The Animal Most Likely to Kill You in Each State

Being aware of your own mortality can get a person thinking. It’s usually not about things we can actually control—like improving our diets to help stave off heart disease, the nation’s reigning killer—but things we can’t, like a swarm of bees coming to inject us with venom until we expire. Helpfully, the people over at LCB have compiled a chart detailing which animal is most likely to end your life in your home state.

As you can see, most humans who have a fatal run-in with another species will be battered or half-chewed by large mammals. Horses, cows, and deer are to be respected and avoided whenever possible. In the northeast, dog attacks lead the way. In California, you stand a better chance of being bit by a venomous snake than a canine. In Tennessee, spiders are the primary suspect.

Globally, things look a little different.

Humans are to be avoided at all costs, along with mosquitoes. But snails? While 200,000 is a pretty liberal estimate, it’s true that some snails in freshwater lakes and rivers in Africa harbor a parasite in the genus Schistosoma, known charmingly as the blood fluke, that can burrow into human hosts and cause a potentially deadly infection known as schistosomiasis.

One deadly animal not included in the survey? The common hippopotamus. The third-largest land mammal (after elephants and white rhinos) aggressively defends its territories in the wetlands of sub-Saharan Africa, where it often comes into contact with fishermen and boaters. The toothy beasts have been known to charge and capsize watercraft that get to close, leading to about 500 hippo-related human deaths per year. (But don’t confuse them with the smaller and cuter pygmy hippo of eastern Africa—they're generally less belligerent and not known to attack humans.)

The moral of the story: Don't pet anything that doesn't belong to you.

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This story originally ran in 2018; it has been updated for 2025.