Guest Column: An Avoidable Conflict by Dan Namowitz
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:
Would you fly in an airplane if upon boarding you beheld a
sign proclaiming, “Notice: the flight crew is trained to cope with nor-
mal operations only. The management is not responsible for the per-
formance of the pilots under emergency conditions.”?
Would you ride aboard a train or an ocean liner, if the engi-
neer or captain had received no emergency training?
What kind of emergency training should the driver of an
automobile undergo? With all the loss-of-control accidents that occur
on icy roads at the beginning of each new winter, and all the
animal/automobile collisions that occur each spring and summer, it is
obvious that drivers whose normal operating environments involve
certain predictable hazards are doing a poor job of dealing with emer-
gencies, resulting in unnecessary death and injury.