The result was Delete--Tone 14:53, 29 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
This list is highly indiscriminate and vague. It is woefully incomplete and has little hope of ever reaching completion. It purports to list, among other things, all animals that have been known to injure humans in self-defense. Practically all animals, even docile ones, have some instinct of self-preservation that will make them lash out at an attacker. It is hard for me to conjure an example of an animal that either does not lash out at an aggressor, or that completely lacks the means wherewith to cause some injury to man. Any such pathetic creature would be evolutionarily disadvantaged to the point of preclusion from existence. Even promising examples like small frogs or caterpillars will usually contain at least a mild toxin or have the capacity to bite, at least in theory. However, even if that would not make this voluminous enough, then we come to the plants. Most plants are toxic. Even when this toxicity does not rise to the level of notoriety or lethality, plants are known for their secondary metabolites which generally have structures (alkaloidal, for example) wherein some degree of pharmacological effect is almost inevitable. Even plants that are commonly eaten will usually have some part other than the edible one that contains a toxin. Issues of vagueness arise from consideration of whether allergens, such as peanuts, fall within purview of this list. There are also plants such as cycads that inherit some measure of toxicity from a symbiote (e.g. a cyanobacterium), raising yet another issue of vagueness. The same issues for plants also apply to fungi. Then we come to the microbes. Some of the microbes already listed are almost exclusively infective to those with compromised immune systems (e.g. Bacillus subtilis), being otherwise innocuous. Given that in cases such as AIDS even one's own healthy gut flora can cause infection, we come to the now familiar situation where it would be hard to exclude any organism from the list. In abstract, there's nothing wrong with simply drawing the line, but it's too involved an issue to be handled in a disinterested way for a topic as broad as this one. deranged bulbasaur 17:31, 25 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]