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:
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?