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.
THIS is the fight We the People face. Faceless “officials “ using storm troopers to do their bidding. I bet the lesson taught to this 9 year old is- officials and cops are NOT your friends. Imagine if they were met with 10-20 armed guys with a shitload of ammo….. plan …
Poor kid. These things are heartbreaking and they happen all the time at stock shows. Not so much the cops coming after the pet but having to sell your friend, knowing they’re going to slaughter. I couldn’t do it. I wonder if those LEOs were proud of what they did.
I read an earlier report. The gist of that report was that the people that purchased the goat just wanted what they had purchased.
This report makes it clearer that the entire situation was escalated at multiple levels to the point where it traumatized a little girl.
Holy crap. That article just gets worse the more you read further into it. Most 4-H fairs don’t have ‘mandatory slaughter’. In fact, a good portion of the ‘auctions’ are given back to the kids along w/ the money because people like the state sen. who bought it don’t care about getting the animal, they want to support the kids and use it as a status symbol showing they care about the community.
All this was was a power trip by that stupid committee and the ignorant cops who followed up. The same type of cops who won’t kick out squatters in a home owned by someone else but will travel hundreds of miles to take an animal from a little girl.
SO and I had our kids in 4H for years and the manager/committee would have been run out of town if they tried any bullcrap like that at our fair.
I would not give up on backing the blue just yet. It is obvious that it is geographic dependent, not the entire country.
Places like CA, or NYC, or Chicago will erode the police, drive the honorable ones out, etc… in order to turn them into an arm of the all powerful State. The people who became cops to serve the public will get so frustrated that the quit/move. And, you end up with a bunch of egomaniacs who are more interested in serving the politburo than serving the public.
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Continue to back the blue in the free states.
Correct it is geographic dependent, the entire planet. There are plenty of YouTube videos of cops in Americas heartland and flyover states of cops being dipshits and tyrants.
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It isn’t all or nothing, two things need to happen.
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We must recognize that cops deal with the “finest” people of society almost exclusively and might deserve a little leeway sometimes on a a case by case basis with all other factors and relevant info evaluated.
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Law enforcement and the state must also recognize the incredible power they wield and the absolute disparity of that power between them, their unions, and the average non Leo or government person and must embrace transparency measures like body cams, publishing department policies, and ending protectionist policies and measure of departments and unions. There needs to be better internal accountability and transparency to it.
Back the blue in free states? They don’t get blanket “Atta boys,” just because their credentials aren’t NYPD or CPD. Just because we cross the state lines into a red state doesn’t automatically mean the people behind the badge become Andy Griffith or Reed and Malloy. You’re just as likely to find a “Just following orders” drone with a badge in a red state as a blue state.
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Let’s look at Alabama. A small little municipality (Brookeside, AL) bankrolled itself by running actual road piracy operations and terrorizing the hell out of anyone who dared to drive through their district.
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Or maybe Cobb County in Georgia who arrested people for DUI and drug offenses because they sent one of their storm troopers to a special divining class where he can declare someone impaired by some voodoo known only to revenue agents.
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Florida maybe? BCSO. Enough said. Oh, actually, I’ll dog pile on and add on the Hampton FL PD that was doing the same shit that Brookside, Alabama was doing. And add the MDPD/MPD/FHP detaining and harassing guys coming back from the range in Homestead because they thought they’d caught the Cuban version of Viktor Bout.
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More Alabama examples where you have local PD officers body slamming an Indian grandfather because he was out walking in the neighborhood and didn’t speak English to their satisfaction. Or the local SO who had a deputy that got in a bar scrap then called his buddies that were on duty to pull the guy over and they proceeded to tune him up on the side of the road.
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“Backing the blue” is one thing and fine in theory, but I don’t think I can trust them any more than a lot of other government professions anymore. Officer Friendly was a casualty of the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and the War on Covid. The damage has been done, especially in the last few years. And I say this as a guy who has friends and acquaintances from local LE to federal agents and who has done business with the same. I’ve had numerous good interactions with officers and I’ve had a few sketchy ones. I’m gonna keep my interactions with “the blue” out of my life as much as possible because all they have to do is think you’re up to something to screw your life up or kill you the hell dead then hide behind qualified immunity.
Blame the parents. They let a kid who wasn’t mature enough raise livestock, let her get attached to it, and then indulged her “change of heart”. Livestock aren’t pets, and the project was to raise livestock, not a pet — they could have allowed dogs and cats if it was about pets.
I think the fair official and police response was over the top, and could have been handled a lot better, but, yes. The parents had an obligation to make sure the kid lived up to hers. That’s part of learning how to be a functional human being; we don’t get to change agreements unilaterally just because we feel like it … at least not with a guarantee of no consequences.