Case Details

Selling pet goats for slaughter
Tulalip, WA (US)

Date: May 2001
County: Snohomish
Local Map: available
Disposition: Civil Case

Person of Interest: Dana Guptil

Case ID: 1506
Classification: Unlawful Trade/Smuggling
Animal: horse, goat
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(Civil Case) A Snohomish County Superior Court commissioner says Dana Guptil must pay Lake Stevens residents Kimberly and Neale Cox $34,329 for the emotional pain he inflicted when he sent the couple's pets to their deaths.

The civil-court judgment may be among the largest of its kind nationally, said the Coxes' attorney, Valerie Bittner, who is a longtime member of the California-based Animal Legal Defense Fund. According to her research, the largest known award in similar cases involving companion animals was a $50,000 judgment in a Kentucky horse case in 2000.

The Coxes met Guptil, 32, in May 2001, when they placed a newspaper ad seeking a "good home" for their goats, which kept escaping from their yard. Buster was a purebred Nubian, while Oreo and Martin were former petting-zoo residents from Everett's Forest Park.

The couple said Guptil then "sweet-talked them" into also handing over Jubilee, a 28-year-old strawberry roan, by promising to pasture him with other horses for the rest of his life. Neale Cox, who had cared for Jubilee since the horse's birth, said he agreed because he worried that his horse was lonely.

Guptil promised they could visit their animals every week, the Coxes said. Guptil said he would keep the goats at his home on the Tulalip Reservation while pasturing Jubilee in the Warm Springs area south of Stanwood.

Instead, Guptil sold the gelding to Florence Packing in Stanwood for $549. Jubilee then was shipped to an Alberta slaughterhouse that sells horse meat for human consumption in Europe.

Guptil sold the goats to meat dealers at the Marysville Livestock Auction. They fetched prices ranging from $97.50 for Martin to $122.50 to Buster, compared with the average $75 per head usually paid for goats at that auction. The deadline for appealing Bedle's May 19 ruling passed Thursday, Bittner said. Two years ago, Guptil didn't dispute that he had sold the animals and said sending Jubilee to slaughter was the humane thing to do, because the horse's feet were in terrible condition. He had intended to keep the goats, he said, but they continually escaped from their pen.

Guptil confirmed that he requested � but didn't get � a bill of sale from the Coxes for Jubilee. Kimberly Cox said she instead wrote a note saying they gave the horse to Guptil "with the understanding that he cannot sell or give him away" but instead must return him to the Coxes.

Bittner said Neale Cox used to bring treats to Jubilee every day on his way to work.

"Mr. Cox has to live forever with the knowledge that he loaded his horse onto the truck that took him to his death," Bittner said

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References

Seattle Times

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