Summary
Blanca Ojanguren, a 22-year-old Spanish tourist, was fatally attacked by an elephant at the Koh Yao Elephant Care sanctuary in Thailand while bathing the animal.
She was struck by its tusk, resulting in fatal injuries.
This tragedy highlights the risks of popular recreational activities involving elephants in Thailand.
It follows a recent fatal attack by a wild elephant on a Thai woman and adds to the 39 elephant-related deaths reported in 2024.
In that case I’d agree with you. It seems like the only objective way to say how dangerous an animal is is to look at something like reported deaths, but you’d really want to divide those numbers by some measure of how frequently each animal encounters a human, and they data is not so readily available.