When a 9-year-old girl didn’t want her goat to be slaughtered, county fair officials sent deputies after it Every day for three months, Jessica Long’s young daughter walked and fed her goat, bonding with the brown and white floppy-eared animal named Cedar. But when it was time for Cedar to be sold and slaughtered at the Shasta District Fair last year, the 9-year-old just couldn’t go through with it. “My daughter sobbed in her pen with her goat,” Long wrote to the Shasta County fair’s manager on June 27, 2022. “The barn was mostly empty and at the last minute I decided to break the rules and take the goat that night and deal with the consequences later.” Long purchased the goat for her daughter to enter into the 4-H program with the Shasta District Fair. Children are taught how to care for farm animals. The animals are then entered in an auction to be sold and then slaughtered for meat in hopes of teaching children about the work and care needed to raise livestock and provide food, as farmers and ranchers do. In her letter, Long pleaded for the fair to make an exception and let her and her daughter take Cedar back. Aware that Cedar had already been sold in auction, she also offered to “pay you back for the goat and any other expenses I caused,” according to the letter obtained by The Times. Instead, officials reached out to the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office. Armed with a search warrant, detectives drove more than 500 miles across Northern California in search of the goat. According to the search warrant, deputies believed Cedar was staying at Bleating Hearts Farm and Sanctuary in Napa County, based on the fact that the sanctuary had posted on Instagram its support for Long and urging people to call the Shasta District Fairto convince them to spare Cedar. But long had taken Cedar to a farm in Sonoma County because she and her family live in a residential area in Shasta County and are unable to keep farm animals there. Echoing language used when law enforcement search a home for drugs, the warrant allowed deputies to “utilize breaching equipment to force open doorway(s), entry doors, exit doors, and locked containers” and to search all rooms, garages and “storage rooms, and outbuildings of any kind large enough to accommodate a small goat.” Cedar was taken and slaughtered. Read the rest here: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-30/goat-slaughter-shasta-county-fair
When I was 13 I raised two lambs. One a second place winner. Closed my eyes to what was going to happen to them. Until I couldn't. Didn't eat meat for a year or lamb for 20 years. Realized I should stick to plants.
What a complete waste of resources. Like life isnt chalked full of lessons? But you know…. Priorities…
I don't eat Lamb. Never will. Screw those cops. What a waste of resources and all for a goat and to "teach a girl a lesson"? They only lesson they taught her is cruelty.
Heartless. “Our daughter lost three grandparents within the last year, and our family has had so much heartbreak and sadness that I couldn’t bear the thought of the following weeks of sadness after the slaughter of her first livestock animal,”
That'll teach her! But it'll teach her the wrong lesson. The lesson she was taught was that people are heartless, cowards, and were more than happy to waste 500 miles of driving and gas to prove a piddly little point. And since it's highly unlikely they were off the clock, Shasta County is now on the hook for the cost of paying them to drive 500 miles + the gas it took to go there. All to kill an animal. Brilliant move. They sure showed her!
How many "traditional" childhood experiences are just organized ways of exposing children to cruelty to toughen them up? (spoiler: it's most of them)
This is mystifying on so many levels, how did they prioritize this over something else like a drug bust? Isn’t that shit rampant in that part of California?
I hope they get sued into oblivion. The GOAT didn’t belong to them. At the very least I hope they lose their positions.
