THERE IS GRACE, BEAUTY, POWER AND DANGER IN NATURE. It’s a combination that can inspire respect and awe, and yet, we seem predisposed to paving, extracting, displacing, managing and generally bothering nature. People’s retreat into “civilization” and alarmist nature shows, and skewed news stories about animal attacks seem to exacerbate our fear, in particular, of wildlife.
Some of the statistics don’t help.
Worldwide, counting all the animal kingdom, mosquitoes kill the most humans, with about 750,000 deaths a year, mostly from malaria. If you don’t count insects, the next deadliest animal to humans is… humans, with about 475,000 intentional killings worldwide. (Dwell on that at your own risk.) If you give humans a pass, snakes kill 50,000 of us worldwide. Guess who’s next? Man’s best friend: dogs, at 25,000 human deaths per year, mostly from rabies.
If you don’t count insects, the next deadliest animal to humans is… humans
Let’s tally the scores for some of the most feared creatures in the United States. Sharks: about one human death in the U.S. per year. Bears: two. Snakes: five. Alligators: one. Mountain lions: 27… in the past 100 years, which comes out to about one every four years. (For perspective, according to a UC Davis study, despite a prohibition on hunting them, humans cause half the deaths of all mountain lions.) Moving on.
When those creatures cause human deaths, it makes the news. But bees, wasps and hornets are responsible for about 48 human deaths in the United States per year. And which animal is the most lethal to Americans? Deer. They’re responsible for about 200 human deaths annually by traffic accident, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
As writer, outdoorsman and hunter Mike Rogers writes on thealaskalife.com, “Human beings… suck at risk assessment.”
But what about Monterey County? There is a lot of natural habitat, and a lot of human encroachment on, and recreation in, that natural habitat. How many human fatalities are there by animal or insect?
None.
That’s according to Det. Sgt. Daniel Karamitis of the Monterey County Coroner’s Office.
“We haven’t had any [on record] in three to four years,” he says. “Another detective can’t recall any in 10 years.”
That’s good news all around. But we’re not out of the woods yet. What about reported human injuries caused by wild animals?
“It’s pretty rare,” says Jeff Cann, a Monterey-based wildlife biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “In a blue moon, somebody will get bit by a raccoon if [that animal] is in a fight with their dog.”
He adds a caveat. People aren’t required to report injuries by wild animal unless it’s by mountain lion, so the figures might be underreported. But there are figures for the most common type of reported injury by animal, he says: “You’ll probably find a lot of dog bites.”
According to the Monterey County Health Department, dog bites account for 85-90 percent of all reported animal bites; cats, 5-10 percent; rodents 2-3. Children are bitten more than adults.
“The most feared complication of an animal bite is rabies,” the Health Department website states. Though there’s plenty of contact between domestic animals and known rabies carriers like skunks, bats and foxes, required pet vaccinations have created a barrier that has mostly protected pets, and thus humans.
Bats have been the leading transmitter of the disease to humans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. If bitten or exposed (or even suspected), the CDC recommends safely catching the bat for testing, washing the wound with soap and water, and getting to a doctor. If untreated, it can be fatal.
Dr. Casey Grover, the medical director of the emergency department at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, says the animal that most tests positive for rabies in Monterey County are skunks. “Racoons are potential carriers and we will vaccinate if we see someone with a raccoon bite,” he continues. “We don’t see many bat bites.”
The most common complication from dog and cat bites is not rabies, but infection from bacteria in their mouths (for cats, on their claws too).
“People look at their hands and [the wound] is not a big deal until it gets infected and we see them in the ER,” Grover says. He says most serious hand bites occur when pet owners are trying to break up an animal fight, so he suggests using a stick or other object to do so.
CHOMP gets people coming in to get rabies tested for squirrel bites. But, harking back to humans’ faulty risk assessment: “[Squirrels] don’t have rabies,” Grover says.
For animals that do, Monterey County Animals Services handles suspected cases of exposure for domestic animals in unincorporated parts of the county, and leaves quarantining animals to each city for their respective jurisdictions. Those entities do not assist with, or track the behavior of, wild animals. That would be the nonprofit SPCA for Monterey County, which operates the only wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center in the county. That reflects the other side of human-animal conflict: injury to wild animals.
In the past year, the SPCA took in 2,585 injured and orphaned wild animals. “Of those, the most common way humans hurt wildlife is by car,” says Beth Brookhouser, director of community outreach for SPCA. “We do a lot of calls in the middle of night – deer and other animals.”
The next most harmful thing for wild animals is cats and dogs that catch them: “Most of those don’t even make it to us.”
Wild animals are victim to pest traps, either by ingesting poisons, eating pests that have been poisoned, or getting caught in snap traps or glue traps. When people trim their trees in the summer instead of the winter, they often take down baby birds in nests. Also, something Brookhouser calls “over-rescue.”
“They see a baby fawn or a bird, and don’t see a parent, and put it in their cars and take it to us,” she says. “We recommend people call us first. A lot of animals that come in to us are healthy and could have reunited [with their parents].”
Bruce Delgado, Marina mayor and a Bureau of Land Management botanist, is in the Fort Ord backcountry a lot and says it’s good policy to be aware of large mammals in nature, including wild pigs which are armed with tusks.
However, he reports, “I’ve not heard of any wild pig harming humans anywhere.” And he suspects they wouldn’t even attack dogs except to defend themselves or their young. He thinks fears of snakes and spiders are overinflated.
CHOMP provided some of their statistics on “injuries to humans caused by animals.”
In 2018 (not counting secondary visits and follow-ups), there were 93 outpatient visits for bites or stings by nonvenomous insects or arthropods. For cat scratches: eight. Cat bites: 24. Dog bites: 84 (in 2017 it was 135). Squirrel bites: eight. Raccoon bites: three. For bee stings, 32. Many are in the single digits: sea lion – 1, spider bites – 5, “other mammal” – 1. There was one incident of “pecked by turkey.” In 2016 there was a “struck by cow.”
“One thing that’s unique about Monterey County is we have more natural resources – marine and land – than other places,” Grover says. “That gives us more exposure to animal injuries [than urban areas].”
Last week news agencies reported a large number of great white sharks in Monterey Bay near Santa Cruz, and State Parks has issued advisories about it. Whale watching boats are enticing tourists with the increased visitation.
There have been fatal shark attacks in Monterey Bay: one in 1981, another in 1952. Before that, there is an account from 1899, in which a giant basking shark (they’re gentle filter feeders that eat plankton) was harpooned by fishermen, but thrashed until it destroyed the boats and dragged the wreckage underwater, killing five men.
Shark attacks are rare but dramatic. The Weekly reported a local surfer was attacked in November 2007 by a white shark off Marina State Beach before he “scissor-kicked it in the face.” There is video of a kayaker off Cannery Row in Monterey whose boat was bitten by a great white in March 2017. In November that same year, a man spearfishing off Pebble Beach was bitten on the leg. The San Jose Mercury News reports 11 unprovoked attacks before that one.
In a twist, in May 2018 Sean Van Summeran, founder of the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation, filmed a deer swimming in the Monterey Bay as a great white circled it. “I maneuvered the skiff in between the shark and the deer,” Summeran wrote. “ [The shark] probably wouldn’t have attacked but [I] didn’t want to create a scene that may lend itself to shark hysteria.”
The numbers just don’t support hysteria, and plenty of people continue to enjoy being in and on the water.
For the rare rattlesnake bite (CHOMP had one such patient in 2018), Dr. Grover says we have a ready supply of antivenom. And black widow bites, though painful, are usually not life-threatening.
And even though Lyme disease from ticks and mosquito-borne illness are very uncommon in Monterey County, insects are not to be overlooked, Grover says, adding that allergic reactions to insect stings can be serious.
“Some of the more unusual are when insects crawl into holes in the body,” he says. “Insects fly into people’s eyes, noses. I’ve taken spiders out of people’s ears. The ears are an awful experience. You can hear it scurrying around and [to the patient] it sounds like a steam train.”
For cases of animal poisoning, Peter Tira, a spokesperson for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, suggests people can call the California Poison Control System at UC San Francisco, a valuable resource for medical staff and the public when it comes to identifying toxins and poisons and suggesting treatment.
The season is a factor. Many creatures have offspring in the spring and are more apt to aggressively defend them. But for the most part, wild animals naturally fear humans and keep their distance when they can. And that mirrors the experience statewide, according to Tira.
“We almost don’t see any injuries from wildlife,” he says. “A lot of issues with pets and livestock – that’s the extent of conflicts. [On humans] it’s almost non-existent.”
Still, they advise precautions to maintain that precarious co-existence between human and wild animal: Don’t get between a cub and its mother, don’t leave out food and water, keep pets and livestock properly protected or restrained, and don’t feed deer.
“When deer get comfortable [around people], somebody gets hurt,” Tira says. That includes living among us and moving through our neighborhoods, changing movements during the fall and spring breeding season, precipitating car accidents. That’s a passive behavior, not an attack. But human injury by passive animal behavior is serious; Grover says people trip over their pets all the time, causing themselves injury.
So go outside and frolic and enjoy and respect nature. And when you get back home, watch your back.