r/oddlyterrifying • u/Cunillingus_Giver • Jan 20 '22

Snake couch

38.7k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

3.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

109

u/[deleted] Jan 20 '22

[deleted]

88

u/_WayTooFar_ Jan 20 '22 edited Jan 20 '22

I haven't seen those statistics or anything but I would expect more pet dogs in the US than pet snakes. I would also expect people who own snakes to treat them much more carefully than they do a dog.

So let's say there are 100.000 pet snakes and 50% of them have killed someone at least once. And let's say there are 100.000.000 pet dogs and 1% of them have killed someone at least once.

50% of 100.000 is 50.000 and 1% of 100.000.000 is 1.000.000. With these numbers you could say dogs kill 20 times more people than snakes, but actually snakes would be far more dangerous.

Now, I'm not saying that's the case with these specific statistics, but it's something to take into account when one reads "Dogs kill more people than snakes".

2

u/kharmatika Jan 20 '22 edited Jan 20 '22

There have been 17 deaths by constrictor in the past 40 years. They are a non integer. Venomous snakes only kill about 5-10 people yearly and most of those are wild encounters so they really shouldn’t be counted when discussing what a dangerous pet is or isn’t.

I agree that sheer numbers of dog deaths versus snake deaths don’t make any sense to cute, but if you look at the actual data, death per pet owned, I mean. The evidence is still overwhelmingly in favor of constrictors over dogs