The relevant parts seem to be that the child must be the owner of the animal, and that all animals sold must go to “processing” directly from the fair grounds.
Of course, if they did that, they only get the meat, not the living goat.
As the person who did win the auction didn’t want the goat slaughtered, the family winning the auction wouldn’t have spared it either.
I realized that I hadn’t read the OP’s link and it clarified a couple of points for me.
- The family was the owner of the goat – not just a care-taker.
- The majority of the auction proceeds go to the family.
All this for $63.
I’m still not seeing the actual contract, only Livestock Rules.
I don’t seem to be able to copy bits of the page. Those rules, however, do state that “junior exhibitors must prove ownership of animals” and that they must be owned by the exhibitor. So it seems clear that the child must have owned the goat.
It also states that all animals sold in the auction must go directly to processing from the livestock barns, and exhibitors aren’t allowed in the barns while they’re being loaded. Seems to me that this particular goat can’t have been in the barns at loading time, or the fair would just have taken it from there, instead of having to hunt it down later many miles away.
And the rules also say – direct quote, caps italics and bolding all theirs:
IMPORTANT: All 4-H, FFA, Grange and Independent Exhibitors MUST be ready with animal and in the line as listed on Sales Order when called for the Junior Livestock Auction. If exhibitor is not ready, dressed in uniform & in line they will not be allowed to sell.
So, if as according to the statement above they tried to back out before the sale – how did the goat get sold? Did the fair put the goat up for auction despite the exhibitor being not ready, in uniform, and in line; and possibly without the goat even being there? Did the child show up ready, on time, in uniform, and in line, with the goat – despite the fact that she should have been able to prevent the sale simply by refusing to do so? And if she did, how come the goat wasn’t there for the fair to seize in that location on the day of sale?
This whole situation doesn’t make any sense in combination with those rules.
Technically it wasn’t about the money, it was about the “rules”.
I hope that the Fair Association gets to learn about other important rules, such as rules of ownership. A person who buys a goat and then signs up for your little exhibit is not legally required to sell, you are not allowed to just sell it without their approval, and the rules say you can’t lie to a judge about who owns the goat, send the cops to steal the goat for you, then kill the goat.
This is great opportunity to teach these adults what it means to abide by the rules.
True, with a caveat:
Property rights of the in-group are supreme. If you are in the out-group, then the laws are there to bind you, not to protect you.
So much this. It’s pretty obvious that there were cock-ups all down the line. How incredibly cruel! She’s never going to trust the cops or contracts again. Wouldn’t be surprise if she becomes a lawyer.
It looks like the mother took the goat after the sale
from the article in OP
My daughter sobbed in her pen with her goat,” Long wrote to the Shasta County fair’s manager on June 27. “The barn was mostly empty and at the last minute I decided to break the rules and take the goat that night and deal with the consequences later.”
From the complaint
- Thereafter, Plaintiff Long removed Cedar from the Shasta District Fair and, in efforts to avoid any conflict, informed the Shasta Fair Association representatives in no uncertain terms that she was willing to pay for any losses and/or damages associated with Plaintiff E.L.’s decision to save Cedar
Which would seem to imply they’ve run into this as before. The ownership rules are in place to keep some farm kid from entering an animal what was in fact, raised by the parent and getting credit for the work.
It would be interesting in a followup to see of either mother or daughter become vegan as a result of this.
Oh dear, “I decided to break the rules and take the goat”. That takes a bit of the sting out of any legal recourse the girl and mother have.
The Fair still acted like jerks in the matter, but it’s not illegal to be a jerk.
Eh, sounds like the family may have broken some rules imposed by the fair and/or 4H. The fair and/or 4H could certainly sanction them, and not allow them to participate in future events due to their breaking of the rules.
However, the rules don’t have the force of law, breaking the rules is not a criminal act.
OTOH, it sounds to me as though representatives of the fair and/or 4H broke laws in order to enforce their rules.
And all the way up and down the chain. They got a judge to sign off on a breach entry warrant based on the fact that a farm said encouraging things? No evidence the goat was there, at all, just the farm siding with the family was enough to have the police raid it.
Then they go to another farm that wasn’t on the warrant at all. This isn’t just a waste of police resources, this is an abuse of law enforcement.
And it’s also not illegal to break rules. Only one side in this dispute did anything that I see as illegal, and it’s the side that did so in order to kill a goat.
The USAToday article answers some of the recent questions in this thread and clarifies the timeline:
- June 24: exhibition at fair, mother and daughter took Cedar home with them
- June 26: Cedar moved to farm in Sonoma, fair livestock manager calls mother and demands return
- June 27: Mother makes written offer to fair
- July 8: Court issues warrant, officers executed the warrant that same day.
I think about this as a person who brought a goat figurine to an auction. The auction house said “you signed the agreement to sell, so you have to sell.” The owner does not fight that statement and allows the auction to happen, then has a change of heart and takes the figurine home.
This is a very different scenario from a person signing the auction agreement, then saying “screw you, I’m not selling” and taking the figurine home before the auction takes place.
After the auction happens, it can be argued that the mom is no longer the owner of the goat. I don’t know if that’s a good argument, there has to be some kind of precedent for animals bought via auction and sent to slaughter, where the ownership of the animal is in question post-auction and pre-slaughter.
“Subject to the power of disaffirmance”, meaning that any such “contract” isn’t legally binding on the child. I made my comments presuming we’re talking about a legally binding contract. I don’t know whether that’s actually the case in this situation, and neither do you.
Again, linking the plaintiff’s complaint means nothing. It represents only what the plaintiff wants the court to find.
Additionally, I looked over the rules of the fair. None of what you’ve linked addresses the topic of transfer of ownership, or the contract, or the contracting party, other than a statement “ALL SALES ARE TERMINAL.”
Without seeing the agreements signed by the parent (and/or child) we don’t know what rights were established by the agreement, or were subsequently violated by breaching it.
OK; I guess that makes some sense; and could even be consistent with their having been asked to be released before the sale, if, upon being rejected, they did then try to go through with it but changed their minds afterwards.
However, it would have been so much simpler to just not show up at the sale ring! doesn’t seem that the fair could have done anything about that other than fine them.
Yeah. I suppose it might be just to speed things up; but that regulation reads to me very much as if they’re trying to prevent last-minute backout attempts.
In which case, I’m puzzled that nobody kept an eye on a child who’d already tried to back out, to make sure that she didn’t pull exactly a last minute backout attempt.
I think about it as someone who bought a goat figurine, and those they bought it from insist that it has to be brought to auction to be sold. They object to having to bring it, they object to having to auction it, but they are told they have to. They try to use words to get out of this, but words aren’t working, so rather than accept the proceeds of the auction, they take their figurine back and offer to pay for any costs or losses this may have caused those doing the auction.
The change of heart happened before the auction, it’s just that they thought that there was a reasonable way to deal with the situation within the rules. It’s only when they found there was no reasonable way to deal with the situation that they broke the rules.
I’ll agree that that is what they should have done, but they were trying to follow the rules, and expecting actual humans in charge to be reasonable about an exception. From what I understand, they didn’t have to bring the goat to the auction, but they were told that they had to. If those doing the auction misled those with the goat about their obligations, then that is entirely on those doing the auction for lying.
And it’s quite likely that had they simply taken the goat without offering to recompense the auctioneers for it, then the auctioneers would have had a civil case that would have required that they recompense them, but it’s extremely unlikely that they would have had been required to give the specific performance of returning the goat.
That they offered to recompense the auctioneers, and in fact made an agreement with the buyer should have put the whole matter to rest.
Turning it into a criminal matter and having police executing search warrants is completely ridiculous. They broke no laws, at most, this was a contract violation.
I think I found the 4-H Fair Contract used at Shasta:
All it really states is that the animal is the exhibitor’s, that the exhibitor agrees to abide by the fair rules, and agreeing that this is a terminal sale. Signature blocks for 4-H members and a block for the parent.
While there may have been better ways for the fair to handle things, ultimately, the mother is at fault for apparently not knowing what she was getting her child into.
I think everyone agrees that the mother made a mistake by letting her child participate, but that isn’t the sum total of the mistakes made in this case.
As @k9bfriender pointed out, the mother tried to play by the rules and ask for permission to withdraw and she was misled into participating. If she had acted completely selfishly and not shown at the fair she would have been in a stronger legal position. As a hopeless rule-follower I have empathy for her situation.
A lot of similar news stories are about some idiot barging through life like a bull in a china shop only to get offended when someone pushes back. This story doesn’t sound like that. It sounds like someone who made a mistake, tried to fix it honestly and fairly, and got nothing but grief the entire time.
Good point. People should be wary of 4H and avoid getting their children involved with them. I think that’s the lesson that everyone should take from this story.