Consultant Larry Smith suggests the timing of the crisis, amid other distractions, also has helped soften the impact. The fact it occurred during the holidays and at about the same time the government raised the nation's terror threat level to orange both lessened the potential for panic, he said, as did the media's "fairly straightforward" reporting to date.
"There haven't been those World War II kind of banner headlines that would cause people's blood pressures to rise," said Smith, head of a Louisville, Kentucky-based communications consulting firm, the Institute for Crisis Management. And with terrorism, SARS and other threats, he said, "Maybe we don't panic quite as much as we used to about things because there are so many other things to panic about."
A whole new attitude is possible if the "lone cow theory" doesn't hold up, as Laermer puts it.
"We're sitting on something that's going to explode as soon as they turn up Cow No. 2," he said. "It's really easy right now to say, `Look at this, it came from Canada, it's their problem and not ours.' But two cows -- it will be a crisis."
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