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Examples of Damage and Loss Estimates from Wildlife/Human Conflicts

Deer-Vehicle Collisions (DVCs)

DVCs number more than 726,000/yr in the United States (Conover 1997a). It's estimated that perhaps half of all DVCs are reported. If that is so, then DVCs probably number more than 1.5 million per year. The average cost to repair a vehicle is $1,644 (Conover 1995, Conover 1997a). If that number is multiplied by 726,000, then total cost of reported DVCs per year is $1.2.billion. For unreported DVCs, if a value of $500 per vehicle is assumed, the total would be $360 million. The two figures from unreported and reported collisions would equal about $1.6 billion annually (Conover 2002).

Bird Strikes

There are approximately 8,000 civilian crashes with birds each year (Conover 2002). The annual costs of bird strikes to civilian and military aircraft exceeded $300 million in the 1990s (Dolbeer et al. 2000)

Damage to Households

Conover (1997b) reported on a survey of more than 1000 households from 100 of the largest metropolitan areas. A majority of households (61%) reported wildlife damage problems with a mean loss of $73. More than 52% of households made an effort to solve wildlife damage problems, spending about $38 per household. If these figures are extrapolated to 60 million households in the United States, they add up $4.4 billion. Figuring in people's time to fix damaged property at minimum wage ($6.15 in 2000) (Conover 1997b), labor cost would be $1.6 billion. Hence, the total cost of household damage by wildlife in urban areas runs to $8.3 billion.

Total yearly economic damage in the United States from all forms of wildlife damage is conservatively estimated to be about $22 billion (Conover 2002)