A few non-paranoid thoughts about the likelihood
"Woman killed by frog venom during bizarre detox therapy carried out by shamans"
— A Daily Star headline
Yes, I know the Daily Star isn't the epitome of great and accurate journalism, but where there's smoke there's fire, and I just bet that there's a grain of truth to the story. People do odd things for the strangest of reasons. Sometimes those things are dangerous, and people could die. Having discovered that there is a specific phobia for frogs (ranidaphobia, I thought the topic worth exploring to some extent, even if jocularly.
A headline in an Egyptian newspaper thousands of years ago might have read "Children die choking on frogs", because y'know, the Hebrew God sent a plague of frogs into Egypt in a giant pissing contest of the gods. It's mentioned in the Bible, The Book of Exodus. If memory serves, it's in Chapter Eight. The frogs were everywhere. Beds, kneading bowls, ovens, bloody everywhere a frog could get. Some kid was bound to have inhaled or swallowed one. Eventually God relented and the frogs died. So we now have piles of rotting frogs everywhere. Houses, public spaces, government buildings, pubs. Ovens. The Good Book says there was a stench. Was it a miasma powerful enough to kill? Maybe, who can say? Let's just assume that someone with asthma or other respiratory condition was overcome by the stench or some bacterial infection and pushed over the edge. People die.
Some South American natives still use the venom from the poison dart frog to tip darts and arrows to use in hunting. Are we to assume that if a tribe in the past was at war with another tribe that their chiefs said, "Oh no, lads, let's not use these wicked weapons on our enemies! I'm sure they'd never use them on us!" Nah, never happened. It's not like they are like nukes, they're going to get used because they had no Hague Convention or similar back then. You can be sure that people died.
I used to run through a park formed from an old gravel quarry. The holes left from scooping up all that gravel were filled with water and the park constructed around it, complete with a nice little picnic area and paths. It was a beautiful place to run in, and I'd take full advantage of it. After all, it was en route to one of my favourite Sherwood Forest runs. One gorgeous morning around dawn I was taking my usual shortcut between two ponds when I suddenly slipped. "By the cringe!", I might have exclaimed, "I appear to have come a cropper on some goose poop!" But I would have been, indeed was, wrong. For this was the day that the tiny wee baby frogs had decided to migrate from one pond to another. Indeed it seemed that every blasted little frog had decided to hop out of the pond they'd previously happily occupied, to find another. Thousands of the little buggers, all trying to find a better pond, and the only way was across the nice paths. I only had a skinned elbow, thankfully, but let's say I'd slipped and struck my head against one of the handy park bences or picnic tables? People die from such injuries.
Then there was that fad some years ago for licking toads in order to get high or hallucinate. I forget exactly what the cause, but people were doing it like they eat Tide pods today. Now I hear you say, "A toad is not a frog", and you would be correct. But not everyone knows the difference between a toad and a frog. Someone might have been sufficiently mistaken to have licked a frog, and depending on where the frog was found, it might have been a venomous frog, and we've already seen that certain frogs can kill. A tiny fraction of a gram of certain frog toxins can be enough to take out a healthy human. People could die.
Charles Fort was renowned for collecting reports of unusual occurrences. Indeed the Fortean Society still exists for the sole purpose of cataloguing such oddities. These have included rains of blood (like in Egypt), hailing fish and yes, of course frog precipitation. (What, wonders Maevwyn, is the terminal velocity of a frog? Could it kill someone?) Given my experience, it is possible that during such an event, a rain of frogs might cause injury, and in days past, even a minor injury could become so infected as to cause death. Yes, I bet that people have died in frog storms.
So, you may ask, "Should I be worried about my survival in the event that I ever meet a frog?". The answer is probably "No". But you should just keep looking over your shoulder, because in addition to our stealing their carefully-grown venom, mistaking them for the clearly inferior (in their eyes) toads, pulling their legs off to be eaten by those dreadful French people and messing with their environment and taking away their ecological niches, you can just bet your sweet bippy that the frogs are by now pretty ticked off.¹
The California red-legged frog is especially cross. Watch out Californians.
¹ My old English teacher would be angrier than a Californian red-legged frog at this sentence.
I forget which of you pointed this nodeshell out to me, but I'm very grateful. It might have been Auspice or avalyn. Speak up, I had a fun twenty minutes writing this.
It was Auspice: "…it was me! I'm tickled pink to see this filled!"
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