Documented fatal wild pig attacks killed an average of about nine people per year worldwide between 2000 and 2019, according to the most comprehensive review of the subject. That number, though, captures only one narrow category of pig-related death: direct physical attacks by wild boar and feral hogs. When you widen the lens to include diseases transmitted from pigs to humans, farm accidents involving pig infrastructure, and vehicle collisions with wild boar, the total human toll linked to pigs climbs considerably higher and becomes far harder to pin to a single annual figure.
What the Data on Wild Pig Attacks Actually Shows
A global review covering the years 2000 through 2019 documented 163 separate reports of fatal wild pig attacks, resulting in 172 human deaths across 29 countries. That works out to roughly 8.6 deaths per year on average.1Human-Wildlife Interactions. Human fatalities resulting from wild pig attacks worldwide: 2000-2019 Most of these attacks occurred within the wild pig’s native range, which spans Europe, Asia, and North Africa, though feral pig populations in the Americas and Australia contributed cases as well.
The typical victim was an adult male, between 20 and 59 years old, traveling on foot and working alone. Victims ranged in age from 3 to 85, which gives a sense of how opportunistic these encounters can be. Children and elderly people are more vulnerable for obvious reasons, but a healthy adult walking through boar habitat at the wrong moment can also end up in serious trouble.2US Department of Agriculture / Treesearch. Human fatalities resulting from wild pig attacks worldwide: 2000-2019
These numbers almost certainly undercount the real toll. Fatal pig attacks in rural parts of South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and remote Pacific islands are less likely to make it into published reports or government databases. The researchers relied on media reports, government records, and published case studies, so any death that went unrecorded in those systems would be missed. Still, the study is the best available snapshot of how often wild pigs directly kill people through physical violence.
How Wild Pigs Kill
Wild boar are stocky, fast, and armed with sharp tusks that can reach several inches in length. Males use these tusks in fights with rivals, slashing upward in an arc that targets the legs, groin, and abdomen of anything standing nearby. When a boar charges a person, the injuries tend to be deep lacerations and puncture wounds to the lower body, though attacks to the head and torso are documented as well.
A case report from South Korea illustrates how severe a boar encounter can get. A patient attacked by a wild boar sustained a penetrating wound near the right ear, along with a laceration to the forehead. Imaging revealed bleeding inside the skull, a brain contusion, air inside the cranial cavity, and fractures of the cheekbone, temporal bone, and jawbone.3PubMed Central. Penetrating Head Injury Resulting From Wild Boar Attack in Republic of Korea: A Case Report That patient survived, but the injuries are the kind that easily prove fatal when medical help is not immediately available, which is often the case in rural or wilderness settings where most attacks happen.
Death from wild pig attacks usually results from blood loss due to deep tusk wounds, organ damage from penetrating injuries, or secondary complications like infection. Boar are not predators hunting humans for food; they attack defensively when startled, cornered, or protecting piglets. A sow with a litter can be especially dangerous, and many fatal encounters involve people who stumbled onto a group of pigs unaware.
Domestic Pigs Can Kill Too
Most people think of domestic pigs as docile barnyard animals, and most of the time they are. But domestic pigs can become aggressive when disturbed, and their size alone makes them dangerous. A fully grown sow can weigh over 300 pounds; boars bred for farming often exceed 500 pounds. Attacks involve trampling, kicking, and biting, and the injuries can be severe enough to kill.4PubMed. Death caused by a domestic pig attack
Fatal domestic pig attacks are rare enough that they tend to appear in the forensic medicine literature as individual case reports rather than as statistical trends. The victims are disproportionately farmers and farm workers, often people who were working alone with animals and had no one nearby to intervene. Small children are also at risk; a pig that would merely knock an adult down can cause fatal injuries to a toddler. Unlike wild boar attacks, domestic pig fatalities are not tracked in any centralized global database, so there is no reliable annual count. The scattered case reports make it clear that they happen, but how often remains genuinely unknown.
The genetics behind pig aggression are complex. Researchers categorize aggression in pigs into several types, including social aggression related to establishing dominance hierarchies, maternal aggression from sows defending piglets, fear-induced aggression, and redirected aggression caused by environmental stress. Overcrowding, excessive noise, and heat stress all make aggression worse.5PubMed Central. Genetic Contributions to Aggressive Behaviour in Pigs: A Comprehensive Review For anyone working around pigs, the practical takeaway is that a confined, stressed pig is a more dangerous pig, and that sows with young piglets should be approached with particular caution.
Diseases Pigs Transmit to Humans
Physical attacks are the most dramatic way pigs kill people, but they are not the most consequential. Several serious infectious diseases jump from pigs to humans, and in terms of total lives lost, these dwarf the number of deaths caused by tusks and teeth.
Streptococcus Suis
Streptococcus suis is a bacterium that infects both pigs and people. In humans, it causes meningitis, blood poisoning, heart valve infections, joint infections, and septic shock, and the death rate is significant.6PubMed. Streptococcus suis: an emerging zoonotic pathogen People typically catch it through direct contact with infected pigs or raw pork, especially through cuts or abrasions on the skin. Slaughterhouse workers, butchers, and pig farmers are the most common victims. In parts of Southeast Asia, outbreaks have also been tied to consuming raw or undercooked pork dishes.
A review of cases in South America found that among 47 documented infections, the overwhelming majority presented as meningitis. The case fatality rate in that dataset was about 4%, though this likely reflects regions with relatively good access to medical care. In large outbreaks in China and Vietnam, fatality rates have been considerably higher, particularly when the infection presents as toxic shock. Infections were linked primarily to pig or pork exposure, though some occurred after consuming undercooked meat.7PubMed Central. Human Streptococcus suis Infections, South America, 1995-2024 Among survivors, lasting hearing loss is one of the most common complications. Global case numbers are hard to estimate because S. suis is underdiagnosed in many countries and not always a reportable disease, but hundreds of cases are identified each year across Asia alone.
Nipah Virus
Nipah virus is one of the scariest pathogens on the planet, and pigs played a central role in its emergence. The virus first appeared in Malaysia in 1998 during an outbreak among pig farmers. Fruit bats are the natural reservoir, but infected pigs amplified the virus and passed it to people who had close contact with them. As of May 2024, there have been 754 confirmed human Nipah cases globally, with 435 deaths, for an overall case fatality rate of about 58%. In the original 1998–1999 Malaysian and Singaporean outbreaks, 294 human cases and 110 deaths were recorded, and most of those infected had close contact with Nipah-infected pigs.8IJID Regions. Twenty-five years of Nipah outbreaks in Southeast Asia: A persistent threat to global health
Malaysia controlled that initial outbreak by culling over a million pigs. Later outbreaks in Bangladesh and India have involved bat-to-human and human-to-human transmission rather than pigs acting as the intermediary, but the original pig-mediated pathway demonstrated how intensive pig farming in regions where fruit bats are endemic can create conditions for lethal spillover events. Nipah remains on the WHO’s priority pathogen list precisely because of its high fatality rate and pandemic potential.
Pork Tapeworm and Neurocysticercosis
The pork tapeworm, Taenia solium, has a life cycle that loops between pigs and humans. When larval cysts from the parasite lodge in the human brain, the result is neurocysticercosis, a condition that causes seizures, headaches, and sometimes death. In many developing countries, neurocysticercosis is one of the leading causes of epilepsy, accounting for roughly 30% of all epilepsy cases in most of those settings.9PubMed Central. Laboratory Diagnosis of Neurocysticercosis (Taenia solium) The disease is also increasingly seen in wealthier countries due to immigration from areas where the parasite is common.10PubMed Central. Taenia solium cysticercosis
The number of deaths specifically attributable to neurocysticercosis each year is difficult to pin down because the disease often manifests as epilepsy, and death certificates may list “epilepsy” or “seizure disorder” without noting the parasitic cause. Estimates from the WHO and various research groups suggest tens of thousands of deaths globally each year are linked to epilepsy caused by this parasite, but exact figures are unreliable. A recent case report documented something particularly unusual: a live adult tapeworm surgically removed from a woman’s brain after serial MRI scans revealed a migrating lesion in her temporal lobe, marking the first confirmed case of an adult T. solium worm living inside the human brain.11PubMed Central. First report of adult Taenia solium in human brain with neurocysticercosis: illustrative case That case is an outlier, but it underscores how thoroughly this pig-associated parasite can invade the human body.
Occupational Deaths on Pig Farms
Working around pigs kills people in ways that have nothing to do with the animals themselves. Manure storage pits on livestock farms are particularly lethal hazards. Decomposing manure produces hydrogen sulfide, methane, ammonia, and carbon dioxide. In an enclosed pit, these gases can reach concentrations that cause unconsciousness within seconds. A worker who enters a poorly ventilated manure pit may collapse almost instantly, and anyone who goes in after them to attempt a rescue often suffers the same fate.
A case reviewed by the Iowa Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation Program described exactly this scenario: a worker entered an underground manure pit and lost consciousness, a coworker tried to rescue him and also collapsed, and both men died of anoxic brain injury despite emergency services arriving within minutes. The same review found that the occupational mortality rate in agriculture was roughly 7.4 per 10,000 workers per year, more than double the rate for non-agricultural occupations. In most cases involving sewage or livestock waste, the cause of death was asphyxiation. Though manure pit injuries are rare, they carry an extremely high fatality rate when they do occur.12PubMed Central. Manure pit injuries: Rare, deadly, and preventable
These deaths are not tracked as “pig-related fatalities” in any standard database. They show up in occupational health statistics under agricultural accidents or confined-space deaths. But they are a direct consequence of the infrastructure required to raise pigs at scale, and they recur every year in farming communities around the world.
Vehicle Collisions With Wild Boar
In Europe, vehicle collisions with wild boar are a well-recognized traffic safety problem. Wild boar populations have surged across much of the continent over the past few decades, driven by milder winters, abundant food from agricultural land, and reduced hunting pressure. A study of wildlife-vehicle collisions in northwestern Spain found that ungulate-vehicle crashes, with wild boar being a primary species involved, pose a serious traffic safety hazard.13PubMed. Spatiotemporal analysis of vehicle collisions involving wild boar and roe deer in NW Spain
Several European countries report thousands of wild boar-related road accidents annually. Germany alone records over 200,000 wildlife-vehicle collisions per year, with wild boar comprising a substantial share. While most result in vehicle damage and minor injuries, fatal crashes do occur, particularly on high-speed rural roads where a driver hits a 200-pound boar at highway speed. The exact annual death toll from boar-vehicle collisions across Europe is not compiled in a single source, but individual country reports suggest dozens of fatalities per year across the continent, making this another quiet but real contributor to pig-related human mortality.
How Pigs Compare to Other Animals
In the United States, a study of animal-related fatalities from 2018 to 2023 found that the majority of deaths came from non-venomous animals, particularly a category grouping horses, cattle, pigs, raccoons, and other mammals. Within that group, cattle and horses are believed to be responsible for most deaths. Research cited in that analysis found that 36% of occupational animal-related deaths were attributed to cattle and 31% to horses.14PubMed Central. Animal-Related Fatalities in the United States (2018-2023) Pigs account for a smaller share of direct animal-caused deaths in the U.S., but they are present in those statistics, grouped alongside other livestock rather than broken out separately.
Globally, pigs are nowhere near the top of the list of animals that kill the most humans. Mosquitoes, by transmitting malaria and other diseases, kill hundreds of thousands of people each year. Snakes kill tens of thousands. Even dogs, mainly through rabies transmission in countries where the disease is not well controlled, kill far more people than pigs do through direct attacks. But when you factor in the full spectrum of pig-related mortality, including zoonotic diseases like Nipah, parasitic infections like neurocysticercosis, and occupational hazards on pig farms, pigs collectively contribute to a death toll that is significantly higher than the single-digit annual average from physical attacks alone.
Why the Real Number Is Impossible to Calculate
If you were hoping for a single clean number, the honest answer is that one does not exist and probably cannot. The roughly nine deaths per year from wild pig attacks is a solid, documented figure for that specific category. But try to add domestic pig attack deaths, and you hit a wall of scattered case reports with no central tracking. Try to add disease deaths, and you run into the problem that neurocysticercosis deaths are coded as epilepsy, S. suis deaths may be coded as bacterial meningitis of unspecified origin, and Nipah deaths are sporadic and outbreak-dependent. Try to add farm accident deaths, and you find them buried in occupational health databases under broad agricultural categories that lump pigs with every other type of livestock.
The categories also overlap in some cases. A pig farmer who dies of S. suis meningitis is both a disease death and an occupational death. A person who swerves to avoid a wild boar, hits a tree, and dies appears in traffic accident statistics, not animal attack databases. The fragmentation of record-keeping across countries, health systems, and government agencies means that no one institution is counting all the ways pigs contribute to human deaths.
What is clear is that the answer to “how many humans do pigs kill each year” depends entirely on how broadly you define the question. If you mean direct physical violence from wild pigs, it is roughly nine per year worldwide. If you mean all the ways that living alongside billions of pigs affects human mortality, including the parasites they harbor, the viruses they amplify, and the toxic gases their waste produces, the number is orders of magnitude larger. The roughly 800 million pigs alive at any given time are deeply entangled with human life in ways that make a simple body count impossible.
Reducing Your Risk Around Pigs
For most people, the practical risk from pigs is close to zero. You are unlikely to encounter a wild boar unless you spend time in rural or forested areas where they are common, and even then attacks are uncommon. If you do hike or work in boar country, making noise to avoid surprising animals, giving wide berth to sows with piglets, and never cornering a boar are the standard precautions.
For people who work with pigs professionally, the risks are more concrete. Wearing gloves and covering any skin wounds when handling pigs or raw pork reduces the chance of S. suis infection. Proper ventilation and gas monitors in manure storage areas prevent the asphyxiation deaths that claim several farm workers each year. Cooking pork thoroughly eliminates the risk of tapeworm infection, and in regions where T. solium is endemic, basic sanitation and meat inspection programs are the primary public health tools for breaking the transmission cycle.
Wild boar-vehicle collisions are harder to prevent individually, but wildlife crossings, roadside fencing, and warning systems on high-risk stretches of road have shown promise in European countries that have invested in them. Drivers in areas with known boar populations are advised to reduce speed at dusk and dawn, when the animals are most active. A boar standing in a dark road is nearly invisible until you are very close, and at highway speed the physics are unforgiving.