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You don't have any deer like we in the US do, right? That's our deadest animal, through crashing with cars.
by hga 10y ago
You don't have any deer like we in the US do, right? That's our deadest animal, through crashing with cars.
- vacri 10y agoThey have (imported) deer in NZ, but I'm not sure how widespread. The analogue of deer here in Aus are kangaroos, but they're not so deadly in a crash. Livestock are indeed our deadliest animals. Most of our native wildlife is pretty sleepy and shy - there's only a couple of snakes that are aggressive; most run (slither?) away from humans. Apart from that, crocodiles are really only the remaining aggressive land animal, but there's not a lot of overlap between a population map of humans vs crocodiles here.
- flukus 10y agoCassowaries can be pretty aggressive. Dingos are dangerous for children. Magpies are very aggressive but can only maim, not kill.
- vacri 10y agoI thought about including cassowaries, but you generally have to provoke them - they don't usually hunt you down to attack you. Magpies swoop, sure, but that's not the kind of dangerous that people talk about. Dingoes, fair enough, I missed those. They're opportunistic though, and you have to go looking for reports on attacks (apart from the obvious one, which was hard to escape the media frenzy of...). Dingo attacks a but a drop in the ocean compared to other (pet) dog attacks here.
- caf 10y agoThere's feral deer in the Australian Alps. I came across one in the middle of the road driving back from Thredbo very late one night.
- flukus 10y agoKangaroos fill that niche here.
- ghaff 10y agoMoose are significantly worse in car accidents than deer. But there are fewer of them and they're not in nearly as many regions so the overall numbers are far lower. But there are some places (Alaska, Maine, also Newfoundland in Canada) where they're a serious hazard.
- bigger_cheese 10y agoWombats mess up cars pretty bad if you hit one.
- toomanybeersies 10y agoThere are deer in Australia, but if they're anything like the deer in New Zealand, they tend to stay well away from humans, since deer hunting is a lot less restricted (since they are introduced).
- hga 10y agoIn my experience they're pretty shy, but there are so many of them, enough of them cross roads, and we have 13.5 times your population, with plenty of it in e.g. the fairly crowded North East where the old farms have returned to forest due to it being so much more efficient to farm out here in the mid-West, there are enough deer-car interactions to, well, wow, I just found this 2001 article, and per Wikipedia below, things have not gotten significantly better: http://reason.com/archives/2001/11/21/north-americas-most-dangerous http://reason.com/archives/2001/11/21/north-americas-most-da... The most dangerous mammal in North America is...Bambi. The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that white-tailed deer kill around 130 Americans each year simply by causing car accidents. In 1994, these predator deer had a banner year, causing 211 human deaths in car wrecks. There are about 1.5 million deer/vehicle collisions annually, resulting in 29,000 human injuries and more than $1 billion in insurance claims in addition to the death toll. And here's Wikipedia on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer%E2%80%93vehicle_collisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer%E2%80%93vehicle_collision... They even kill around 20/year in Germany.