Your Law Enforcement Dollars At Work: Deputies Drive 500 Miles To Seize A Young Girl’s Pet Goat

Legal Issues

from the ever-heard-of-law-enforcement-cooperation,-gas-hogs? dept

I’m not going to open this by stating I assume the Shasta County (CA) Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) has better things to do with its time. I know it has better things to do with its time.

I’m also not going to pretend the SCSO didn’t have enough personnel to deal with local crime while sending deputies on a 500-mile round trip to seize a goat. I’m sure these deputies were surplus. We know they weren’t needed for anything important because they drove 500 miles to take a goat from a girl, apparently authorized to do so by an agency with money to blow on gas, snacks, and overtime.

Even if we pretend this is the sort of thing law enforcement should be doing, we have to ask why the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office didn’t ask a more local law enforcement agency to perform the seizure. But I’m sure we know the answer: any other law enforcement agency would have refused to engage in this bullshit.

But here we are, detailing a long road trip to take a goat from a young girl, who possibly didn’t understand that entering a 4-H auction meant her beloved pet goat would end up dead.

The Sacramento Bee was the first to report on the lawsuit stemming from this incident. (But it was also far from the only entity reporting on the lawsuit to decide they didn’t need to post the actual lawsuit. WTF, journalists. The entity suing — Advancing Law for Animals — would certainly have provided anyone with a free copy.) Anyway, here’s the backstory:

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.”

“She loved him as a family pet,” court papers say.

The little girl was enrolled in the local 4-H chapter youth program, and in June she took Cedar, a white goat with chocolate markings framing its face, to be exhibited at the Shasta District Fair livestock auction.

But a 4-H exhibition isn’t an exhibition. It’s an auction. Attendees bid on “exhibited” animals, converting them from family pets to potential meat sources, something the young girl (and her family) clearly didn’t understand.

The family tried to back out but fair officials refused to act like adults. Instead, they insisted Cedar be auctioned. The winning bidder, who paid $902 for the goat, was state senator Brian Dahle, who is a candidate for governor.

The federal lawsuit [PDF], filed by the parents of the child with the assistance of Advancing Law for Animals, details multiple times adults refused to be adults in order to take a child’s pet away from her by force.

This is the lawsuit’s overview of the constitutional issues — one that seems to indicate all of this was more vindictive than actually lawful.

On July 8, 2022, at the behest of the Shasta District Fair and Event Center (hereinafter, “Shasta Fair Association”), two sheriff’s deputies left their jurisdiction in Shasta County, drove over 500 miles at taxpayer expense, and crossed approximately six (6) separate county lines, all to confiscate a young girl’s beloved pet goat, Cedar, after she decided not to auction him for slaughter.

Cedar was her property and she had every legal right to save his life. Yet, the Shasta Fair Association disputed her contractual rights to do so. In response, two sheriff’s deputies unreasonably searched for and unreasonably seized Cedar, without a warrant, despite notice of Plaintiffs’ civil contract dispute over him, notice that Plaintiffs continued to assert possessory interests in Cedar, notice that Plaintiffs did not receive compensation for him at auction, and notice that Plaintiffs even offered to pay the Shasta Fair Association for any damages that could possibly arise in a civil dispute over Cedar—which under fair rules were no more than $63.14.

Nonetheless, without providing Plaintiffs any notice or opportunity to be heard as required by the Constitution, the sheriff’s deputies assumed for themselves the mantle of the judiciary and played judge in an otherwise purely civil dispute, adjudicating—wrongly—who owned Cedar by simply turning over him to third parties whom they deemed to be his rightful owner outside of any lawful judicial process. As a result, the young girl who raised Cedar lost him, and Cedar lost his life. Now Plaintiffs can never get him back.

According the lawsuit, the minor who owned the goat was legally able to rescind participation in the contract, which she did.

Accordingly, on June 25, 2022, shortly after the auction and before transfer of Cedar to slaughter, Plaintiff E.L. exercised her statutory rights as a minor under California law to disaffirm any contract that may have existed between her and the Shasta County Fair and/or any other party with respect to Cedar. See Cal. Fam. Code § 6710 (“a contract of a minor may be disaffirmed by the minor before majority or within a reasonable time afterwards ….”).

The fair refused to release E.L. from the contract. The family offered to pay the fair the cut of the funds the family hadn’t even received yet (the $902 winning bid from the state senator), which was a total of $63.14, the 7% of sales the fair claimed from 4-H auctions.

The family felt its efforts to save this goat might result in retaliatory behavior from others in the agricultural community, so it shipped the goat off to a third-party farm in Sonoma County, presumably until any animosity (perceived or real) died down.

The fair continued to insist the goat be relinquished and slaughtered. When the family refused, a fair official threatened the family with criminal charges (specifically, grand theft). The family again offered to pay the 7% fee, along with the entire $902 the goat’s sale had generated. This offer was also rejected.

The family then contacted the winning bidder, state senator Dahle, who informed the family he had no interest in forcing the girl’s pet to be slaughtered.

Apparently, none of this mattered to fair officials, who decided this disagreement should be settled by force. The Fair Association approached the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office to follow through on criminal charges. A warrant was sought by a Sheriff’s Office detective to search the animal sanctuary in Napa, California, where the goat had been moved by the family. He did this despite being informed the family had tried several times to settle this civilly (not in the legal sense) with the Fair Association and Senator Dahle’s refusal to force the family to relinquish ownership of the goat. The affidavit claimed the goat was “stolen or embezzled,” when nothing of the sort had actually happened.

The Fair Association never had ownership of the goat. The winning bidder technically had some sort of ownership (but only over the meat, which could be taken from the pet at any time, not necessarily immediately), but the family had asserted its ownership and had made several efforts to make right the extremely minor wrong of… irritating a county fair official.

The affidavit also swore the agency would seize the animal and present it as evidence. It also ordered the family to keep the goat alive as evidence if the deputies were unable to locate it. Then, with this warrant in hand, deputies drove a couple hundred miles out of their jurisdiction to perform the seizure of the animal they had sworn they would bring back intact.

The warrant, like all good warrants, provided the location of the place to be searched: Bleating Hearts Farm & Sanctuary. But the deputies didn’t find the goat there so they went to another place entirely — one not listed in the warrant affidavit.

Upon information and belief, Defendant Fernandez and Defendant Duncan then proceeded from Bleating Hearts Farm and Sanctuary in Napa County to the Sonoma Farm in Sonoma County where they seized Cedar. Defendant Fernandez and Defendant Duncan had no warrant to search and seize Cedar at the Sonoma Farm.

The deputies then drove all the way back to the Shasta Fair with the evidence they had sworn they would present to a judge. It appears the officials involved with pressing criminal charges sent the pet goat out to be slaughtered.

This is all insanely ugly. Even if a lot of this might turn out to be legal, it’s going to be tough to explain why the deputies felt they could search a location not specified in their warrant. And even if there’s some legal justification for the fair’s decision to enforce a questionable contract with a minor by killing her pet, there’s simply no good reason for it to have chosen to go this route. I mean, it sounds like the actions of people who like to kill animals to make children sad.

On top of that, it’s a colossal waste of taxpayer money. No citizen (other than the fair official who insisted things needed to go this way) would ever view this as a worthwhile use of law enforcement resources. And, unfortunately, it’s going to be those same people who would never agree to this sort of thing being asked to cough up a little more money to pay for the eventual settlement.

Filed Under: 4-h, auctions, california, goats, scso, shasta county, shasta county sheriff