A girl wanted to keep the goat she raised for a county fair. They killed it

How does America have such an abundance of police which behave in such an obviously morally corrupt manner?

In most nations the police makes at least a token effort to appear trustworthy for plausible deniability. From the states you get weekly reports that are so outlandishly bad that you almost can't believe it.

Really strange as a bystander.

It's so frustrating! There are just some people who won't just step back and look at the big picture. An exception now and then won't hurt. Maybe they were on a power-trip, afraid of rocking the boat, or just mindlessly doing their job like a cog in a big machine.

Look, I’m an animal lover and what a nightmare for that little girl, but I don’t think that her parents did her any favors by not preparing her mentally for what was to come. The animals being sold at auction is part and parcel of the 4H experience, or many families will opt to have the animal slaughtered themselves. It sounds like they brought this goat to auction where it was sold and then tried to re-neg on the sale. If she bonded that closely to the animal they should have kept it on the property and not brought it to the 4H show. They almost tacitly admit this in offering to repay the income brought into 4H by the goat.

A number of years ago there was a dog being given up that my wife and I wanted to adopt off Craigslist. It was being given up by a family who - you guessed it - “didn’t have time for her”. This was in Weatherford TX which was over an hour from our place in Dallas. We got halfway there before the woman who placed the ad called us asking us to turn around, because her 8 year old daughter was having a breakdown after the realization that their dog was about to be rehomed.

Six months later they emailed us asking if we were still willing to take the dog, otherwise it was going to the shelter. At that point we had already taken on another. I hope it didn’t wind up in a kill shelter all because these parents couldn’t help their child deal with reality. This story reminded me of that.

I feel for this little girl - for losing her friend.

I think if more parents would explain to kids where meat comes from most would react like Indie-Rose - another little kid[0] - who said:

"I don't want to chop up animal people"

And there are so many more kids realizing on their own what they are eating. They don't want to eat Peppa the pig & friends and yet we (mostly) force them to eat them.

And there are so many more examples of these kids. They seem to instinctively understand what Einstein talked about in the last century [1] [2].

What do you think would happen if we show little kids the reality of slaughterhouses - they'd be traumatized for life and yet we feed them the products of those brutal and inhumane places.

One day we might end this barbarism - maybe a few more hundred years - as depicted in this optimistic future [3]

EDIT: Would be good to hear why you down vote this comment.

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[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3151959/Tearful-f...

[1] "Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."

[2] "Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

[3] The Dietary Requirements of a Star Fleet Officer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS7NRtEJBcA

I think, in life, sometimes we just don't quite think things through. You're busy, preoccupied, whatever. You don't get all the facts and just assume the best. You get to the auction and realize your daughter loves the goat a lot. You don't spend all day in an analytical mode, anticipating the worst cases, and then things happen and it's then too late to act. It's like being careless where you park your nice car and having it get keyed.

We can hunch over a little more, strive to blend in, build taller fences, be more cynical, make a million plans and expect the worst, or we can advocate for change and try to be more patient, kind and accepting, and, I think, I would like to advocate the latter.