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 Fair to 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.
Jesus H. Christ
:what-the-hell: :acab:
Pointless cruelty. The livestock is a commodity to them, any goat should be as good as any other if it’s healthy. It has a market price. They should be satisfied with any other goat or the price of one, even though a contract was breached.
They just wanted to make a 9-year old cry and terrorize a family and really rub it in. Sadistic fucks
And to reinforce that animals are for killing only. I think they see it as some kind of radical deviant act to go back on killing an animal.
Another part later in the article:
“Making an exception for you will only teach [our] youth that they do not have to abide by the rules,” [Shasta District Fair Chief Executive Melanie] Silva wrote back to (the girl or her mother) Long in an email reviewed by The Times dated June 28, 2022. “Also, in this era of social media this has been a negative experience for the fairgrounds as this has been all over Facebook and Instagram.”
“Making an exception for you will only teach [our] youth that they do not have to abide by the rules,”
Fucking Christ, when the mask falls off and your fascist fair exec tells you in no uncertain terms we must kill this goat and break your daughter or else people might get ideas.
GOD'S LAW DOESN'T CHANGE AND NEITHER DOES MY SOCIAL CLUB'S LAWS!
gotta sacrifice a goat to appease the people who are mean to us on the internet about sacrificing a goat
What a fuckin moron too. Imagine The Dodo videos there could have been about this. It could have been amazing press for them to just do a tik tok and give the girl the goat. Instead they're probably making a thirty dollar commission and will forever be known as the people that slaughter pet goats.
Absolute worst kind of trash who gets off on control and suffering but justifies it as saving the soul of the youth. Let the youth decide you fucking control freak. People like that have never been in a situation where they couldn't use everything around them to enact control on others.
The solution is to forcibly remove them from that station and make sure they have power over nothing ever, not even themselves.
What are those rules, I wonder? Oh, wait:
Gordon and Shakib also argue that although fair officials were trying to hold Long’s daughter to her agreement that the goat would be slaughtered when entered into the fair, California law allows a minor to withdraw from a contract “within a reasonable amount of time.”
“A child can’t be held to the same standard as an adult can,” Gordon said. “When she wanted out, she had an absolute right.”
I hope they’re suing. Between a civil case for misuse of police resources and for theft and keeping a minor in a contract illegally, the fairground fucked themselves.
All to murder a little girl’s pet against the wishes of everyone involved. Fuck that fairground asshole I hope she ends up in the :pit:
Lol they offered the full price of the goat AND then some. But I guess this girl was just an exceptional animal caretaker and no one else was able to come to her level so it must be executed.
This feels like it was a special order for the Bohemian Grove or something:
:geordi-no: Cruelty free!
:geordi-yes: Extreme cruelty added! Marinated in the tears of the 9 year old girl who raised it
Sorry we can't remove your student loans or house the homeless or build roads or take care of healthcare or provide for the elderly. But boy can we track down and slaughter an animal already paid for and of no particular importance.
Fixing just enough crumbling infrastructure so that the
occupying fascist military forcepolice can hunt down and condemn children's pets to certain death
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.
Pulling out the big guns for finding a pet goat, jesus
bloodlust ass country. can't wait to escape this shithole
also it's absolutely hilarious that the warrant distinguishes between "doorways, entry doors, and exit doors" like motherfucker a door goes two ways, that's what makes it a door
Death to America
what? there are plenty of doors only designed to be opened from one side
can’t wait to escape this shithole
To where? Pretty much every country eats meat.
most countries won't send a government-sanctioned hit squad 500 miles to go shoot your fucking pet
Why was it slaughtered? I never did 4H or any animal auction, but the state Rep that won the auction said he didn't care if it went to a farm? It's interesting that cruelty was their stated goal, not even hiding it behind some legal thing.
As far as I can tell it’s because the guy in charge of the fairground is just a cruel asshole that wanted to kill a child’s pet.
There’s also a really common idea among the worst fucking people in agriculture that a child having attachments to animals is some sort of “weakness” that you need to train them out of.
Edit: Woman in charge of the fairground. This seemed like the kind of cruelty only a man would be capable of! Gaslight, girlboss, goat murder.
To come back to this, even according to the warrant the goat wasn’t supposed to be slaughtered. The cops stole and murdered a goat. The warrant said the goat would be held until a court hearing.
Alright so a list of charges for the fair CEO and every cop involved: Trespass, theft, assault, possessing stolen property, animal abuse, destruction of evidence, and obstruction of justice. Anything else?
I value the life of the goat more than every filthy pig fucker involved in this case
