I have similar conversations with student nurses when they come to psychiatry about how to (informally) calculate risk when making decisions like how close to stand to someone or whether or not you can go into a patient’s room alone. My one-liner is “don’t be scared, never be stupid.”
First of all, we’ve got a bunch of highly unpredictable people, but 7-11 often has a similar quantity, and at least on the psych unit you can be around 99.9% that they don’t have a gun or even a knife. They might not be kittens, but you don’t have to treat them like rabid bears, either. Well. Most of them anyway, and I’d tell you if we had one at that time.
It also helps when you’re dealing with a high violence patient to take account of all their strengths and weaknesses. Back when I was a sitter I had a patient who was delirious from low oxygen but kept trying to clock me every time I tried to get the O2 cannula back on, but also was too weak from the low oxygen to even sit up. So I just backed off to the foot of the bed and phoned the assigned nurse and just explained what was up and that I needed a second set of hands (to hold his until we got the O2 back up enough for him to listen to reason). She walked right past me and almost got decked and the conversation went more or less:
“oh shit, he’s really aggressive”
“yeah, that’s what I said”
“you sounded so calm though!”
“…well he can’t get me over here!”
I had a similar conversation much later in my career about a patient who was trying to break my fingers but lacked the strength to even do that. When the other nurse expressed concern that he was trying to hurt me all I could think to say in that moment was,“…he’s not very good at it.”
It’s the same when you’ve got a super violent patient in ambulatories. They’ll be ready to beat the shit out of you but if their feet are tied together by a 6 inch strap you can just walk away from that ass-kicking at a leisurely pace, that’s the point of the restraints. Just make sure they’re on right and you won’t have any problems.
Also statistically speaking people with mental illness are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators, but that’s a whole different discussion.
The slow motion punches always amuse me.
Similarly, there are a lot of really lazy bad maps out there that are trying to make some point about a statistic, but are really just population density maps. Give your up votes to the person that links the appropriate xkcd.
I like to say, “Stastically you’re much more likely to die in a car accident on the way to the beach than be attacked by a shark once there.”
So people are less afraid of sharks and more afraid of each other, like it should be.
Maybe, but if we rode on sharks to get around I’m sure the statistic would be different.
We wouldn’t get far before the shark would asphyxiate though, I think it’s a bad replacement for cars
“Who here plans on driving their car today? Show of hands!” … “I recommend getting to know these people, because you are far more likely to die in an car accident caused by a stranger than by someone you know. But also don’t upset them, as you are far more likely to be murdered by someone you know rather than a stranger.”
“Mr Tourguide, aren’t you supposed to talk about sharks?”
Actually vending machines just have an insatiable bloodlust.
I would too if people thought shaking me would make me give them chocolate
Coconut trees need the nutrients of the fallen
We should take hundreds of vending machines into a field and corral them
And I heard you’ll more likely die on your way to collect your win than actually win the lottery.
And I heard home is a very dangerous place, cos lots of people die because of it…or at it?
That’s something that always gets me with certain safety recalls.
Like the Samsung Note 7’s second recall. Something like 1 out of 2 million phones caught fire. It just happened to do it on an airplane and got the phones banned by the FAA. Nobody was injured by the phones catching fire.
How many people died in car wrecks going to the store to swap out their phones?
driving is an apt choice to compare because it’s fucking disgusting how many people it kills every day and no one seems to give a flying fuck about it.
society is constantly actively choosing to let people die in horrible crashes simply because it is convenient.
Exactly. In general, our willingness to do stuff depends heavily on convenience.
How many of those people were only going to swap their phone though? How many would have been driving anyway. How many would have been killed doing something else because they weren’t going to swap out their phone…
While an interesting thought, there’s no way to know an alternate timeline of events.
I had a VERY close call against a cow once. Never seen a coyote, so I can’t really compare.
Coyotes aren’t super big and alone are pretty timid and rarely approach things bigger than it (like an adult human). Though when starving or other certain conditions drive them to approach larger animals or big open space (I.E. in a pack, or rabies), be mightily wairy.
(This is anecdotal experience only, please take it and reference it as such only)
Where do you live that there are cows but not coyotes? I thought coyotes were more or less a worldwide nuisance anywhere rural enough to have cattle.
Outside of North America 😳
Gotcha. I knew they had spread from Alaska to Panama, so I thought they’d moved into South America and Eurasia as well
There’s more than 30 millions of cows in Europe, and zero coyotes.
Yes, thank you for making the same point the other poster had already made.
You’re welcome!
Eurasia has grey wolves in that general role, although in some substantial areas like the United Kingdom, Japan, and southern China they’ve been extirpated completely
Skill issue
Cows are smarter than they look. Long ago I worked in a dairy operation and they would do things to fuck with you… like if you weren’t super careful in a milking stall they’d casually lean to one side (“oopsie! my bad”) to squish you. Or let the poop rip at just the right moment.
I don’t blame them one bit.
I always think about this when people say vending machines are more likely to kill you than sharks.
Are they looking at vending machines only in beach cities or in the middle of like, Arizona too?
I also feel that vending machines don’t really suddenly strike you without warning and through no fault of your own
Tell me you live in a safe neighborhood without saying you live in a safe neighborhood…
Your “feeling” are invalidating hundreds of peoples lived experience of the terror of vending machine gang violence
I mean they do. By not giving me the food I just paid for
The chances are low, but never zero.
There’s also a possibility that if humans live coyotes closely for several generations, it is likely to end up domesticated - one way or another.
Oh hang on, millions of humans already do live closely with domesticated canids.
A few days ago i tried to look up the genus of my dog breed with the presumption i would find like a family tree of how breeds relate to eachother.
Turns out the scientific name for my dog is “Canis familiaris”
So is the scientific name of literaly any dog breed, its literally latin for “domesticated canine”
So yeah a domesticated coyote would indeed just count as a dog breed like any other. Scientific literature wouldn’t consider it any other way
A better stat for the post would be you have a higher chance of being hurt by domesticated animals then getting attacked out of the blue by wild animals.
the reason all domestic dogs are canis familiaris is because they’re all the same species. They can all have non-sterile babies with each other, which is the most commonly accepted definition of a species. A domesticated coyote would still be its own species and get its own scientific name because it would not be able to breed with dogs, at the very least without having a sterile baby.
I hate to well actually you but coyote can breed with dogs and the offspring are known to be fertile for at least 4 generations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coydog
The same is true for wolf-dogs.
There are increased chances for complications so i guess fertility is lower but that is only verified to be true with wild parents specimen.
Domesticated coyote would likely be bred based on properties like ability to coexist with dogs so over time the species would merge more and more, complications would smooth out.
I believe we have a similar history with the neanderthaler.
damn that’s crazy to know. It’s wild how stuff like this is possible, I guess that means coyotes and dogs are basically the same animal already.
Cows are 300 times more likely to kill someone than coyotes. Not you.
Are you sure about that? My cholesterol has been looking mighty high lately.
… oh
People shaking coconut trees are often crushed by falling people who don’t exist within the context of all in which they live and which came before them.
someone once shook a vending machine vigorously for me when my snack was stuck. it was very stressful to watch
I’ve never seen a cow killing a coyote.
Coyotes are pretty small though, I think cattle would still be more dangerous.
You have clearly never been in a holding pen with 300 coyotes. Cows are not pack hunters.
Neither are coyotes, at least not by nature. They may live in a pack, but they typically travel and hunt solo or in pairs.
Also, coyotes do not hunt humans. They are opportunistic hunters at best. They scavenge a lot.
Im pretty sure you haven’t been either
