I read shit like this and I wonder how anyone can “back the Blue” anymore.
A 9-year-old girl didn’t want her goat slaughtered. California 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.
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.”
“It was never about money,” said Vanessa Shakib, an attorney for Advancing Law for Animals who represents Long. “County officials were clear that they wanted to teach this little girl a lesson.”
Attorneys argue the county used the warrant “for the sole purpose of circumventing the civil process” and killed the goat as a way to end Long and her daughter’s fight for Cedar.
“The government was seeking to silence our clients viewpoint,” Shakib said. “Our lawsuit seeks to hold public officials accountable for violating the law and enacting a personal vendetta against a little girl simply because she loved her goat.”
Holy fucking shit.
This was a 9-year-old little girl who loved her pet goat and didn’t want it slaughtered.
I understand that. I have a little girl that can’t reconcile the fact that the chicken nuggets she eats were chickens and the hamburgers were cows.
They offered to buy back the goat but the farm sent the fucking sheriff’s office after her to raid her parents home.
There are so many ways that this could have been handled differently, but a battering ram and a SWAT team was how it was resolved.
I hope that little girl learned a lesson.
Bureaucrats and cops are callous, officious fucks who do not care about your feelings and will stomp you into the ground over the pettiest of bullshit.
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