The Most Dangerous Animal in Texas is Smaller Than Your Shoe
If you're going to die from an animal encounter in Texas, it will most likely be with this one. It's responsible for more deaths here than any other animal.
Oh my goodness. Like parents need anything else to worry about.
Man vs. Beast breaks it down by state, and they tell us that in Texas, the scorpion is the animal that is responsible for the most deaths. North Carolina feels our pain. The scorpion causes the most fatalities of any animal there too.
Have you been stung by a scorpion before? It's not always fatal of course. I have a friend who was stung by a scorpion on his butt cheek because the little stinker was hiding in his bed sheets and he rolled over on it. I KNOWWWW! It freaked me out too and I checked and double checked my sheets for weeks after he told me that. He survived, but said his backside hurt like heck for several days.
Louisiana has to worry about hornets, wasps, and bees the most. It's not alligators in Florida causing the most deaths, but mosquitoes instead. And in the vast majority of states, death-by-animal comes from encounters with large mammals like horses and deer. Deer vs. car never turns out well, and we've got that risk in Texas too.
Does any of this make you think differently about your spring break camping trip? I mean, bug spray doesn't keep scorpions away and we could see a deer on the loose out there. But at some point we probably get used to these risks and turn up the radio and go on with life. Like true Texans.
Some of us might still be afraid of spiders and snakes, but not because they might kill us. It's just because they're creepy. Oh, and here's some good news. Despite our issues with scorpions, the odds of actually being killed by an animal are in our favor in Texas -- at 1 in 1,003,146. So I think we're good!