Deadliest Animal in Australia Revealed, And It's a Big Surprise
The three most venomous snakes in the world are from Australia (with a few others in the top 10).
It has some of the most venomous spiders, with the Sydney funnel-web (Atrax robustus) most infamous for its deadly toxin.
Aggressive saltwater crocodiles, tiny octopuses patterned with iridescent blue rings, sharks that swim the sea by which the land is girt.
Related: 'World's Most Dangerous Bird' Seen Emerging From The Ocean in Australia
But the deadliest non-human animal in Australia is none of these. It's not even a native Australian animal at all.
The animal involved in the most deaths in Australia is: the humble horse, according to a report from the National Coronial Information System.
The report, which is designed to support the work of death investigators and researchers, catalogs 713 animal-related deaths recorded between 2001 and 2021, with an average of 34 animal-related deaths per year.
Nearly a third of those deaths – 31.1 percent, or 222 fatalities – involved horses, and most of those horse-related deaths involved a fall from a horse.
Surely, you're thinking, the second-most common cause of animal-related death in Australia is a native species. Nope. Accounting for 92 deaths, or 12.9 percent of the sample, were cattle, just under half of which were involved in a road traffic accident. After that, it's dogs, coming in at 11.5 percent, with 82 deaths. Most of those were bites – but just under half were from falls.
You have to get to fourth place to finally find a native Australian animal. Kangaroos were involved in 53 human deaths between 2001 and 2021 – and every single one of them was a traffic accident.
All the way down in fifth place we get to snakes with 50 deaths, followed by bees (45 deaths, all from anaphylaxis, and probably not native bees), sharks (39 deaths), and crocodiles (25 deaths).
Not a single death from a spider bite was recorded in the timeframe the report covers – actually, no one has died from a funnel-web bite since 1981, when the antivenom was introduced.
So how does that stack up against the US? Well, a new report of animal-related fatalities in the US documents an average of 267 deaths per year. That's reasonably comparable, given the relative sizes of the current populations – 340 million for the US, and 27.4 million for Australia.
However, the biggest proportion of the animal deaths in the US – 31 percent – were from hornets, wasps, and bees. "Other mammals" – a group that includes horses, cattle, other livestock, and raccoons – makes up 28.6 percent, and dogs come in third at 26.2 percent.
So there you have it. The animals with which we spend the most time – or to which we are most allergic – are most likely to be the ones that kill us.
You can read the full report from Australia here, and find out more about animal-related deaths in the US here.
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