A 9-year-old’s goat was taken by police for slaughter. Now a stranger has made an offer
Tiana Peet listened to the podcaster tell the tale of the 9-year-old Shasta County girl and her goat and had had enough.
Cedar the goat was gone, ordered retrieved by Shasta County fair officials with the help of Shasta County Sheriff’s deputies and a judge’s warrant after the girl and her family begged to back out of the Shasta District Fair’s meat auction. The girl’s mother later took the goat in a last-ditch effort to save it from slaughter.
The 7-month Boer goat was later slaughtered for a community barbecue.
How and why the girl’s goat was taken is now the subject of a federal lawsuit alleging Shasta fair and sheriff’s officials violated the girl’s civil rights.
“I said, ‘What can I do with this anger? I wanted to show the family that there are decent people out there,” said Peet, 30, of Arcata.
Peet offered to help buy the Shasta County girl a new goat or other pet, maybe a dog.
She wrote a letter to the editor of Bee sister paper San Luis Obispo Tribune in hopes of getting in touch with the girl’s family.
“I figured, what if I could reach out, try to scrounge up some money,” she said. “We forget there are so many kindnesses every day. That gets lost in all the craziness.”
Peet, a Trinity County native, said she was deeply disturbed at the lengths the fair and law enforcement went to retrieve the goat — obtaining a search warrant and driving hundreds of miles to secure the animal — and at its apparent cruelty.
“I know 4-H — it’s why my mom wouldn’t let me join 4-H. (The fair) says ‘There’s rules,’ but this is so extreme, so unnecessarily cruel,” Peet said. “Taking a goat from a 9-year-old? So unnecessary. And their excuse is that they’re teaching the girl a lesson? I was crying. This is insane.”
Anger over the Cedar saga has gone international. Toronto-based photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur documents animals used for food, entertainment and in the laboratory through her agency We Animals Media.
“I think the fair, the law enforcement, all involved, were not allowing for a pause and some critical thinking. What harm would truly have come to allowing the girl to keep Cedar?” McArthur said via email. “This was an ugly finale to our stubborn adherence to ideas and traditions. And so uncompassionate.
“I may be looking at this as big picture — it was one girl and her family trying to save their goat — but the social interest and push-back is an indication of changes in thinking,” McArthur continued. “This has turned into a total PR nightmare for those who insisted on taking and killing Cedar. I hope they take in the lesson.”
Since The Bee’s reporting, publications across the country and around the world have picked up the story, readers and commentators from California to Canada remarking on Shasta authorities’ alleged overreach; while questioning the ethics of programs like 4-H and Future Farmers of America and whether they work with the meat industry to indoctrinate children.
Back in Arcata, “it’s the least I feel that could be done,” Peet said of finding the girl and her family another pet. “She’s nine. She should just be happy and not know that the world is such a cruel place yet.”
