All I can tell you is, I’ve yet to see a dairy farmer in my corner of the South-East US packing heat in the field.

Same as its more dangerous being in the same room as a lion than a bicycle. Or rubbing a lump of plutonium on your chest than a knife. Or Dancing with Wolves instead of Ballroom Dancing.
This could be an episode of “When good statistics turn into bad conclusions”.

My cat has long hair and often has poo stuck to him

I feel your pain.  The late Mister Fluffy Cheeks, who was fine in SF, immediately developed loose stool when he arrived in Palm Springs.

He also climbs all over me in bed and if I don’t get up fast enough to feed him when he wants, he starts “play” biting me. He also likes to lay on my chest and knead my throat while smelling my hair; probably a ruse to make sure all that poop is near my face so I get infected.

He then walks right in front of me every time I’m walking toward where his food bowl is. He stops every two feet or so and sits down to make sure I’m following him, preventing me from moving (especially in one particularly narrow part), so since I’m no longer following him, he waits until I continue. I trip over him often. 

I always just thought he was weird, but, now I know what his real plans are I guess.

Perhaps if we got as worked up about smoking and automobile deaths as we do about shark related deaths, we wouldn’t have nearly so many deaths in those categories. 

I see what you did there, cow apologist.

Soon enough, Cowicide will show up and it’ll be hooves over udders.

People don’t have many interactions with sharks, but a high proportion of those interactions are unpleasant as compared to interactions with dogs.

And yet, I rarely find shark shit on my lawn.

A car accident, there’s a good chance you’ll hear the brakes, though part of what terrifies me about driving is someone running a red light and just hitting me. Though I feel somewhat saver as I have a decent field of vision in my car.

On a related note, try pigs. They won’t just kill you; they’ll eat the remains, too.

Try cats. They’ll infect you with a brain parasite to make you subservient, then trip you until you break your neck, then eat your face.

What I’d like to know is the rate of fatalities per encounter. I’ll wager there are orders of magnitude more human-cow encounters per year than human-shark ones.

If a cow passes within 20 feet of you, the chances of you being aware of it approach 100%. With sharks, not so much.