Well, I don’t consider fleas animals…
Still, if you are going that route, Bacteria are really what are dangerous, not fleas…
Foul creatures, those. My cats like to dismember them, which is nice because then I don’t have to deal with them.
We’ll leave house spiders be, and I happily held a millipede at the zoo once, but house centipedes? <<shudder>>
OK, not exactly “dangerous” but we had a squirrel and a duck inside our house before (separate occasions :))
Trying to encourage either to go out the door and not hurt themselves/destroy things, however, was quite the chore!
As for insects: I have only recently convinced my wife to not kill the centipedes (I usually relocate them to the basement) and she doesn’t bother the spiders. Our reaction has been mimicked by my 3 year old who happens to find these predatory insects more interesting than scary (which I’m glad for).
But are sheep really all that dangerous?
Oh - you didn’t mean that thread.
I lived in Phoenix for about 10 years. Never saw a scorpion, but my siblings and I would amuse ourselves by killing black widows by dropping bricks on them. That seemed to work just fine.
No deadly bites to any of our human family but a poor hamster named Dale is suspected of dying from a spider bite. (Chip, his brother, unfortunately decided to hide in the dryer hose…not a pleasant discovery for mom)
Fleas are unambiguously members of the animal kingdom, while bacteria unambiguously are not. And I’m not aware of any definition of “animal” which includes scorpions and spiders but not fleas.
If you think that’s a bad demise for a hamster, you should have seen the spectacular ways my childhood pets liked to kill themselves. One hamster got so fat he became stuck in a tube, while another escaped only to somehow find his way into the bathroom wall where he would occasionally scratch from the inside… Until one day, the scratching ceased. 
Wow, I appear to have had more experiences with (not very) deadly organisms in and around the house than most. We used to live in a stilt house in Corpus Christi Texas, right next to the Laguna Madre. The downstairs was walled in with breakaway walls, making a kind of garage under the house. Several times I found small rattlesnakes inside this area (although not in what could be called the living area, which was upstairs). I’d just throw them into a bucket and drive them away from the house and let them go. If any ever came back, I don’t know about it. We had small scorpions of some not-very-dangerous kind in all parts of the house, upstairs and downstairs on a semi-regular basis. I killed one in my son’s crib once, after my wife was about to drop him in. She saw the scorpion just in time, and freaked, and made me come and kill it. I was not as nice to the scorpions as I was to the snakes. I was only stung by a scorpion once, when I was surprised to find one in my shorts as I put them on. Bet you’ve never seen a guy get out of his shorts that fast. Ouch! It was a tender area, but I’d rank the sting as less powerful than a red wasp (which we also had regular troubles with). I once lost work after getting massively stung by red wasps when I inadvertently mashed a large, hidden nest in a tight place I could not get out of rapidly. For the wrong person, that would have been deadly for sure, but luckily I am not particularly sensitive. We also had coral snakes out back, but I never saw one for more than about 2 seconds at a time, and I never considered them dangerous. Our next door neighbor’s dog was bitten by a very large rattler (which my neigbor killed with a shovel, and we ate it.) Now here in Missouri, the wildlife is fun, but doesn’t seem to be quite as dangerous.
Yeah - grant that - you are quite right. But I always feel obliged to defend the creatures with whom I have now become irrationally obsessed.
According to the news, it seems to be ex-husbands and ex-boyfriends.
Dyson, Hoover, Electrolux. If it fits in the hose, out it goes!
Yes, and I believe that though they have a neurotoxin (like cobras), coral snakes are very tame. They don’t attack automatically like pit vipers. You can pick up a coral snake and it won’t just try to bite you; it just tries to get away.
There’s one king snake that looks an awful lot like a coral snake. It has the same colors, but the pattern is slightly different.
There are several mimics, not just the king snake one. But none of them have red touching black in the red, black, and yellow color scheme.
Red on yellow, kill fellow, red on black, friend of jack.
Before I moved into the Corpus Christ stilt house, a neighbor boy was apparently bitten by a coral snake, but he got the antivenom and was fine afterwards. They had moved out before I moved in so I never met the victim. But the fireman neighbor across the road said that he and his father had been holding it and playing with it for a long time before it bit him. I was told at the time that it was the only recorded coral snake bite in the County, but I can’t verify - that was before the interweb. In fact, the boy would probably be in his late thirties by now if he has not continued with his Darwin Award tendencies.
According to the link below, there appears to have been a spate of coral snake bites in Corpus recently.
Coral snake bite deaths became very rare after the antivenom was introduced in '67. The link states that there have been none, but it is incorrect in that respect. There was one in 83 in Texas, and if you search you will find references to it - I did, but neglected to save the links to those. I suspect that the Nat Geo article the link quotes predates the 83 bite. I think there have been a couple more, more recently than that.
Anyhoo - the bad news is that no one is making more Coral snake antivenom these days, and stocks are dangerously low.
But it’s important to point out that mnemonic only works in the United States. Don’t use it in Latin America :).
I did not know that, and I have spent years in Costa Rica and occasionally visit Mexico. Why?
Because this handsome little bloke lives in Costa Rica and he could kill you ;).
That mnemonic works perfectly for the two ( or three, depending how you split things ) U.S. species of coral snakes, Micrurus fulvius/tener and Micruroides euryxanthous. But there are 60+ species of coral snakes in the Americas as a whole and it doesn’t work on all of them.
To slow for the edit:
Poking around, I can quickly find AT LEAST five species of Mexican coral snake that violate that mnemonic as well.
ETA: If you’re a snake chaser in Latin America, do invest in Campbell and Lamar’s Venomous Reptiles of Latin America. Great, great book.
Of course, the simplest rule is, if you see a snake, leave it alone. Sure, it’s probably not poisonous, but even if not, why should you go trying to pick it up? It’s just going about its business; you go about with yours.
Unless it’s in your house or something, but that’s not a very common place to find snakes.
As noted above, I have found snakes in my house (or, at least garage) on several occasions. But I would not normally go messing around with a snake I found in the wild, not so much because it could hurt me, but because it probably does not deserve to have me ruining its day. (Unless I wanted to eat it, or wear its skin or something, in which case, all bets off.)
I did not know about the coral snakes. I’ve seen several coral snakes or their mimics in Costa Rica. But the mnemonic never came into play - I never really wanted to mess with them, and usually when you see a coral snake, it is gone before you could say “Friend of Jack”. Pretty hard to count the stripes on a red, yellow, and black blur.
Not true of the terceopelo (I think called Fer de lance, in English, although it sounds French to me). Those darn things stand their ground. The only time I ever killed a poisonous snake because it was poisonous was when one came through the door of a rancho (in Costa Rica, that means a usuallly one-room, thatched roof house) we were building. We were not finished with the building, but we had crashed on the floor, with no roof or door on it yet. It was in the wee hours, very bright moon, and I got up to go pee, and met a medium sized terceopelo right as it came through the door. More than half the floor space was covered with sleeping people, so I yelled and grabbed up a big machete and killed it. Scared holy heck out of my friends, not because of the snake, but because I was yelling and swinging a huge machete inside around all these people.