A California county’s sheriff’s office agreed to pay $300,000 after it seized a 9-year-old girl’s pet goat, which was later slaughtered, despite the family’s efforts to spare the animal from a local fair’s auction, according to court documents made public Friday.
Jessica Long, the girl’s mother, sued the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, the Shasta District Fair, which auctioned the goat, and some of its employees in 2022 for taking “a young girl’s beloved pet goat” to be sold and slaughtered, according to court records.
Ms. Long bought the goat for her daughter, who called him Cedar or Cedes, so the girl could participate in a 4-H program, according to the family’s lawyer, Ryan Gordon.
Ms. Long’s daughter, who is identified as E.L. in the lawsuit because she is a minor, initially raised the goat to be auctioned at the Shasta District Fair in Northern California.
But as auction day approached, the girl, who had been feeding and walking with the goat on a leash everywhere, became attached to Cedar and did not want to sell him.
The fair ignored the family’s pleas and sold Cedar for $902, of which the fair was owed $63 as part of the sale.
The family offered to pay the fair the money it was owed, and as the dispute continued, offered to pay the full auction price. Fair officials refused to withdraw the sale, however, according to court documents.
As the family attempted to keep Cedar, fair officials threatened criminal theft charges.
During the dispute, Ms. Long took Cedar to a farm 200 miles away in Sonoma County to be kept safe, the lawsuit said.
Two Shasta County sheriff’s deputies drove to the farm and seized the goat, though it remains unclear who got the deputies involved, Mr. Gordon said. Law enforcement did not have a warrant to search and seize Cedar from the farm, he added.
Cedar was eventually slaughtered but where his remains ended up is still unknown, and the winning bidder never paid the $902, Mr. Gordon said.
In settling with the girl and her family, Shasta County admitted no wrongdoing. The lawsuit against the Shasta District Fair and some of its workers remains pending. Representatives of Shasta County and the Shasta District Fair did not immediately return requests for comment.
“They can never get justice for Cedar, he’s gone,” Mr. Gordon said. “But this is a good first step.”
The money will be held in a trust until Ms. Long’s daughter, who is now 11, is a legal adult, he said.
In a 2022 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Gordon, who is the co-director of Advancing Law for Animals, a nonprofit law firm specializing in complex cases of animal law, said the sheriff’s deputies were “not the judge” and had no right to deem who was Cedar’s rightful owner.
When Ms. Long’s daughter learned of Cedar’s fate weeks after he was taken, she ran to her bed and cried under her covers, Ms. Long said.
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