Just another reason to be impressed with the French !!!!

It seems everyone knew except the organization committee. It was all over the internet and the press release from the EU and French Ministry of Agriculture really left no doubt…
The press statement on the official web site appeared September 7… But if you’ve been training for an entire year, and you get an e-mail from the committee saying everything is ok (the original mail is underneath) two days before the championships are supposed to begin you’ll probably take the risk and go… I guess they tried to get permission up to the last moment and you can’t really blame them… After all the work they’ve done… There should have been some info on the internet earlier so that the teams knew what was going on. Everything looked fine… and than suddenly they’ve cancelled… Luckily my friends turned around half way because some people on site in France called and told me it was off. Hadn’t it been for that phone call… my friends would have been reading the press statement in France…

----- Original Message -----
From: Odile TANNEAU
To: Michael Nosowski
Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 7:19 PM
Subject: Re:
you can go to france the shampionships is ok!
best regard
odile
> Message du 06/09/04 16:27
> De : "Michael Nosowski"
> A : ambessportcanin@wanadoo.fr<br />> Copie à :
> Objet :
>
There are o lot of rumors on the internet that the championships will be cancelled due to the rabies problem... Will there be an announcement on the internet about this?
Our competitors don't know if they should go to France or not...
Thank you

Everyone "knew" what?

That there was a dog with rabies in Bordeaux in August, yeah, that was common knowledge. That some people got exposed to this dog in August, and are at risk of contracting deadly rabies? Yeah, that was known too.

But IMO it's a stretch from that to say that everyone "knew" a world championship event would be cancelled in which everyone must have known that the dogs scheduled to compete had to provide documented proof of a rabies vaccination. The rabies vaccination requirement has been on the official event website all along.

I don't think it's fair to piss on the trial organizers for this. They too were blindsided by this decision.

Incidentally, the word there is that the mandate that led to the cancellation came down from the EU, with the French government as just an intermediary.

Laura Sanborn

The press statement from the French Agriculture Ministry had been released many weeks earlier and reiterated on August 3, just with stronger wording. You can find it on google.com. It banned all shows, etc… this should have been passed on down to the team captains.

The EU press release merely states that there has been an outbreak in France and the European Commission issued an EU-wide alert to all countries so that tourists that were in the area at the time should take notice. Nothing more.

Finally, writing an e-mail stating that the “championship is ok” when the meeting, to decide whether the championships will be allowed to go ahead or not, hasn’t even started (this meeting was scheduled for the day after I received that mail) isn’t a wise thing to do. One thing is the cost to the teams that went to France unnecessarily. Another issue is that some European countries will not let you in with a dog if you don’t have a veterinary certificate stating that there were no outbreaks of rabies in the region where you were staying… this involved months of quarantine.

Despite all this I feel terribly sorry for the organizers. All the work, costs and so on… for nothing… I’m certainly not pissing on them…

Ok, I found the Sept 3 (not August 3) press release that you refer to. It appears to ban dog competitions and expositions within 3 regions in France, including the one where the championship was to take place.

I have no idea what was going on behind the scenes about this. I doubt if trial organizers make it a habit to check with their national government to see if they've banned dog trials. Or maybe they thought they had an exception to hold this event?

Laura Sanborn

September, of course...

Anyway, disregarding whatever happened in the run-up, its really a shame. Looking at the pictures of the stadium, tracking fields, web site, etc it really seems they had everything well prepared. I fell really sorry for them…

I had 3 friends theyre - 2 of whom were competing the other the team captain and they only found out once they had reached the stadium - as did many of the competitors and spectators - apparently the atmosphere was that of a funeral.
At the end of the day if an outbreak was know more should have been done to keep the competitors and spectators upto date with what was going on in that country at that time and the possibility of cancelation - alot of people could have saved them selves time and money if they had known.