Riding Tours Blog

Safety Overseas

Americans generally have a totally distorted view of the dangers of foreign travel. It seems that only a small percentage of my countrymen even have passports. They have the impression that the risks of going overseas are far greater than staying at home. This is a great shame for riders as most of the best horseback riding vacation opportunities are abroad. The bottom feeding media pander to our worst instincts - xenophobia, isolationism, ignorant arrogance and mistrust of the unknown. They give the impression that once beyond our borders our lives are in constant danger. Statistics point in a totally different direction. Deaths from firearms in the US run around 30,000 annually (only approached elsewhere in the world by active war zones) and violent crime rates are among the highest in anywhere. Indeed once we are abroad we are often safer than we would be at home.

Unfortunately perceptions determine behavior far more than statistics. Many people coming to the Rocky Mountains are terrified of those wicked grizzly bears although deaths from them only account for one casualty every few years. They hardly consider traffic deaths which account for over 40,000 deaths a year, but do not make news. Most consider lightning deaths so rare as to be risible and yet they mount to nearly 200 people a year. Nevertheless, it is grizzlies which cause the worry. Even less logical are those who turn two packs of cigarettes a day into ashes, knowing full well that it reduces their life expectancy by 6 or 8 years, and yet they will not take the comparatively miniscule risk of a foreign vacation. Breathe a sigh of relief as your plane clears the runway at Kennedy and start worrying again when it touches the ground at home.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Riding Tours. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.