Who killed Cedar the goat?

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. It lit up the news last spring, and then again in November because the girl's family filed a lawsuit — the mere existence of which serves as a spoiler to you, a sophisticated consumer of news, that a whole lot of bad stuff went down.

As a member of her local chapter of the century-old agricultural education group 4-H, the girl — let's follow the lawsuit and call her "E" — raised a goat. She was supposed to feed it, care for it, and then sell it at the Shasta District Fair, in Northern California. Thousands of children participate in 4-H's livestock projects every year; they raise farm animals and sell them, learning about cows and pigs and sheep and goats, and how we turn them into meat.

E raised the goat as planned, and brought it to the auction. But somewhere along the way, the "it" had become a him. And when it came time for E to hand Cedar over to his new owner, who would serve him up at the annual 4-H barbecue, the kid wouldn't let go of the kid. Sobbing, E begged her mother not to make her give the goat up for slaughter. Cedar wasn't meat. He was her friend.

Now, no one who tends to animals wants to send a creature they've raised from birth to its death. 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. It's a scene that's reenacted every year at county fairs across the land, a rite of passage in agricultural communities right up there with spring planting and horse shows. 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 an opportunity to convey the concepts of responsibility, mercy, and justice, to explain the kind of world we want and the kind of world we have. 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.

No matter how you feel about eating meat, the Longs' lawsuit may wind up putting How Things Are on trial. 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. Only a sliver of them raise animals; that's a major project that costs money and time and requires more space than the average backyard. In rural parts of America, though, it knits the community together. Usually, when a child sells an animal at the county fair, some local macher buys it for more than its market value. The child puts the money away for college, a new computer, whatever. The littlest kids always cry; the big kids do, too, but less. Circle of life. And, sure, sometimes the kids don't go through with it, and mom and dad go home with Bobo the hog as a pet.

Cedar went for the handsome price of $903. His buyers were State Assemblywoman Megan Dahle and her husband, State Sen. Brian Dahle. At the time of the sale, in June 2022, Brian Dahle was the Republican candidate for governor of California. Five months later, he lost to Gavin Newsom in a landslide of epic proportions, further acquainting him with the concept of a sacrificial goat.

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. (Seriously.) In a series of emails and calls, she explained to Dahle what had happened and offered to repay his $903. Dahle said he was willing to let it go.

Long made the same offer to the Shasta District Fair, which was entitled to about $63 of the sale. But the fair — and its oversight agency, the California Department of Food and Agriculture — was having none of it. "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," the fair's CEO told Long. "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." 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. And for another, it's hard to figure how Long and her daughter "stole" a goat they never relinquished ownership of. 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. She also indicated her willingness to turn the whole mess over to civil court, where it could be decided under the vicissitudes of contract law. But thanks in part to viral posts on Twitter and Instagram — like one from Bleating Hearts Farm and Sanctuary in Napa, which offers "an alternative outcome" for children who don't want to send their raised farm animals to "fatal auctions" — Cedar's plight was becoming national news. 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. His deputies, armed with a search warrant, immediately gassed up a black-and-white and drove a couple of hundred miles south, to seize Cedar from the Bleating Hearts sanctuary.

But Cedar wasn't there! Bleating Hearts had just been 'gramming about him in solidarity. Cedar was actually holed up in a totally different sanctuary, Billy's Mini Farm in Sonoma, one valley over.

The deputies headed to the second location. And even though they didn't have a warrant covering Billy's farm, its owner gave up the goat. The deputies then brought Cedar back to the Shasta fairgrounds, the place where he had been sold for meat.

As for what happened next, no one is saying. On July 28, 20 days after Cedar was seized in the daring goat-farm raid, an assistant at the county texted his boss that they were "killing goat today finally." All they were waiting for, apparently, was approval from the Shasta County district attorney. It's not clear whether Cedar was actually eaten, or whether he was just slaughtered to send a message to anyone foolish enough to treat a farm animal like a pet. But whoever knows his fate isn't talking. Cedar wasn't just killed. He was disappeared.

That sense of incredulous rage you're feeling right now at the fact that adults in authority spent thousands of taxpayer dollars and days of law-enforcement time in service of killing a child's pet? That's why this story went viral.

Even avatars of the American farming industry were shocked at the fair's rule-bound response to a child's change of heart. "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. "More important for livestock producers is how the Shasta County Fair and the Shasta County sheriff — both unencumbered by intelligence — created a bonanza for animal rights zealots."

That is, indeed, how my family took the news. We're no zealots. We eat meat in our house. My children have been active in our local 4-H chapter, and my wife grew up raising hogs for hers. Her sisters did 4-H livestock programs, too — sheep, goats, rabbits. I've seen my wife cry tears of both joy and sympathy watching children auction their animals at a county fair, and the story of Cedar and his little girl shocked her — not for what it said about animal rights, but because of the manifest absence of mercy for a 9-year-old child. The ethics of raising animals to be food are tough; the ethics around the treatment of a child seem clearer.

"They could have said: Oh, sorry, little girl, we'll let you have your goat back," says Leslie Irvine, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine who studies people's relationships with their pets. Irvine has done key work in understanding how 4-H livestock projects change kids' understanding of animals — how they learn to make a distinction, over time, between companion animals and "sentient commodities," over which humans have mastery. As young children watch older kids go through the process, they also learn to modulate their emotions. "They learn that only babies cry," Irving says. "They see that the older kids aren't crying when their animals are sold, and they've got all this money they can put toward college."

Maybe all this bellyaching over a goat seems wimpy. It's not as if lions spend much intellectual effort parsing their relationship with antelopes. But then again, lions don't run a global industry that kills 300 million cattle and 70 billion chickens every year. It's our capacity for ethical reflection — combined with our ability to organize slaughter on a mass scale — that sets us apart from other predators. Humans are the only creatures capable of seeing different animals as having different statuses under different contexts, laborer or pet or food. "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. One of Irving's former students, Colter Ellis, has shown that cattle ranchers feel a keen duty of care for their animals and often regret that their efforts lead to the death of those animals. Ranchers sometimes develop so much affection for a particular steer, goat, or sheep that they keep it out of the slaughterhouse — transforming it, in other words, from commodity to pet. But generally, ranchers see death as part of life, a consequence of the responsibility to feed a hungry world.

Long's daughter clearly hadn't internalized that lesson yet. In fact, 4-H doesn't even claim to teach it. "We strongly believe that animal science projects provide opportunities for youth to develop responsibility, patience, and understanding," the organization said in a statement it issued in response to Cedar's case. "The programs do not advance a singular point of view, but empower young people to ask questions, think for themselves, create real-world solutions, and lead their peers." It's not killing animals that 4-H teaches. It's reflecting about killing animals, and what it means.

On consideration, E decided that Cedar wasn't food. "How many urban people, people in cities, have actually seen a pig or a goat at that girl's age?" says Charlie Thieriot, who until recently ran Llano Seco Meats, a heritage pork producer that focused on sustainability and ethics. "She has done all I could ask a fellow human to do, which is to understand the animal before you eat it. 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. Maybe it was just another example of petty martinets deploying their authoritarian mindset against children — like the Texas school administrators and district attorneys who put an 11-year-old in solitary confinement, or the Mississippi judge who sentenced a 10-year-old to three months' probation for peeing outside.

But as bad as those cases are, I think there's more going on here. In the case of Cedar, these small-town community leaders from an agricultural area were reacting to something they viewed as an existential threat. They clung to their rulebook to protect their way of life.

"On one hand, this is a civil-rights dispute over private property," says Gordon, the attorney for the Longs. "But on the other hand, by trying to save Cedar, the Longs disturbed the order of things. Cedar was livestock, and many people can't even conceive that livestock like Cedar can be something more than food. That's why agricultural interests in the government fought this issue so hard." (The California Department of Food and Agriculture, the Shasta fair, and the county sheriff all declined my requests for comment.)

It doesn't seem that Jessica Long and her daughter intended to level a critique of people in power, or the way they treat livestock. Long's entreating letters to them insist that they did not. Yet the state food and agriculture department has countersued Long, and in late December her attorneys filed a counter to the countersuit, calling it an attempt at intimidation. 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. 

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.