't be as dangerous as pitbulls.

I was once in a hand to hand struggle with a pit bull that attacked another smaller dog. At least three bystanders took part simultaneously in kicking and punching the pit bull to get it to release the smaller dog.

The only way to dissuade the pit, after what was at least a couple of minutes of this and with the smaller dog being disemboweled, was that I stabbed the pit bull in the neck with my pocket knife.

Their physical power and stubbornness should not be taken for granted.

Both dogs survived the incident.

No respected dog behaviorist would ever advise kicking, punching, or stabbing to break up a dog fight regardless of breed. Y’all made it worse.

We decidedly did not make it worse.

The smaller ~20lbs dog was being courageously held onto by its owner underneath both dogs for the entire ~fight~ mauling to prevent it from being taken away and killed by the ~100lbs pit bull. I didn't see in that situation that I had time to consult with a respected behaviorist and get into the dog's upbringing, give it some positive reinforcement, tummy rubs, and treats, but I did finally get its attention.

Stabbing the pit bull ended the attack within seconds. My intent was to kill it at that point, but I was unsuccessful. That is my only regret in the situation.

Another bystander took the small dog and its owner to the pet hospital in her car where emergency surgery saved its life.

I'm not sure the eventual fate of the pit bull but I know that it was turned over to the custody of the local SPCA and the owner was given some type of citation.

Interesting that you and other comments took mine to mean how to train a dog, which is irrelevant to the situation under consideration. Did any of y'all mean that in good faith?

No, it's about how to de-escalate a severe situation without loss of life. (Good) policemen don't break up a fight between an 18 yr old and 10 yr old by viciously beating and then stabbing the 18 yr old. My point was only that the instincts of those involved made the situation worse before it was made better. And based on the new facts, starting with the owner.

Just as with humans, there's a well understood hierarchy of severity of tools for handling situations such as that one, though only a small minority of dog owners know them. It's incredibly unfortunate that dog lives are more or less toys for humans to play with, otherwise this fight is likely to never have happened if it was a severe as you say before it turned into a five animal brawl.

Bottom line the three of you DID make it worse before it was made better. The punching and kicking won't help in all probability. It's simply not on the spectrum of effective tools. Killing is on the far end, so I'm not begrudging your actions, I'm begrudging the behavior before it: yelling (probably), kicking, and punching instead of forcing the bite, wheelbarrowing, and other environmental tools that may have been available. Y'know, the things that animal behaviorists have figured out, how to cause specific behaviors, like stopping a dog from biting another during a fight.

I'm not sure why I wrote this comment since apparently your only regret is not achieving your intent which was to kill the dog. You managed to stop the fight without causing death, a huge win, but you wish otherwise. I sincerely hope your future is brighter than your past.

I did the wheelbarrowing thing from the start. That only took leverage off of the small dog to try to give the other people who enough time to try to dissuade the pit bull, but as I said, nothing distracted it from its purpose until I stabbed it. It was obvious when I was able to see the intestines of the small dog exposed that it was going to not last long and my resolve was to try to kill the aggressor if one was going to die for sure at that point.

We seem to be talking past each other as at this point I suspect we're in agreement. My initial claim was that punching, kicking, and stabbing were ineffective at breaking up dog fights and make them worse. I back-pedaled slightly to say that stabbing (lethal actions) is effective if it's a scenario where non-lethal tools prove ineffective.

My biggest issue from the start was the socialization of "three bystanders took part simultaneously in kicking and punching the pit bull to get it to release," which failed, predictably, and I didn't want anyone to think that that was a good thing to try in the first place.

Yes I agree about us having some difficulty in properly communicating what's going on. It was a very dynamic situation. It was just a bunch of passers by jumping in to help in whatever way they were able or thought appropriate at the moment.

I don't know what would have been, so to speak, appropriate and would have been effective. The one thing I knew to try was to do the wheelbarrow and that did nothing at leas in attitude of the pit bull. I was totally focused on my not being excessively injured or letting the other dog be torn apart and didn't organize anyone else's interaction, like "I'll hold the legs and you kick it."

If anything it was the opposite of bystander syndrome where everyone thinks someone else will do whatever is needed. Everyone there was doing whatever they could with the tools and knowledge or lack of knowledge that they had.

> your only regret is not achieving your intent which was to kill the dog

You cannot ever know what his intentions were, and to accuse him of that is pretty disgusting.

Except for when someone states their intent?

> "My intent was to kill it at that point, but I was unsuccessful. That is my only regret in the situation."

Their intent was to stop a dog from killing another dog, you are discussing the method of doing so as if it was the only stated goal. "I just wanted to kill a pitbull doing nothing minding it's own business".

Why do you think such a terrible leap of logic would work here?

> between an 18 yr old and 10 yr old

Nope, this was more like a 10 year old being savagely beaten by a 30 year old very strong, very violent, out of his mind MMA fighter who wanted to kill the 10 year old.

What you're saying makes sense for some breeds. The whole point was that pitbulls are more agressive and violent than other breeds.

I believe he was trying to stop the Pit from killing another dog, not train it to be better.

Well, he wasn't a dog behaviorist, and he's not required to know how to adequately deal with vicious dogs trying to tear apart little ones. Stabbing the pitbull saved the other dog's life.

Dog behaviorist? Are you fing kidding me? Why do people on this site post this kind of crap?

Elitist mentality and condescending language common in tech, sadly.

Why did you change your belief? I've heard both beliefs too but never seen evidence for the blame-the-owner one so I'm never sure.

I hope your logic is not: "I can imagine how A might cause X, therefore I believe B cannot possibly cause X." Easy way for people too fool themselves into believing unsupported ideas.

There are a lot of bad pit bull owners that abuse their dogs and make them aggressive.

Pit bulls are stronger and more capable of injuring or killing a human than most other breeds.

Both can be true. But if you want the "bad owner" theory to explain why 80% of all fatalities are pit-related , you are essentially calling at 80% percent (or higher) of owners dangerously negligent.

That’s a big strawman, percentages would only be true if every owner’s dog killed someone.

The numbers don't relate perfectly, but the point stands. By failing to address what i'm actually saying, it's your straw-man of "the math doesn't work" that is distracting the conversation.

Bad pit owners exist. Pits have a dangerous combination of mentality and strength. You can use a gun as a can opener if you want to, that doesn't change the ability it has to remove a life.

Your logic is thus

1. 80% of fatal dog attacks are by pit bulls.

This is complete nonsense from dogsbite.org actually nobody tracks this. This "statistic" is at best comprised by trying to compile news articles that notoriously misidentify any large breed mutt responsible for attacks as pit bulls.

2. If 80% of fatal are attacks are caused by pit bulls and negligent owners were the cause of attacks then 80% of owners must be negligent.

3. 80% of owners being negligent is an absurd conclusion thus the conclusion that bites are largely caused by negligent owners must be false.

Premise 2 is the result of what I like to call number gluing. To explicate people have 2 entities which they can attach a numerical identity to that seem related so people just mentally stick them together instead of doing the mathematical reasoning to figure out how the 2 relate. It's not that they don't "exactly" relate how you said they do they don't relate AT ALL. With no other numbers its entirely impossible to reason about which portion of owners are negligent or even how their average negligence relates to owners of say rottweilers and dobermans. There are 3.6 million pit bulls in the US and 40 people are killed annually. Even if every fatality was caused by a pit bull we could conclude from that fact that 1 in a million pit bull owners are negligent. The prior poster wasn't distracting from your argument he demolished it like a bulldozer.

1. The statistics are 80% pits and pit breed derivatives. You are welcome to argue against facts and statistics but I wont be joining you.

2. Shifting all the blame onto owners is ignoring the clear trend. If 100% of gun owners were safe and responsible, there would still be gun deaths because of the capacity of a gun to kill someone. Same with Pits.

3. I agree but that's your logic, not mine.

You are also shifting focus from Pits attacking other dogs (the point of this thread) to attacking people. Fine, they account for most dog attacks on other dogs and on people. You seem to have your own justifications for why that is, and why it's ok, but those only work on you. Because you want to believe your Pitbull is an angel from heaven and not a well trained, but inherently dangerous animal.

https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-fatalities-2020...

Entry after entry is pitbull.

"Pictured are the two most deadly dog breeds in America: pit bull terriers and rottweilers. Research from DogsBite.org shows that during the 14-year period from 2005 to 2018, canines killed 471 Americans. Pit bulls and rottweilers accounted for 76% (358) of these deaths."

Dogsbite is a worthless source. You yourself aren't being consistent in your arguments. First it was pit bulls were responsible for 80% of fatalities and now its pits and rottweilers are responsible for 76. Would you like to settle on "big dogs are the ones that normally manage to kill people" and include 2 or 3 more large breeds?

Looking at the link it relies on news paper stories to report that the death happened and then uses the reporters words to correctly identify the breed even though this may actually result in pit bulls being over counted and some fatalities being missed. In fact if you peruse the source its sufficient for an attack to be pit bull related for any given source to refer to the dogs as pit bulls. So if a dozen sources report on the matter and one misidentifies the culprit as a pit bull pit bull kill it is. As an example I found in the first dozen cases a "pit bull kill" wherein nobody saw the person get killed but a neighbor testified that there were problematic dogs in the neighborhood which the neighbor says are pit bulls. I found another which was a literal homicide in which the murderers dog attacked the victim while he was murdering them. It's hard to justify digging through 400 some cases when 1/6th of the first 12 are obviously complete nonsense and the rest are of unknown quality without extensive research not composed of finding newspaper articles and grepping for the word pit in any article about a particular incident.

The citations show the article title but not a url to the actual source making identifying just how bad the source in unnecessarily cumbersome but anyone that spends more than 5 minutes studying it ought to come to the conclusion that dogsbite.org is shockingly not even trying to do an unbiased analysis. It's a hit piece serving the interests of a lobbying group of dog haters who in many cases want to steal people's family pets and kill them to address a problem that kills about the same number of people annually as drowning in bath tubs.

Usually only having one biased source of truth is an indication that you are hanging out with the flat earth society. I invite you to join the rest of us on the round earth.

> Would you like to settle on "big dogs are the ones that normally manage to kill people" and include 2 or 3 more large breeds?

Sure, doesn't detract from my point at all. Nitpicking numbers is not a good use of anyone's time.

Your entire argument seems to rely solely on attacking the source. Everything I google turns up similar numbers

https://www.caninejournal.com/dog-bite-statistics/ https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-studies.php

If you are going to grab your tin foil hat and claim an internet-wide conspiracy against your dog of choice, fine. I don't see any reason to participate.

For your consideration Breed Specific Legislation doesn't work while strategies that focus on other factors does.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/10/25/bsl-and-dog-bites/

> Restricting breed ownership has not reduced the incidence of dog bites. A survey of reported dog bite rates in 36 Canadian municipalities found no difference between jurisdictions with BSL and those without. Likewise, a 2010 Toronto Humane Society survey found no change in dog bites in Ontario in the years before and after Ontario’s BSL.

> Calgary, however, saw a five-fold reduction over 20 years – from 10 bites per 10,000 people in 1986 to two in 2006. Rather than banning breeds, Calgary uses strong licensing and enforcement plus dog safety public education campaigns.

It would be great if you stopped promoting strategies that don't work and started promoting ones that do.

We know they exist. The point of the conversation is how prevalent they are (what you’re inflating), and how much of the behavior is attributable to the dog’s nature (in my opinion, near none; pit bulls are naturally sweet and playful).

Their "nature" is to hunt and kill things. They have the size and ferocity other breeds don't have. The fact that you have trained yours to pose for cute photos and play with your kids is the weird thing here.

That is not a nature unlike any other dog. Nor are pit bulls the biggest or most ferocious, not even close. Even a cursory glance at dog breeds reveals much bigger threats.

Yeah, I'd rather have a neighbor with a shark than a neighbor with a dog.

A neighbor with a shark is clearly a super villain.

The dog attacks are really more about dogs that have rabies.

In countries that have good rabies control this is not an issue. For example, the US has 30 - 50 deaths due to dogs each year.

North American and Western European audiences don't realise that while 1 dog can only sometimes hurt you, a pack of 8-10 non-rabid dogs can hunt an adult human down and kill them easily.

In countries around the world, it's more about packs of wild dogs and rabies, instead of just rabies alone.

Countries/Regions that have wild dog pack problems: India, Some Eastern European countries, South East Asia (almost all people who grew up in South Eastern Asia would have a childhood story of being followed home by a pack of dogs. They are quiet at the beginning, they follow you, and if no one else is home when you get there, LOCK THE DOOR and God protect you), some parts of Australia.

I had to regularly face down packs of wild dogs in India, probably the scariest thing I’ll do in my life. A trick my friend showed me in Greece (this was after India and wouldn’t have applied) was if you see a group of dogs at a distance and they seem threatening or interested, then bend down and pretend to pick up stone and they’ll back off.

My father grew up in rural India, has zero faith in dogs, and always carries a wooden cane on his daily walks to this day.

Growing up, I was ashamed that my dad was so scared of dogs, but the dogs he grew up around were incredibly violent and unpredictable compared to the domestics we’re so accustomed to here in the States. I think he and his brothers raised a puppy they found in the village, and it bit him pretty terribly when it grew up, so he has zero trust for animals. And he’s the most rational man I know, so it was weird to see him carry this memory so strongly into his 50s and 60s.

I don’t think he’s ever used it before (he lives in the Bay Area), but he’ll literally turn back from 5 blocks away if he realizes he’s forgotten it. I guess I’m trying to say: these kinds of environments are really traumatizing, and you should totally believe what the parent is saying. It’s a different world out there.

> Poor sharks, they get one of the worst raps for how little damage they do to humans.

Sharks can't do very much damage to humans because, in the natural course of events, it is impossible for a shark and a human to meet.

But sharks are quite dangerous conditioned on the fact that you're encountering one.

I had never heard of Assassin bug but apparently they are all over North America.

https://www.insectidentification.org/insect-description.asp?...

Wonder if those Murder Hornets will make next year's list?

When I was a kid at camp we used to catch them and make them fight other bugs. Those things are creepy.

My understanding from (very briefly) reading about the insect family Reduviidae is some species are parasitic and spread deadly pathogens much the same way mosquitoes do. It's not the insects themselves killing people, but diseases like Chagas disease (Triatominae is a subfamily of Reduviidae "Assassin Bug"). [1]

[1] https://www.paho.org/en/topics/chagas-disease

The assassin bug is called "vinchuca" in my country, Argentina, and it's a real problem here. There are ways to combat the bug, but once you catch the Chagas disease, there's no cure and you have to live with it. There is only symptomatic treatment as far as I know.

> Wonder if those Murder Hornets will make next year's list?

I was curious, so:

> Since 2001, the yearly human death toll caused by stings of bees, wasps and hornets in Japan has been ranging between 12 and 26.[26] Since this number also includes deaths caused by wasps, bees, and other hornet species, the number of deaths caused by Asian giant hornets is likely to be significantly lower.[citation needed]

from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet

[26] is a Japanese source that I cannot read.

Seems like they're not a huge threat?

I hadn't heard of them either. They don't seem nearly as terrifying to me as murder hornets. They're dangerous due to disease.

Their nests are pretty cool though. Kinda like a flat hex grid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduviidae#/media/File:Assassi...

Would love to see statistics from the other perspective: Which animals are killed most by humans? Besides insects, I would guess fish and chicken are quite high...

you mean farmed animals or wild ones ?

In that case, depending on the framing, you might care more about the balance of animals killed by humans vs. animals caused-to-exist by humans. (Or you might think both of those things are bad. Negative utilitarians don’t much like chicken farming, given the large number of chicken lives and the large amount of suffering in each life.)

Does this include dust mites in the vacuum cleaner or washing machine?

This list isn't really fair. Mosquitoes don't actually kill people, they are just vectors for a disease which does kill people. So then humans should get a point for every death due to flu, AIDS or COVID-19, right? And all the accidental deaths too, because I'm pretty sure the mosquitoes are just living and don't intend to kill anyone. So I think human should be number 1 by a very long way, followed by mosquito.

They might not intend to kill, but they do so during the act of sucking blood without permission. That’s at least manslaughter.

Is it most mosquitoes, or is it primarily aedis aegypti? I could swear I read that particular species was responsible for most mosquito-bourne disease, but I can't seem to find much information for the proportion between it and other species.

If they disproportionally kill even more than other mosquitoes, that also puts things into greater perspective. Perhaps if we could target this particular species, it would save millions of human lives.

i know someone who wants to do this, and probably can.

Is that “someone” funded by the Gates Foundation? [1] [2]

[1]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Mosquito-Week-2018

[2]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/gates-foundation-teams-oxitec-...

From Project Debug, Verily's attempt at reduction of mosquito problems: https://debug.com/

"""Mosquitoes kill more people than every other animal combined. One species, Aedes aegypti, carries diseases such as dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and chikungunya which make hundreds of millions of people sick every year"""

The low number of deaths from shark attacks fails to account for the way in which people die from a shark attack: broken in two and eaten alive by a gigantic fish while simultaneously drowning.

This is a horrible way to spend the last few seconds of your life on Earth and it likely triggers all the self-preservation instincts in a human mind, and then some.

The slow, painful death from a debilitating disease like malaria does not even come close for sheer compulsive terror. After all, most people experience sickness at some point during their lives, but very few experience being eaten.

This "raw, visceral horror of being eaten alive by a very big fish" [1] is the reason why people are afraid of shark attacks much more than mosquito bites or even accidents etc.

____________

[1] That's a quote from a National Geographic article I read a few years ago that stuck in my mind. I have no reference to it, apologies. It was in an issue of the print magazine.

And, in the United States - the most lethal animal of all is the ... Deer. (about 120 deaths/year, which shows how safe most Americans are from animals)

https://www.askmen.com/news/entertainment/deers-kill-more-pe...

If you include viruses the top 10 looks a bit different:

    1  Hepatitis    1,340,000
    2  Mosquito     1,000,000
    3  HIV            770,000
    4  Influenza      489,000
    5  Human          475,000
    6  Rotavirus      440,000
    7  Hantavirus     150,000
    8  Measles        140,000
    9  Rabies          69,000
    10 Snake           50,000

... although the Mosquito-related deaths due include a number of viruses, and all of these numbers are from different sources so should be taken with a grain of salt.

Off topic, but how did you make that beautifully formatted table?

Insert two spaces at the beginning of each line.

Testing (edit, it didn't work when I copied it from the page and added two spaces before each line, see below):

  1 Mosquito 1,000,000
  2 Human 475,000
  3 Snake 50,000
  4 Dog 25,000
  5 Tsetse Fly 10,000

See:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

which has a link to:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

I should be more clear. I know how to add verbatim formatting.

I'd like to know if the OP manually aligned the columns in the table, if they used a program to do so, or something els.

Yeah, I had to put some manual effort into this. (I wish I knew a program which could do this kind of thing.)

This might be along the lines of what you are looking for?

https://plaintexttools.github.io/plain-text-table/

Huh, venomous spiders are not on the list?

They rarely kill, just 'really annoy' for a month or so.

These numbers are weird. Why do we count mosquito-borne diseases under mosquitoes but don't put communicable diseases under the tally for humans? It is especially curious considering mosquitoes don't know any better while humans have both the knowledge and ability to dampen how disease spreads through our population.

That's kind of like saying that it's not the shark that kills people but the blood loss.

You missed my point. I am asking for consistency in the metrics.

We get malaria from a parasite that is spread by mosquitoes.

We get tuberculosis from a bacteria that is spread by humans.

TB kills more than three times as many people every year as malaria. Why is malaria counted as a death caused by mosquitoes but TB isn't a death caused by humans? Either you count both or you count neither.

I think it's because the only really meaningful experience you have with a mosquito is when it kills you via malaria.

Ah, I see.

It is probably fair to count TB deaths in the "human kills" category, but I think we usually make a differentiation between human to human disease and disease caused by contact with an animal. It's just the way we see ourselves as separate from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Although I get what you're saying, I don't think that human deaths caused by TB is necessarily what people are interested in when you aggregate all of the of humans at the hand of other humans, which may be why those deaths are omitted.

Mosquitoes don't kill except for diseases. Humans have means of killing besides spreading diseases.

Not it's not.

They're saying that 1,000,000 is the number for mosquitos, not because they kill people but their a carrier of disease.

What they are asking is do we consider other animals in the same capacity, such as, does the number beside humans include human transmittable diseases (HIV for example).

Seems like a reasonable question.

> Seems like a reasonable question.

Just to be clear, I think it's a perfectly reasonable question. A rational question can still contain a potential flaw.

But I did misunderstand what they were asking.

For one thing, we could conceivably get rid of the mosquitoes if the problem to solve is making life better for humans. However, getting rid of humans to make life better for humans rather defeats the purpose.

Tuberculosis kills almost as many people as the rest of that list combined. It is spread from human to human. There is a vaccine that can help prevent it. If this list was intended to shine light on a fixable problem, TB seems like a much easier problem to solve than eradicating all mosquitoes.

There's a vaccine that helps prevent it in children, although apparently it's not very effective for adolescents and adults: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4950406/

I am actually surprised cows (or cattle) are not on this list. Pretty sure they kill more people than sharks - even in Australia. (Mind you, the bovines also have more opportunity than sharks.)

I googled some but I can't find good information on freshwater snails? Some of the results reference cone snails, but those seem to be marine. How do snails kill people?

adding in covid-19 https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/2562261/

Why isn't "Plasmodium parasites" on this list?

This is unfair because Mosquitos don't kill anyone. They are a vector for pathogens that kill.

Humans are also vectors for pathogens, we just don't count them as such.

Pathogens aren't animals, so the mosquito is the one counted.

They don't count humans the same as other animals, instead, they count homicide/war (intentional killing), and you can just consider it a point of reference. Are you going to count accidents? Suicide? Anything that can be traced to human decisions? Anything that can be traced to human biology?

Any way you count humans, it just isn't going to be equivalent.

In the chart, the humans vs. mosquitos are not fairly comparable.

First - if you're going to say 'mosquitos kill humans because they transmit disease' and then include humans for a completely different reason (i.e. homicide) makes for an odd comparison.

For example, what if human transmission of the communicable disease results in some massive amount of death, which could very well be the case?

Second - mosquitoes are carrying a lot of otherwise benign things, which most people recover fine from. Possibly things like the flu. Well some people die from the flu, but very rarely. So I'm not sure if the fact it was communicated by a mosquito or something else makes sense.

Maybe inanimate objects, like the door handle to your public building, contribute more to basic pathogen spread, like the flu, in which case again, that would put things in context.

It's a tricky thing to compare lions attacking people to mosquitos that happen to spread in some cases, some minor thing that in may have rare deadly consequences.

Well I said elsewhere that they should probably skip the humans since it is so different, but I got pretty well downvoted.

Malaria is almost exclusively spread by mosquitos, so there is a certain logic to saying "mosquitos kill a lot of people." But you are right that most times you are bitten by a mosquito, it is nothing but a minor annoyance. It's a bit different from a lion.

Some people include deer in such charts, because people die by crashing their cars into deer. But that is pretty different too.

How about polar bears or orcas - and how would you know?

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