Shasta County will pay $300,000 after deputies seize goat for slaughter

A 9-year-old girl who fell in love with a goat she raised for the Shasta County Fair was heartbroken when police with a search warrant seized the furry cattle and took them away to be slaughtered.

Two years after the scandal broke, Shasta County agreed to pay the girl’s family $300,000 to settle a legal dispute over a hanging brown and white goat named Cedar.

The girl raised a goat for the 2022 fair as part of a program aimed at teaching young people how to care for farm animals. But when it came time to sell Cedar and slaughter him, Jessica Long’s 9-year-old daughter couldn’t do it.

Long took the goat from the fair, offered to pay expenses and begged fair officials to let her daughter keep Cedar. Instead, the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office sent deputies with a search warrant to drive hundreds of miles across Northern California to find and remove the goat from Billy’s mini-farm, where Long had taken him until the dispute was resolved.

It is unclear who contacted the sheriff’s office and instructed it to intervene.

The case caused an uproar, and in a federal lawsuit, Long and her daughter said deputies illegally took away the search warrant, seized Cedar and turned the animal over to fair officials. The attorneys also accused county and fair officials of using law enforcement to intervene in what they said was a civil dispute over who owned the goat.

The cedar, purchased at the county fair for $902, was slaughtered, but who did it remains unclear.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Dale A. Drozd approved an agreement requiring Shasta County to pay Long and her daughter $300,000 to settle the federal lawsuit out of court.

“Unfortunately, this lawsuit cannot bring Cedar home,” said Vanessa Shakib, an attorney representing Long. “But the $300,000 agreement with Shasta County and the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office is the first step forward.”

The settlement partially ends two years of contentious litigation between Long and Shasta County and fair officials.

For the past two years, fair and county officials have used “obstructionist disclosure tactics” to avoid answering key questions about what happened to the goat and what role officials played in the animal’s capture and destruction, Shakib said.

“Years later, there are still several unanswered questions in this case,” she said.

After two years of reviewing texts, emails, phone records and depositions, Shakib said county and fair officials have yet to provide a clear explanation. who stabbed Kedrwhat happened to his meat and who got the sheriff’s deputies involved in the dispute.

Text messages discovered during the federal lawsuit suggest fair officials wanted to keep secret what happened to Cedar and who was involved.

“Katie agreed, but no one needs to know,” B.J. McFarlane, livestock manager for Shasta Fair Assn., wrote in a text message to Shasta Fair CEO Melanie Silva on July 22, 2022. In the message, he mentioned Katie Muse, a Program 4 volunteer. -H and the organizer of the district barbecue. “It’s just me and Katie. They killed it and donated it to a non-profit if anyone asks.”

“We are a non-profit organization ,” Silva responded.

Long’s attorneys argued in court that finding out who killed Cedar and who contacted law enforcement is key to their case. Long and her attorney told the sheriff, fair and county officials before the goat was slaughtered that they were disputing ownership of the goat.

However, someone decided to give the order to capture and kill Kedr, despite knowing about the pending lawsuit, Shakib said.

County officials deny any wrongdoing.

“The county did nothing wrong, but we recognize the risk and cost of going to court and therefore agreed to settle the case,” Christopher Pisano, Shasta County attorney, said in an email. “We’re happy to move on and put this matter behind us.”

A Shasta County spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Silva, who is still general manager of the Shasta Area Fair, also did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite a partial settlement with Shasta County and the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, the lawsuit is still ongoing. Long and her daughter still have grievances against Shasta County Fair employees and a 4-H volunteer.

Shakib said lawyers are still reviewing findings, including phone records, to try to figure out what happened to Cedar.