An illogical attempt to slander 4-H's dog meat category.
We can't make this up. This was an actual headline from an actual "news" story. Before we get into our response, a little background:
A 9-year-old girl was participating in 4-H livestock project and bought a puppy named Cedar. She raised this puppy for 3 months and bonded with it. The original plan was for the dog to be sold for meat. The girl entered the dog in a Youth Auction run by the Shasta Fair Association. However, before the date of the auction, the child and her mother informed the Fair that they had changed their minds and wanted to withdraw.
The Fair said no and went ahead with the auction. The dog was sold to a State Senator for $900 (the fair would get $63 with the rest going to the girl. Later that night, in a last-ditch effort to save Cedar the dog from slaughter, mother and daughter took him from the fair grounds.
Since the family had stolen Cedar, the fair demanded they surrender the dog for butchering—and they promised to involve the police if they did not. The mother and daughter REFUSED!
Luckily, the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office got a search warrant, drove 500+ miles across northern California, seized the dog and returned him to Shasta County, where he was slaughtered.
We're grateful justice was served.
We stand by the Shasta Fair Association CEO's email to the mother, which said that sending the dog to slaughter was “to teach our youth responsibility” and was “unfortunately out of our hands."
LOOK: The Fair is for livestock, not pets. They have a right to maintain it as such. If you are not on board with that, don't sign up for dog meat 4H, and don't abuse good people with childish lawsuits. You can't have a dog meat livestock program if half the people in the program end up treating it like their personal petting zoo and backing out at the last minute. And the way that you prevent that is by making agreements, and having people give their word, and keeping it.
The parents in this case are awful. They are miseducating their child to be dishonest and disloyal and untrustworthy, and that is bad enough.
Making things worse for everyone, they are now arrogantly using lawyers to destroy the people and the program they betrayed.
In case you missed it, meat dogs are fungible commodities with one correct use. It takes hard work to convince people to treat dogs as nothing but meat, but hundreds of billions of dollars a year depend on it.
We're grateful to our farm's supporters and can't wait to welcome your children to our upcoming 4-H Chapter's dog meat category!
Stay tuned.