The 5 things most likely to kill you in the wild

When people think of dangers in the wild they normally picture animals like bears and wolves or a large cliff to fall off, but in reality, you are more likely to be killed by almost anything else. A good example would be the number of people in the United States that are killed each year from falling out of bed, which averages around 450 people, compared to people killed by black bears across the entire US which is only 23 people, and that’s over a 16 year period between 2000 and 2016.

(This is Jeremy the bear, and you have more chance of being killed by a falling tree branch than one of these guys)

So if all the usual things people think of arent that deadly, what is?

The answer would depend mostly on where you are in the world, but if we are averaging it out globally then the 5 things most likely to kill you in the wild are below:

1) Other people

In the US you are 60,000 times more likely to be murdered than killed by a bear, and people who look for victims often do so in quiet areas. Each year in the UK there are between 350,000 and 400,000 missing people reports, but the vast majority of those are found alive. In the US the number averages 600,000 a year, and anyone who is reported missing has around 90% of being found alive, if they are found at all, and many of these victims are picked up while hitchhiking or kidnapped by criminal opportunists in quiet country areas.

2) Mosquitos

There are around 700 million cases of people contracting mosquito-carried illnesses, with around 1 million of these dying. Mosquitoes inhabit every single country on Earth apart from Iceland and the continent of Antarctica, though they are much less common and tend to carry fewer dangerous illnesses in colder countries. The threat they carry comes with their victims not having access to the right medicine to save them in time, and even if you come from a developed country there’s still the risk of being on holiday somewhere that’s far from what you’ll need to get better.

(Nobody likes mosquitos, but fortunately, they rarely carry dangerous diseases in the colder areas of the world)

3) Snakes

There are some wildly variating sources on the number of people killed by snakes each year, but they mostly seem to range between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths globally. If you’re in certain areas of the world, then snakes would be much deadlier than anything else you would come across, mostly due to the fast-acting or extremely powerful venom that doesn’t allow people the chance to get help. Most snakes are quite shy by nature and usually don’t attack unless they have to, but most people who get bit don’t realize there was a snake there in the first place until it’s too late.

(Snakes only pose a danger in certain countries, in the UK the last snake death in the wild was in 1975 when a 5-year-old boy was bitten on the ankle in Scotland)

4) Tsetse flies, Assassin bugs and freshwater snails

These nasty critters are at the same rank because they each kill around 10,000 people globally every year. The Tsetse fly inhabits most of Africa and apart from carrying various diseases, they often leave wounds infected which is much more serious in a tropical environment. Assassin bugs bite people and inject a type of venom that can cause the wound to rot and become infected, and to make things worse they often leave feces on the skin that’s packed with very dangerous bacteria. The snails on the other hand aren’t quite so nasty, but they do carry a disease that infects people who come too close to them or drink from the water they live in.

(The assassin bug can deliver a painful but rarely lethal venomous bite, the real danger comes from infection)

5) Dogs

Even though dogs kill more people each year than all the creatures in number 4 combined, the majority of these happen in urban areas. The reason they make the list for being something that can hurt you in the wild isn’t because they kill 50,000 people globally each year, but rather the fact that many poor countries have huge populations of feral dogs. It’s estimated that in India alone there are between 35 and 40 million stray dogs, many of which carry illnesses like rabies. Around 35% of all dog-related deaths happen in India, but this doesn’t make other popular traveling destinations with high numbers of stray dogs any less dangerous.

(Every year in the UK, dogs attempt to snuggle millions of people to death, but are rarely successful)