Jessica Long and her 11-year-old daughter won a $300,000 settlement after Shasta County sheriff's deputies seized their pet goat named Cedar in 2022.

California sheriff’s deputies have been forced to pay a girl’s family $300,000 after taking her pet goat and sending it to slaughter. Jessica Long purchased the goat, named Cedar, in 2022 for her daughter who was enrolled in a youth development program in California.

Jessica Long and her daughter sued Shasta County, California, officials in 2022 after sheriff’s deputies seized the girl’s goat, Cedar, who was later killed.

Cedar was 4 months old in April 2022 when Jessica Long bought the white Boer goat for $300 for her 9-year-old daughter ahead of the Shasta District Fair that June. The family registered the young goat in the fair’s junior livestock auction, but as June approached, Long’s daughter couldn’t bring herself to put Cedar on the auction block.

She] 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.