From here (a pretty good rundown of the things that happened and who did what) because the LA times story is behind a paywall:
Melanie Silva, CEO of the Fair Association, was unmoved. Silva wrote back that while she was “not unsympathetic” to E.L.'s plight, “please understand the fair industry is set up to teach our youth responsibility and for the future generations of ranchers and farmers to learn the process and effort it takes to raise quality meat. Making an exception for you will only teach [our] youth that they do not have to abide by the rules that are set up for all participants.”
It seems a fair point to me. Aside from the use of Sheriff’s deputies to seize the goat, I think the mother (as the only parent mentioned) was at fault for allowing this situation to start by not doing more to remind the child during the foster period that the animal was not a pet and that it would become food at some point. She should have made sure the child did not get unduly attached. Or at least to tried to do so, and then have followed through at the end even if it still caused the child emotional pain.
Children who grow up on farms with animals that become food go through this at a very early age, without noticeable harm. Assuming this girl was not so raised, it was on the mother to mitigate the perfectly natural tendency of a child to bond with an animal she is taking care of.
The owner or their rep was in possession of the goat and the mom stole it from them. Then the cops took it back. Not that I am a fan of getting police involved in this.
Fair point. And if they wanted to make a point of prosecuting the mom, I can see that. But I still don’t think it’s the right play to then seize and slaughter the goat.
It’s a sociopathic point to me. “Now, little girl, you understand that we gave you that goat to raise for slaughter to teach you responsibility, right? Don’t you understand your tears mean nothing to me, and that no amount of money can replace the simple joy I will get by butchering that goat and feeding it to a bunch of government employees at a picnic? Now grow the eff up, put a pack of tissues in your lunchbox, and let us slaughter the effing goat already!”
It’s a 4H program. They’re entirely normal in a whole lot of places, all over the country. If you go to a county fair, and go look through the livestock barns, there are almost certainly animals being shown there which are part of such a program.
As near as I can tell, pretty much everybody behaved badly in this, with the exception of the goat and probably the 9 year old; who is, after all, 9, and didn’t have enough life experience to realize that she wouldn’t be able to handle the slaughter outcome.
The mother appears to have waited until after the goat had already been sold. If she’d simply bought it herself at the auction, or even quietly asked the group in charge of the auction beforehand whether she could buy the goat, I doubt we’d be seeing any of this commotion.
And then she made a fuss on social media before the fair sent deputies after the goat. If this was before the fair made any decision, they may have reacted badly to finding themselves all over social media, and may have insisted on the slaughter partly due to that reaction. If the mother notified social media after fair officials had already told her she couldn’t buy the goat, then I’ll withdraw that as an issue; and the officials shouldn’t have reacted in that fashion if they did; but nevertheless if she did notify media before they decided that was unlikely to be a good way of going about it.
But the fair officials should have realized that the message given by their actual behavior wasn’t ‘children need to live up to their committments’ or ‘slaughtering animals is a necessary part of the food system and shouldn’t be criticized’ or whatever they were trying to get across – but just ‘we will beat down your doors with police in order to further traumatize a 9 year old who just lost 3 grandparents.’ Saying instead something like ‘because of the exceptional circumstances of this case, we will allow this particular child to keep her goat, as long as the purchaser and the fair are fully reimbursed. She will not be eligible in future to enter any 4H programs’ would have left everyone – goat included – in a lot better position. And for children who do want to be in 4H, it would seem that her actions did indeed have consequences.
And it would have been kinder. Children who enter livestock in this sort of 4H program are usually farm kids who understand the whole concept, and who are used to seeing stock from their farms go to slaughter. As this family was suburban and needed to board the goat elsewhere, the mother and daughter may not have dealt with the issue directly before. – I hope also that parents are careful which children they let enter these programs; and that the 4H personnel running the program are prepared to deal with situations that aren’t working out well; though I’m afraid there may be some in both cases who just think this is a way to make the children get over known qualms.
This. There doesn’t appear to have been anything spectacularly unusual about the meat from this specific goat. And I doubt that goat meat in general is in such drastic shortage that anyone would have gone hungry, or missed the ability to produce some ceremonial meal, for the lack of this one.
It doesn’t seem to have been the owner, though, as apparently the purchaser, when appealed to, was fine with the goat not being slaughtered. It seems to have been pretty much all on the fair officials. I don’t know whether they were the same as the adults involved with the 4H club, or if not what those adults were doing during all of this.
I wonder whether the slaughterhouse knew what was going on? The fair certainly did; but the slaughterhouse might not have known until it was all over why the goat was originally missing, and was then delivered (I presume) by deputies. They might have thought it escaped from a truck en route and had been picked up by police on the road.
You don’t teach someone responsibility by depriving them of agency and forcing them to suffer the consequences of a contract their parent entered into by demanding specific performance in lieu of restitution or damages.
I don’t know specifics in California so I’ll talk in generalities. Generally police have statewide jurisdiction to act but not statewide jurisdiction to investigate. The warrant originated in one county and those sheriffs officers can execute the warrant elsewhere within the state. Generally all it takes is a courtesy call to the local department.
As to the squatter thing it is sort of analogous. Police can’t act on a squatter because it is a civil matter as to who has the right to live there and must be ruled on by a judge in civil court. With a court order they can evict. The goat is property. Who had rights to the property had to be determined in court. The article says they had a warrant. A judge did rule on what should be done with the goat. The sheriffs officers did not make the determination on their own as to who should have the goat. They were carrying out judicial order.
I have a rack is goat in the freezer right now. I was thinking of cooking it for Passover, but it’s looking like we’ll have too many people. So probably two racks of lamb.
This thread reminds me that goats are a lot more personable than sheep…
Sheep are basically chicken in fur coats. Goats are surprisingly dog-like once you get past their freaky rectangular pupils and tendency to eat the plastic trim off of your car.
There’s a reason i eat a lot of chicken and lamb. I’ve never interacted with a chicken or a sheep and thought, “I’d feel bad killing this creature to eat it.” I try to buy meat that was reared and slaughtered humanely. But I just don’t think I’ll be punished in the afterlife for the untimely death of chickens.
I’m usually fine with seeing on TV animals being slaughtered. But I recently saw on, I think it was on Huang’s World, a goat start crying when it saw the knife. The slaughter was done right outside the pen with the other goats watching.
It’s based on a true story about a 6th grade class in Japan where the teacher wants to teach the children where their food comes from and gets a piglet for them to raise. At the end of the year, the children debate about whether they should send P-chan off to slaughter as originally planned or leave it for the 3rd graders to continue to tend to.
I don’t know that the real debate was like, but the children in the movie do an amazing job of debating about quality of life, their responsibility and duty to fulfill P-chan’s destiny.
You don’t know any of this to be true. The child should have been party to the original agreement, to the extent that what would happen was explained to her and asking her if she agreed. I would certainly hope she was; if not, then the mother is even more to be censured. It’s not normal practice of 4-H to involve children in activities without agency. The whole point is to teach the children about these kinds of things (among others), about how food chains work and where food comes from.
