Last of the Shark Bull

After sleeping on it, I've decided that last night's shark post was a crock.

Sharks simply aren't dangerous animals. Period. Beach attendance is more than 100 million every year in the U.S. There are about 40 attacks annually, most minor, and about every two years, one person dies.

A much smaller number of people -- about 30 million -- ride horses in the United States, yet 50,000 people wind up in the emergency room due to contact with horses each year. I couldn't find national death statistics, but figures from a study by the U of Kentucky suggest that 6.7% of these injuries would be fatal, implying that over 3000 Americans are killed each year in incidents involving horses. The majority of these are riding accidents, but 19% of injuries are due to kicks. In other words, if the percentage for fatal injuries is similar, horses kick roughly 600 people to death in the U.S. every year.

I don't have the real figures yet, but what statistics I am gleaning also suggest that dairy cows are many times more vicious and dangerous than sharks, kicking or trampling a significant number of people to death each year. Not bulls. Cows. I shit you not.

OK, so a cow pasture is a much more dangerous place than a shark-infested beach or dive site (both of which really ought to be called human-infested shark sites). But lets be a bit irrational and suppose for some reason that we want to minimize our risk of dying at the beach, even though it's not a particularly dangerous place and we don't spend much time there anyway. Wouldn't our risk of dying at the beach be a little lower if there weren't sharks around? Nope. In 2000 there were 132 beach fatalities, mostly by drowning. None were due to sharks. The greatest number of people killed in a single year from shark attack in the U.S. was 3, which barely amounts to round-off error compared to other beach hazards.

That's all I'm going to say about shark attacks specifically, but I'll write more about irrational fears and our obsession with freak occurances later.