I like to get drunk, strap on a semi-auto, and parachute out of an airplane while eating a Big Mac.
I do it safe, however. I pop a statin just before eating the burger.
In all seriousness, the inability of people to gauge risk is always a bit amusing to me.
How about the person that carries 60 extra pounds on their body (they call it "curves" now), even as they obsess about the "dangers" of GMO food?
How about the person who is terrified about "Muslim extremists," but who texts while driving, and thinks nothing of hanging out with fundamentalist Christians?
How about the person that is terrified of flying in an airplane, but thinks nothing of driving 70 miles an hour on the Interstate at night?
* * *
Faulty risk analysis is not just limited to human life, of course. How about the faulty risk analysis we see so much of in the world of dogs?
How about the person who obsesses about dog food ingredients who purchases a breed that is a genetic wreck or a canine cancer bomb on four legs?
How about the person that reposts every Facebook list about canine poisons (You have a dog that eats pointsettas? You know what baker's chocolate actually tastes like?), but never looks too hard to see where that loose Xanax went off the counter?
Seriously? These folks are worried about over-vaccination?
* * *
Of course, the real danger, for dog and human alike, is too often the same: the very real possibility that old age will come, but that a real life will have never been lived.
How many people stay in a dead-end job their whole lives out of a sense of financial insecurity?
How many dogs never get to run free, off-leash, in forest and field?
There is more to life than longevity.
However long I live, or my dogs live, let it be said that we truly lived when we had the chance.
And yes, both the dogs and I are going to die with a few scars to prove it! How sad if we didn't!
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