Fact Check: Do Cows Kill More Humans Than Sharks?

It feels like every week is Shark Week thanks to seemingly endless reports of people's encounters with the big, bad fish.

Over the weekend, fact-checking publication Snopes investigated a viral meme’s claim that cows kill more people than sharks every year.

Specifically, the meme below states: “Every years, sharks kill 10 people. Every year, 100 people die from being stepped on by cows.”

Using a reverse-image search, Snopes discovered that the meme was first circulated in 2013. The original version had a different caption at the bottom that read, "fear the real killer."

Next, Snopes researched how many people sharks kill around the world every year. According to the International Shark Attack File, the only scientifically verified database of shark attacks, five shark attacks resulted in deaths in 2022. In 2013, there were 10 fatalities caused by sharks worldwide, which was higher than the 10-year average from 2003 to 2012.

Snopes said, that the “number was most probably the source of the claim from the meme that sharks kill 10 people every year, given that the meme was originally published in 2013.”

Meanwhile, the myth busting website found that from 2003 to 2007, cow-related fatalities averaged 22 a year in the U.S. Ten of the 21 fatalities involved attacks by individual bulls, six involved attacks by individual cows, and five involved multiple cattle.

In 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 109 deaths caused by cattle ranching and farming, and 21 of them were the result of violence and injuries by people or animals. More recent data showed that in 2021, cattle-ranching-related fatal injuries amounted to 96 that year, 13 of which occurred from violence and injuries by people or animals.

Snopes concluded: “Based on the available data from just the U.S. and a few other countries, on average more people are killed annually by cows than sharks. Therefore, we rate the claim as "True."'

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