Cedar the goat was sold at auction, destined for the dinner table.
But his owner, a 9-year-old girl, loved him too much for that.
She decided, instead, to save him.
Then the sheriff came and took Cedar to the slaughterhouse.
You might’ve heard about this story.
E raised the goat as planned, and brought it to the auction.
But somewhere along the way, the “it” had become a him.
Sobbing, Ebegged her mother not to make her give the goat up for slaughter.
Cedar wasn’t meat.
He was her friend.
But that’s part of what 4-H is designed to teach kids.
It’s the system.
Animals are living things that become meat.
That’s what farms do.
It’s how things are.
But here was E, in tears.
And when a child gets emotionally distressed over the fulfillment of a commitment, it’s lesson time.
A parent’s moral agency is at stake.
It’s a teachable moment though reasonable people can disagree on what, exactly, to teach.
In the goat pens at the Shasta fairground, E’s mom, Jessica Long, said yes.
And then, well, whoooo boy.
By holding on to Cedar, E unwittingly picked a fight with the entire agriculture-industrial complex.
She may have lost the battle, but she started a war.
Nearly 6 million kids belong to 4-H, which bills itself as America’s largest youth-development organization.
In rural parts of America, though, it knits the community together.
The child puts the money away for college, a new computer, whatever.
The littlest kids always cry; the big kids do, too, but less.
Cedar went for the handsome price of $903.
His buyers were State Assemblywoman Megan Dahle and her husband, State Sen. Brian Dahle.
Jessica Long knew that reneging on the sale would cause trouble in her small town.
So she sent Cedar away to a farm where he could run and play with other goats.
Dahle said he was willing to let it go.
The person in charge of the fair’s 4-H barbecue claimed the goat was now stolen property.
Long’s lawsuit disputes that characterization.
For one thing, minors in California are allowed to back out of any contract, no questions asked.
Cedar was suspended between pet and meat, between old owner and new.
His contractual status was that of a no-man’s goat.
Long sent multiple letters to the fair asserting ownership of Cedar and offering to pay everyone’s expenses.
So the county fair swung into action.
The fair called the sheriff.
The sheriff didn’t seem to have much interest in airy legal arguments about ownership.
But Cedar wasn’t there!
Bleating Hearts had just been ‘gramming about him in solidarity.
The deputies headed to the second location.
As for what happened next, no one is saying.
All they were waiting for, apparently, was approval from the Shasta County district attorney.
But whoever knows his fate isn’t talking.
Cedar wasn’t just killed.
That’s why this story went viral.
“Reasoned adults might bend the rules for a little girl and her pet goat.
That didn’t happen,“the beef trade journal Drovers pointed out.
That is, indeed, how my family took the news.
We’re no zealots.
We eat meat in our house.
Her sisters did 4-H livestock programs, too sheep, goats, rabbits.
As young children watch older kids go through the process, they also learn to modulate their emotions.
“They learn that only babies cry,” Irvine says.
Maybe all this bellyaching over a goat seems wimpy.
It’s not as if lions spend much intellectual effort parsing their relationship with antelopes.
“The Long family had a relationship with Cedar that can’t be measured.
They loved him like a dog,” says Ryan Gordon, their attorney.
“But to the fair, fundamentally, Cedar wasn’t even Cedar.
He was just cuts of meat worth $63.”
The idea that humans have a total, God-given mastery over other animals is called dominionism.
But the people who make a living raising livestock tend to have a more nuanced attitude.
Long’s daughter clearly hadn’t internalized that lesson yet.
In fact, 4-H doesn’t even claim to teach it.
It’s not killing animals that 4-H teaches.
It’sreflectingabout killing animals, and what it means.
On consideration, E decided that Cedar wasn’t food.
And if you decide not to eat it, more power to you.”
The adults in charge of Shasta’s 4-H barbecue and county fair clearly didn’t see things that way.
They could’ve backed Jessica Long’s parenting play.
Instead they deployed the cops.
But as bad as those cases are, I think there’s more going on here.
They clung to their rulebook to protect their way of life.
That’s why agricultural interests in the government fought this issue so hard.”
Long’s entreating letters to them insist that they did not.
E’s tears raised fundamental questions, and now they’ll get asked in court.
Those questions deserve an honest answer.
Do things have to be this way?
Do we care for animals in an ethical way?
I don’t know.
But no one neither human nor goat should be punished for asking.
Correction: January 16, 2024 An earlier version of this story misstated the university where Leslie Irvine works.
It is the University of Colorado Boulder, not the University of California at Irvine.
Adam Rogersis a senior correspondent at Business Insider.
