Torn apart by tigers or butted to death by rams: meet Dr. Ricky Langley, expert on animal-related death

So we've established that getting killed by a leaping spotted eagle ray is approximately as likely as being flattened by blue ice from the toilet of a passing 747. But what about being eaten by rats? Crushed by a dairy cow?  Could it happen to you?

If anyone knows, it's Dr. Ricky Langley, author of the study "Deaths resulting from animal attacks in the United States."

A physician with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, Langley often thought about becoming a veterinarian. But he ended up a people doctor instead, and used his interest in zoology to specialize in the interactions between humans and animals. Usually the bad ones.

When we ask Langley about the most unusual mode of animal-related death he's heard of, he pauses for a moment, pondering. 

"People fell in a pig pen and were eaten by pigs," he says finally, in his deep North Carolina drawl.

But is that really weirder than the cases of people being impaled by flying sailfish (a woman was stabbed in the chest by a blue marlin; her breast implants may have saved her life)? Or a swimmer surfacing directly into the maw of a stinging jellyfish ("It would be pretty painful," Langley says, in what seems like a contender for understatement of the year)? Or the woman Langley treated who was bitten on the breast by a horse (she lived).

But while people spend a lot of time worrying about snakes and sharks, they're far more likely to keel over from a bee sting at a church picnic.

"I think they probably don't think about the insects or the cars colliding with deer," Langley said.

Though they probably should  –  533 Americans were killed by hornets, bees, and wasps between 1991 and 2001, and around 200 people die in deer-car accidents every year.

What's the worst kind of death-by-animal, the way Langley himself would least like to go?

"I think that being eaten would be tough, unless it went directly for your neck," he says. "I don’t know if there’s a good way."

--Emily Matchar