From: Boris Ehret
Date: Mon Nov 15, 2004 3:27 pm
Subject: Strasbourg
Hi Vickie, dear ICATers
I think Strasbourg (France) was a good experience – huge traditional show with about 400 cats and really a lot of public. Lots of them were interested in ICAT and we had media coverage from one tv channel and two or three news papers. Sometimes we had over 200 spectators around the course… not an easy thing for the cats.
The only thing that was a little disappointing is that only about 10 or 12 cats came to try the course. Everybody wanted to see how our kittens run the course. I had two Bengal kittens with me (Spice Gidron and Spice Candis) – it’s hard to imagine how tired they were at the end of the day… Perhaps the exhibitors of the traditional shows are not so used to handle their cats, to play with them, to trust them. Maybe it’s because they didn’t know me and they were afraid that they wouldn’t succeed with their cats… it’s strange but compared to Frankfurt it was quite different.
An other good thing is that we have now the carpet. It’s 100 square meters, red, not a great quality… it’s what they use for expositions, and it’s not too heavy (transport) and rather cheap. We will get a new one every two or three shows (sponsored) – so it will always be clean and in good condition. We have five pieces of 2 x 10 meters and we scotch them on the floor.
This time we managed to build up the course in 60 minutes – the carpet was already there, and 45 minutes after the last cat run the curse everything was stored in the trailer and we were ready to leave. I think this is really important and probably we can change some things in order to be even faster.
An other good thing for us to see is that in Strasbourg for the first time a cat got panic and really tried to escape and jumped up the net… but it couldn’t escape and we had the time to hold it back. So now we know that our fence is safe.
Regards
Boris
For photos of Strasbourg, go to Pictures 3.
