“Last April, Jessica Long’s family bought a 4-month-old goat and took it to their Shasta County home, where Long’s young daughter named it Cedar, feeding and caring for it and bonding with it as she ‘would have bonded with a puppy,’ the Sacramento Bee says (read story here). “She loved him as a family pet,” court papers say.
Court papers? Yes, court papers. Here’s how that came about: “The little girl was enrolled in the local 4-H chapter youth program, and in June she took Cedar … to be exhibited at the Shasta District Fair livestock auction. Before the auction began, the family asked to back out but fair officials refused, saying fair rules prohibited that and put the goat up for auction.”
Things get a little muddy here. The story says the girl “‘exercised her statutory rights’ as a minor to reject any contract she may have had with the fair, and her mother took Cedar from the fair.” This refers to a California law that allows minors to disaffirm contracts, and the girl having done so, if the fair officials neglected to get a parental signature on the contract they didn’t have an enforceable contract. Instead, they cited fair rules, but the lawsuit claims there were no such rules.
To keep it safe, they took it to a farm in Sonoma County, several counties away (see map here), because they “feared that deviating from a 4-H program through resisting the slaughter of livestock would upset other 4-H members and community members,” i.e., their Shasta County neighbors. I don’t know how the goat was found by the posse, but it was.
Initially the fair’s livestock director, this guy, phoned Long and threatened her with felony theft charges. This sounds a bit squirrely to me. First of all, it’s a contract dispute; specifically, failure to deliver goods. Second, if the family wasn’t paid for the goat, no one was robbed. The fair at most had a civil claim for what lawyers call “specific performance” (explained here). But it likely didn’t even have that, as the buyer was only entitled to meat, which isn’t the sort of unique goods or property subject to that legal doctrine.
The buyer, it so happens, was state Sen. Brian Dahle, the GOP’s 2022 sacrificial lamb in the California governor’s election (details here). He paid $902 for Cedar on a plank. But he’s not the bad guy in this story; he waived his claim to the goat. It was the fair that went after it.
Shasta County sheriff’s deputy Jeremy Ashbee then obtained a search warrant for Bleating Hearts Farm & Sanctuary in Sonoma County, alleging that Cedar was “stolen or embezzled,” without telling the magistrate there was a civil dispute over rights to the goat or that the putative buyer had waived his claim to it.
The lawsuit alleges that two deputies then drove 200 miles to Sonoma County, didn’t find Cedar at Bleating Hearts Farm & Sanctuary, but did find him at a property for which they didn’t have a search warrant, confiscated Cedar, turned him over to third parties, which apparently violated California law with respect to the handling of property seized pursuant to a warrant, and Cedar “possibly ended up as part of the 4-H/Future Farmers of America community barbecue in Anderson the next day.” That’s a town of about 11,000 people on I-5 a few miles south of Redding (see map here).
The family hired a lawyer and sued “Lt. Jerry Fernandez and detectives Jacob Duncan and Jeremy Ashbee” of the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, and 10 “John Does” (i.e., defendants whose names are unknown). Duncan was the other deputy who went to Sonoma County on the goat hunt, according to the lawsuit.
The legal complaint (see it here) alleges the 13 defendants “violated plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures of their property by unreasonably searching for Cedar when the evidence they possessed showed no crime had been committed as a matter of law and/or fact, and by confiscating Plaintiffs’ property … without a warrant and then disposing of and destroying plaintiffs’ property interests in Cedar.” The lawyer added, “They had a right to a hearing before they killed him. The cops don’t get to say in my determination that guy over there owns it.”
I don’t think this is going to end well for the cops. First of all, the story is getting international news coverage. Second, they were out of their jurisdiction, calling into question whether they had authority to execute the search warrant or seize the goat. Third, no crime was committed; this was a civil matter. Fourth, they didn’t have a search warrant for the property where Cedar was found. Fifth, cops don’t decide property rights; courts do, after a hearing and due process. Sixth, the buyer no longer wanted it, so there was no property claim to enforce. Finally, they apparently gave the goat to someone who had no claim to it.
Legal problems aside, what were all these people thinking? And why would sheriff’s deputies drive 500 miles to retrieve a goat? (My guess: They’re somebody’s pals.) I can’t visualize any scenario in which they come out of this well in court. But the worst damage, apart from any legal judgment, is the bad publicity they brought upon themselves, their employer, the county, the fair, and the 4-H organization.
God gives people brains to think with. When a little girl is crying and clutching her goat, you don’t send a posse to grab the goat and butcher it. If you do, you will become a story in the Sacramento Bee, the Guardian, USA Today, the New York Times, a San Francisco TV station, and a gazillion other news outlets. You will be famous in a not-good way. You will be made into a goat, as the expression goes.
Related story: Read about the meat industry’s war against farm animals and people who rescue them from slaughter here.