Animals that kill the most people: deaths per year

This chart ranks five causes of human death by how many people each one kills in a year. Sharks come last: 12 people were killed in 2025. Rabies, which dogs spread, kills 44,203 people a year. Snakes kill at least 274,000. Murder kills 458,000. One more animal sits above all of them, and its bar is the longest by far.

Sharks are the animal people fear most, yet they are rare killers. The Florida Museum's International Shark Attack File counted 12 confirmed shark deaths worldwide in 2025. Nine of them were unprovoked bites. The most recent five-year average is eight unprovoked deaths a year. Australia's own shark incident database recorded five fatal bites there in 2025.

Dogs are on the chart because of a virus, not the bite itself. The World Health Organization says rabies causes 44,203 deaths a year, and that dog bites and scratches cause 99 percent of human rabies cases. WHO warns that the real number is probably higher, because rabies deaths are under-reported. The US CDC gives a higher estimate of 70,000.

Snakebite is where the newest research changes the picture. A study in PLOS Medicine, published in August 2026, estimates that snakes kill at least 274,000 people a year, and up to 513,000. That is far above the older WHO range of 81,410 to 137,880. The study's authors say the true toll may be higher still, because many bites happen far from clinics and records. The chart shows the low end, 274,000, so it never overstates.

Each bar counts deaths and uses the newest figure its publisher gives, so the years differ, and the year is printed on every bar. Where an animal spreads a disease, as dogs do with rabies, the bar counts deaths from that disease. The rabies and murder figures are for 2021, and the shark figure is for 2025. None of these numbers is an exact count. The murder figure comes from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, which estimated 458,000 homicide victims in 2021. The UN's later 2023 rate of 5.2 per 100,000 people is below 2021's 5.8.

Read the bars as sizes, not as exact counts. The shortest bar is a sliver beside the longest. The top bar holds its place under every estimate here: even the highest snakebite estimate, 513,000, is below it. The order of the middle bars is less certain, because the snakebite and murder estimates overlap. As of October 2026, these are the latest figures each publisher has released, and newer reports may change them.