Killing of California goat, NY squirrel is government overreach, attorneys say

In California, Shasta County sheriff's deputies agreed last week to pay $300,000 for traveling 500 miles with a faulty warrant to seize and hand over for slaughter a pet goat, against the wishes of the 9-year-old girl who raised it and exhibited it at the county fair. Her litigation against the state continues.

During the same week, a cohort of New York state and Chemung County officials raided a home and animal sanctuary, seizing a raccoon named Fred and a squirrel, P'nut, who had gained YouTube 500,000 followers with its tricks, tiny hats and snack nibbling during the seven years since it was rescued as an orphan on the streets of New York City.

In both cases, said Ryan Gordon of Advancing Law for Animals, who represents the family whose goat was killed, the issues appear to be unlawful seizure without notice and opportunity to be heard, without due process.

"In these two cases the facts are wholly different but it's the same common theme of government overreach, abuse of power, due process violation and taxpayer rights," said Vannessa Shakib, co-founder and co-director, with Gordon, of the Redondo Beach firm which specializes in animal law.

Shakib

Gordon

She said in an interview with the Daily Journal on Monday the firm has not been in touch with Fred Longo, who had bonded with P'nut and kept him as a pet after a try at release into the wild resulted in the squirrel returning with a chunk of his tail missing. New York state law requires certification for keeping a wild animal, and Longo said in an interview with The AP that he was in the process of getting P'nut certified as an educational animal when the raid occurred.

The state's euthanasia of P'nut "won't go unheard," The AP quoted Longo as saying. "We will make a stance on how this government and New York state utilizes their resources."

"We have not been in contact with the Longo family but invite them to get in touch with us," Shakib said.

Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Dale A. Drozd in Sacramento issued an order on Oct. 31 approving a settlement for the minor plaintiff and her family of the lawsuit over the Shasta County Sheriff's Department's role in the seizure of the pet goat and handing it over to be killed. Long et al. v. Fernandez et al., 2:22-cv-01527-DAD-AC (E.D. Cal., filed Oct. 31, 2024).

"My clients did nothing wrong in this matter," an attorney for defense, Christopher Pisano of Best Best & Krieger LLP, said in an email Monday. "However, we recognize that there is a risk and cost involved in bringing a case to a jury trial, and we wanted to take the unknown off the table. The County is looking forward to putting this case behind it."

Drozd noted that the county defendants "merely turned over Cedar to other defendants and did not themselves kill the subject animal. The court notes that plaintiffs argue that "[t]he brunt of emotional damages E.L. suffered relate to Cedar's death, for which [the non-settling defendants] are responsible."

Emailed and telephoned requests for comment and questions to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which was in charge of the fair, received no response by press time. The attorney general, counsel to the department in the continuing litigation, referred questions to the agency.

Of the $300,000 settlement, the child receives $65,000 to be put in trust; the named plaintiff, her mother, receives $100,000.

Drozd noted that in the Eastern District of California, "25% of the recovery is a reasonable benchmark for attorneys' fees in contingency cases involving minors' state law claims.

"Notably here, plaintiffs' counsel undertook representation entirely on a contingency basis, assert that they spent nearly 500 hours on the case, fronted all costs, and had specialized knowledge in the sub-field of animal law," Drozd detailed. "Accordingly, and particularly in light of plaintiffs' counsel's seeming ability to generate a recovery far exceeding the average award in arguably similar cases, the court concludes that 35% of the minor's settlement amount going toward attorneys' fees is reasonable under the circumstances in this case."

Drozd noted "the lack of cases in which defendants captured, but did not kill, a companion animal, and in which that purported companion animal was a goat and not, for instance, a dog." Therefore, Drozd said in his order, "the plaintiffs analogize generally to cases where law enforcement defendants killed the subject companion animal."

That's just what Cedar was to the 9-year-old plaintiff, who made it clear after the goat was apparently auctioned that she did not want to give him away or have him killed, her attorneys argued in court documents.

"After the auction, [the minor girl] would not leave Cedar's side," the mother and named plaintiff, Jessica Long, wrote in a sworn statement. [The girl] loved Cedar and the thought of him going to slaughter was something she could not bear. While sobbing in his pen beside him [she] communicated to her mother she didn't want Cedar to go to slaughter."

State Sen. Brian Dahle, R-Bieber, made the winning bid, $962, presumably to donate the goat for a state barbecue planned the next day. However, he issued statements when the controversy came out that he did not want to keep the goat.

But neither Dahle, nor his wife, nor his representative who made the bid ever paid the auction money, according to discovery, Gordon said in an interview with the Daily Journal on Monday. And that's not the only mystery.

Discovery has been inconsistent and contradictory among witnesses, according to transcripts, about who was given the goat, who killed it, when and where, and what happened to the meat.

"Four years of hard-fought litigation later so many questions remain unanswered," Shakib said. "At the outset we assumed the reason for this 500-mile trek by the sheriff's deputies" to Sonoma County, where the goat was raised "to illegally seize Cedar was for a barbecue taking place the next day. We discovered that he was not eaten that day. He was held for weeks while this office was calling, trying to locate him."

Gordon added, "I called their office many times while he was there. They would not tell us if he was alive, where he was or who they deemed was his owner."

Neither attorney could pinpoint the motivation for what happened to Cedar.

Shakib speculated, "The ideology of the defendants was Cedar's purpose was to be meat. They couldn't see him as anything other than meat, so he had to be killed."

The causes of action against the state include First Amendment viewpoint discrimination, she explained. "The defendants retaliated against our clients in a lawless manner because they disagreed with the viewpoint that Cedar was a member of a family who belonged at home."

Comparing the case to that of P'nut, she added, "What we're seeing is government overreach and abuse of power. Government officials feel empowered to act as they wish with animals deemed to be merely property. We're a country of animal lovers. Most of us have companion animals at home that are not property but members of our family."