Oddly, I felt the opposite about fairs. The last time I went to the Los Angeles County Fair, I was probably 14, and I had pet rats and birds and fish at the time, and I took horseback riding lessons, and I LOVED seeing the horses and all the different rats who were obviously so much better treated than the ones I was used to seeing at the petstore. At the time, rats were considered nothing more than snake-food. And at the fair, there were breeders and owners showing them who loved their rats as pets and friends, and there were crazy colors amd styles (blue and lilac, hairless and dumbo-eared) that you would never see any place else.
I didn’t got to the LA fair again until last year. And in the meantime, all the animals and crafts and competitions were replaced by stall after stall of infomercial type products. It was truly a disappointment. I wonder how children will learn to love the more exotic creatures if they never see them loved by other people…
Maybe the LA Fair was initially different because it’s LA, and we’re a bunch of city-folk and tree-huggers…now our fair has just become a huge exercise in commericialism. You can find 20 ways to clean your floor, but you can’t see more than 1 goat… (I do love goats! I couldn’t fit one in a 1-bedroom apartment, but OMG they are so funny and cute!). I miss the goats and the rats and the rabbits, too. I never had the idea that the creatures lived in their “show” cages for longer than the couple days of their showing at the fair. All the breeders/showers I talked to when I was 14 were very clear that the way the animals were kept at the fair was temporary, and that the animals should be kept in much different circumstances normally…ie, if I were to purchase one of their babies. I think that’s the responsible thing to tell a 14-year-old at the fair, isn’t it?