What the Deadliest-Animal Map Left Out

A map titled “Most Dangerous Animal in Every State” has been circulating online. It shows grizzlies in Montana, feral hogs in Texas, alligators along the Gulf, white-tailed deer across most of the Midwest and the Northeast.

It has no source, no date range and no definition of “dangerous.” It could mean deaths, attacks or just how scary the animal sounds, and the map does not say. Looking for the data turns out to be more instructive than any single number in it.

First, the scale, which is smaller than most people expect. From 2018 through 2024, death certificates name an animal as the cause of 2,018 deaths in the United States, about 290 a year, up from 238 in 2018 to 353 in 2024. Crash deaths, by contrast, have held near 200 a year. Add them and the total is still under 500 a year, out of about 3 million deaths of every kind. That is roughly one death in 6,500. Over the full 26 years of data, 1999 through 2024, death certificates name an animal in 6,080 deaths and fatal crashes with an animal add 5,413 more, including 419 people who were riding an animal, about 11,500 in all. Many people would guess thousands a year.

Injuries run the other way. Emergency rooms treat more than a million animal bites and stings a year. Animals hurt a lot of people and kill very few.

No agency counts what the map claims to show. The nearest thing is the death certificate system run by the National Center for Health Statistics, where a doctor or coroner records a cause of death that gets coded to an international classification. That classification has specific codes for animal contact: bitten or struck by a dog, contact with a venomous snake, contact with hornets, wasps and bees, and about a dozen more. CDC WONDER lets you query those codes by state. It sounds like the answer until you read the fine print.

CDC suppresses any state count of one through nine deaths, to protect the privacy of the people involved. Animal deaths are rare enough that this rule swallows most of the useful cells. Pooling seven years into a single query by state, eight jurisdictions still came back hidden: Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wyoming.

Split the same data by single year and most states would go blank. A ranking of the deadliest animal in each state cannot be built from this source, because for most animals in most states the count sits somewhere between one and nine and CDC will not say where.

What the pooled totals do show is mostly population. Texas had 248 deaths over the seven years, California 142 and Florida 114. Per person the picture tilts toward the rural West and South, with Montana, Alaska, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Arkansas at the top, though Montana’s rate rests on 19 deaths and Alaska’s on 11, which makes them fragile.

Those numbers also leave out the animal that probably kills the most people. A driver who hits a deer and dies is coded as a transport accident, not an animal death, so the whole category vanishes from the death certificate codes. For that, the source is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, whose Fatality Analysis Reporting System records every fatal crash in the country. One of its fields is the first harmful event, and for some crashes that event is a live animal.

Between 2021 and 2024 it was the first harmful event in crashes that killed 796 people, roughly 200 a year, with deaths in nearly every state. Crashes involving people riding horses are coded separately, and they are left out here. The system records that an animal was struck but not which one. An older review by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that about 77 percent of fatal animal crashes involved deer, so deer are the working assumption and nothing more.

Texas led with 76 deaths over the four years, then Pennsylvania with 57, Michigan with 52, Wisconsin with 48 and Ohio with 43. The Great Lakes and the Plains show up where the map put mountain lions and grizzlies. That lines up with a 2008 federal highway report, which estimated about 200 deaths and 26,000 injuries a year from reported animal crashes. A 2019 review by Michael Conover of Utah State puts deer collisions alone at 440 deaths a year, but that number is an extrapolation from the fatality rates in three states, not a count of crashes. Michigan’s and Alabama’s rates alone would give about 130 by the same arithmetic, and Utah’s higher rate pulls the average up. The crash records, which put deer at roughly 150 a year, fit the lower figure. Per collision, moose are far deadlier than deer: the same report puts fatal outcomes at 0.26 to 0.5 percent of moose collisions against 0.009 to 0.05 percent for white-tailed deer.

The two sources are not added together here, and should not be. One counts death certificates that name an animal as the cause. The other counts fatal crashes where an animal was the first thing hit.

Broken out by the kind of animal, the national death certificate numbers look nothing like the map. Over 2018 through 2024, hornets, wasps and bees killed 598 people, dogs 547, and other mammals 534, a category that takes in cattle, horses and wild animals such as bears, bison and moose, since the code says bitten or struck by any mammal other than a dog or rat. Those three codes make up 83 percent of the total.

Snakes and lizards killed 34 people and venomous spiders 35. Marine animals of every kind, sharks included, accounted for 11 deaths in seven years, and alligators were suppressed nationally, meaning fewer than ten. The animals on the viral map barely register.

The yearly series shows where the rise comes from. Dog deaths ran between 18 and 38 a year for two decades, then climbed from 35 in 2018 to 127 in 2024. Bee and wasp deaths crept up from around 50 to about 100, and deaths from other mammals held between about 60 and 90. Crash deaths have stayed between about 165 and 235 a year since 2003. Why dog deaths jumped is unclear, and the death certificate codes cannot say.

By state, of the 51 jurisdictions, eight recorded fewer than 10 animal deaths of any kind in seven years. Twelve more had between 10 and 22, but split across so many kinds of animal that none reached 10 on its own. In the other 31 only three kinds of animal ever came out on top: bees, wasps and hornets in 11 states, dogs in 10 and other mammals in six, with four states tied. Snakes, spiders and alligators did not win anywhere.

The map below opens on the longest window where both sources are complete, 1999 through 2020. In those 22 years every one of the 51 jurisdictions recorded at least one death from an animal, counting death certificates alone. Crashes with animals, mostly deer, lead in 46 of them. Bees, wasps and hornets lead in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and Hawaii and Rhode Island show crashes in a lighter shade because they had fewer than ten and CDC hides its own counts under ten. DC has nothing we can see.

The buttons narrow it. The 2018 to 2024 window is more recent and names fewer states, 38 in all, with crashes leading in 34 and ten more shown in the lighter shade. Dropping the crash data leaves the death certificates alone, which is the version described above.

Then there are the attacks that made the map feel true. Sharks, alligators, bears and snakes are what people picture, and nobody counts them by state. So this piece uses a list of fatal attacks compiled from Wikipedia’s incident lists, which volunteers assemble from news reports. It is a list of leads, not a census. The dog list holds only cases someone judged notable and leans heavily toward recent years, and snake deaths are clearly undercounted next to CDC’s.

Even so, the shape is the one the viral map suggested. Here are the named fatal attacks by state from 2015 through 2025, leaving out crashes:

Florida and South Carolina are alligator country, Alaska and Montana are bear country, and Hawaii leads on sharks. Dogs turn up almost everywhere. All told the list holds 165 deaths across eleven years, about 15 a year, against roughly 290 a year in CDC’s data. The list is a sample of the most reported cases, not the total. Leave out the dogs and it drops to about seven a year, close to the eight a year that Conover arrived at in the same 2019 review, which added up published counts of bites and attacks by wild animals. He put the injuries at about 47,000 a year and the deaths mostly at snakes, around six, with alligators at about one and bears and cougars at a third of a death each.

The official counts are just as small. The International Shark Attack File counted a single fatal unprovoked bite in the United States in 2025, out of 25 unprovoked bites, 11 of them in Florida. Florida’s wildlife agency has logged about 500 unprovoked alligator bites since 1948, and 32 of them were fatal. The National Park Service counted five deaths from wildlife across every park unit from 2014 through 2023. Bears and mountain lions have no national tracking at all, since each state wildlife agency keeps its own records.

Deaths are also the wrong place to look for how often animals hurt people. The federal survey of emergency rooms, the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, estimates injuries treated in hospitals across the country, and CDC publishes it through WISQARS. It has no state breakdown, but the national numbers are large.

Dog bites sent an estimated 349,968 people to the emergency room in 2018 and 472,790 in 2024. Other bites and stings, a category that covers insects, spiders, snakes, marine animals and cats among others, were larger still: 908,137 visits in 2024. Together that is about 1.4 million visits in a single year. These are estimates from a sample of hospitals. Over seven years the survey counts roughly 2.6 million dog-bite visits against 547 dog-bite deaths, about 4,800 visits for every death. Nobody counts those injuries by state either.

The viral map ranks fear. It probably answers which animal each state is known for, which is a different question from which animal harms the most people there. A more defensible map would show deer in most of the country, because the likeliest way for an animal to kill you is to be in the road at the wrong moment. That version would be much less fun to share.

A ranking is only as good as the definition behind it, and here the definition changes the answer. Count deaths from animal contact and the leaders are populous states with a few rural outliers. Count fatal crashes and the Great Lakes come forward. Most of the confidence in the original map came from leaving the definition out.

Sources

Death certificates. CDC WONDER, Underlying Cause of Death, 2018 to 2024 and 1999 to 2020, National Center for Health Statistics. ICD-10 codes W53 to W59, W64 and X20 to X29, queried nationally, by state, by year and by state and cause. CDC’s data use terms bar publishing counts of nine or fewer, which is why those cells are hidden.

Crashes. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Fatality Analysis Reporting System, 1999 to 2024, first harmful event “live animal.” Williams and Wells, “Characteristics of vehicle-animal crashes in which vehicle occupants are killed,” Traffic Injury Prevention 6(1), 2005 (the 77 percent deer share). Huijser and others, Wildlife-Vehicle Collision Reduction Study: Report to Congress, Federal Highway Administration, 2008.

Injuries. CDC, WISQARS Nonfatal Injury Reports, National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, mechanisms “Bite: Dog” and “Bite: Other, including sting,” 2018 to 2024, all intents, national estimates.

Wild animal attacks and deaths. Michael Conover, “Numbers of human fatalities, injuries, and illnesses in the United States due to wildlife,” Human-Wildlife Interactions 13(2), 2019. Florida Museum, International Shark Attack File, 2025 summary. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Alligator Bites on People in Florida, updated February 2026. National Park Service, mortality data, 2007 to 2026 (the “Wildlife Incident” category).

Attack list. Fatal attacks since 2000 compiled from Wikipedia’s lists of fatal attacks by bears, cougars, alligators, sharks, snakes and dogs, read in September 2026. The lists are volunteer-compiled from news reports.

The data behind this piece. The death certificate and crash counts, with their sources and suppression flags, are public in animal_incidents.json and documented on the API page. Map boundaries come from the US Census Bureau via the us-atlas package.