cmsellers wrote:Regarding killings, this article shows that there was exactly one fatality as a result of a pet big cat between 2000 and 2010. Even if you include the two deaths from pet bears, even if you assume all of the victims were unconnected to the owner (which is unlikely), that's still a far lower fatality rate than from domestic dogs. ...
I will say that attitudes like yours allow animal rights groups to push either blanket bans on large groups of animals, or worse: to ban anything that's not explicitly permitted. Blanket bans on carnivores cover raccoons, foxes, and kinkajous; bans on primates cover marmosets, bush babies, and lemurs; bans on crocodilians covering dwarf caimans. None of these animals are any more dangerous than a domestic cat (they might cause minor injuries, but nothing that requires hospitalization). Even the tigers, chimpanzees, and Nile crocodiles which drive these bans are statistically less dangerous than large dogs.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... 74/?no-ist
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/w ... incidents/
I already found two deaths from pet tigers within that time frame, in one case the owner's 10-year-old nephew who was visiting. Let's charitably assume there aren't any more and call it .2 deaths per year, and go with the 10,000 estimate for total number of exotic pet cats in the country. Overall that works out to about a 1 in 50,000 chance of a human fatality per big cat per year.
Domestic dogs killed 34 people last year, or 170 times as many people. However, the number of pet dogs in the US is estimated at about 75 million, which works out to less than a 1 in 2 million chance of a human fatality per dog per year.
Now, there are some potential issues with that analysis, but the main takeaway is for fuck's sake don't use a Hubpages blog entry with no citations to prove such an extraordinary claim. I mean really, are you seriously saying you like your chances of surviving an encounter with a loose tiger just as much as your chances of surviving an encounter with a loose golden retriever? I'm completely open to arguments against exotic pet bans here, but you're not going to convince me that a tiger poses no more risk than a dog and a raccoon is no more potentially troublesome than a cat. That's flatly not true, and if you know as much about wild animals as it sounds like you do I think you know that, so I don't understand what's going on with this post.