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Comment by Hizonner | Hacker News Reader

> It sounds like they brought this goat to auction where it was sold and then tried to re-neg on the sale.

Wrong.

You did not read the article closely, or you would not have made that assumption. Frankly you had no reason to make such an assumption even without reading it.

Complaint: https://dig.abclocal.go.com/kgo/PDF/2022-08-31-Complaint.pdf

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Except I’m not wrong:

“On June 24, 2022, accompanied by Plaintiff Jessica, Plaintiff E.L. exhibited Cedar at Shasta District Fair in the junior livestock auction.”

Since we’re making assumptions about each other apparently, I’ll assume you’re from San Fransisco or Toronto or some other urban center where livestock auctions aren’t common. So allow me to inform you that the purpose of a livestock auction is to bid on livestock which most of the time will end up being bred or slaughtered.

Yeah, it's kind of weird. Apparently they went through with the auction all the way past bidding, and then decided they didn't want to sell. The auction had no legally binding agreement that could prevent this, but they seemed to believe that they did. Fair enough, I certainly would think backing out of an auction after selling wouldn't be possible.

I would be surprised if anyone was under the impression that the purpose of a livestock auction was … to raise pets?

Me too, which is why this whole incident and some of the posters here reaction to it is so strange. They never should have entered the goat into the 4H show.

You clearly didn't read the complaint. It states that they tried to back out at the auction, both before and after bidding had concluded, and then taking the goat and sending it to a friends farm hundreds of miles away while continuing to try to negotiate.

That's correct. And at the time they first "tried" to back out, the goat had not been sold. At that point, everybody was on notice that the goat was not for sale. No valid sale could have occurred after that first attempt. It's not that they "tried" to back out. They did back out. And the only available remedy for that was money damages, not random extraducial confiscation of property.

By the way, on top of that, California law explicitly gives minors the right to back out of major sales even after they are concluded. So in fact they couldn't even have gotten money damages.

> No valid sale could have occurred after that first attempt

Auctions have rules. I don’t know this one’s, the complaint [1] omits much of them, but every one I’ve participated in bars backing out on the day of the auction. If you change your mind, you bid for your item.

[1] https://dig.abclocal.go.com/kgo/PDF/2022-08-31-Complaint.pdf

Irrelevant. She is a minor.

> Irrelevant. She is a minor.

The relevant California code (§ 6710) is superseded by federal livestock auction law [1]. Also, most contracts require the minor and a parent or guardian sign specifically to avoid this.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packers_and_Stockyards_Act

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