KILAUEA — Sometime between dusk on Thursday and dawn on Friday, a pregnant goat from Kilauea’s Kunana Dairy was gutted and beheaded, her unborn kids dumped next to her insides, sources said Monday.
“Nothing like that has ever happened to us before,” dairy co-owner Louisa Wooton said. “You have no idea how horrible it was. She was like a family member.”
A trespasser is suspected of killing Kaitlyn, Kunana’s goat named after a former worker.
Wooton said Kaitlyn was gutted in a field in Moloa‘a about a mile from the dairy’s main pasture in Kilauea.
“They took her meat, they took her head, they took everything that was edible from her and left everything else there on the ground,” she said.
Wooton said she discovered what was left of Kaitlyn on Friday afternoon, when she went to check on her goats in Moloa‘a.
“Our goats are so fricking tame, she was probably kissing his hands while he knifed her in the heart,” Wooton said.
Next to Kaitlyn’s remains, the killer left behind a Winchester hunting knife, unspent shotgun shells and a pair of sunglasses.
Kaitlyn, a 4-year-old white doe, was two weeks away from giving birth. Wooton said besides being a family member, Kaitlyn was also a working animal that generated $7,000 in annual income for the dairy.
On Saturday Wooton was scheduled to conduct a goat-raising workshop for approximately 50 people in Wailua. “I was a total basketcase,” she said.
An initial $5,000 reward was increased to $11,000 after two anonymous donors came forward, according to Wooton. The reward is being offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for killing and butchering Kaitlyn.
The Animal Welfare Institute, a 60-year-old Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, has offered assistance to the dairy to solve the case.
The Kaua‘i Police Department has sent a press release announcing the reward and asking for anyone with information about the incident to call KPD dispatch at 241-1711 or Crime Stoppers at 241-1887.
“The suspect(s) reportedly climbed over a fence in order to get to the goat,” KPD said in the release. “The suspect slaughtered the goat then took it, leaving its organs behind.”
It’s common to hear that goats have been stolen — one of her goats was once stolen — but not that goats have been gutted on the field, Wooton said.
Wooton said her husband told her that in the 1960s it was “somewhat common” on the North Shore for people to do this to cattle, but she has never heard of it happening since then.
“We’re going to do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Wooton said.
Because her goats are so tame, it made it easier for the perpetrators, she said.
“We’re not going to change the way we raise goats, and we can’t change people,” she said. “But maybe we can somehow get them to think twice before they do that.”
