A Tail of Two Centuries

On October 28th, we left to travel to Columbus, Ohio, for the 77th Annual ARBA Convention. We left at 8:15 a.m. and arrived there around 3:30pm. The weather was lovely. It was actually beautiful the whole 5 days we were there, and on our travel days.

We drove straight to the Ohio Expo Center, with no problems. Our animals were housed in two separate buildings. The cavies were in the Youth Building, which was the Celeste Building. Our rabbits were in the Bricker Building.

The cooping for the cavies was adequate for the species, as they enjoy small, cave-like enclosures. The rabbits were in VERY very small coops. I saw Florida Whites leisurely sprawled out in coops nearly as large as mine have at home, but ours were in very tiny coops of about 1' x 1'. This was my only true concern about the entire experience. They bordered on inhumane. I saw senior does that could barely turn around, and would probably have been happier in carriers for the whole week. We ran into a little hitch when we started to coop the rabbits, because they didn't supply shavings. We finally found some straw, after searching the showroom and put them on that, and some of the shavings from their carriers. Evidently, instead of supplying shavings, they were selling them, and ran out. When we took our animals out the next day, the brokens had black feet. We had to find somewhere that sold shavings, and Margie Brewer was nice enough to point us to Lowe's, which wasn't gouging for them like the businesses in the immediate area.

The ventilation and temperature in the showroom were both good. The morning of checkout, the air in the Celeste building was ammonia riddled, but up until then it was very good, especially compared to the previous year in Kentucky. There, the air was bad by the second day.

The cavy area was nice, in that they supplied shavings and had conveniently located garbage cans, that weren't overflowing, to clean the pens into. This was not the case in the rabbit building.