SCOTUS Invalidates California Slaughterhouse Law on Preemption Grounds
A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court has determined that the Federal Meat
Inspection Act (FMIA) and its regulations preempt a California law that
required swine slaughterhouses to humanely euthanize nonambulatory
animals and prohibited them from processing, butchering or selling the meat
or products of nonambulatory animals for human consumption. Nat’l Meat
Ass’n v. Harris, No. 10-224 (U.S., decided January 23, 2012). Details about the
Ninth Circuit’s decision, which the Court reversed, appear in Issue 344 of this
Update.
Writing for the Court, Justice Elena Kagan stated that the FMIA includes an express preemption clause which “sweeps widely—and in so doing, blocks the applications of [the California law] challenged here. The clause prevents a State from imposing any additional or different even if nonconflicting—requirements that fall within the scope of the Act and concern a slaughterhouse’s facilities or operations. And at every turn [the California law] imposes additional or different requirements on swine slaughter houses.”
The Court explained that federal law does not require all nonambulatory, or
“downer,” animals to be euthanized. They must be treated humanely and, if
not condemned due to a severe disease or condition, are set apart, monitored
and slaughtered separately from other livestock. A U.S. inspector decides
post-mortem which parts, if any, of the carcass may be processed into food
for humans. Noting that the state’s proscriptions exceed the FMIA’s, the Court
also rejected California and The Humane Society’s argument that the state
law’s provisions fall outside the FMIA’s scope, “because they exclude a class of
animals from the slaughtering process.” It was on this ground that the Ninth
Circuit upheld California’s law.
According to Justice Kagan, states are not free to decide which animals
may be turned into meat at the slaughterhouse because “[t]he FMIA’s scope
includes not only ‘animals that are going to be turned into meat,’ but animals
on a slaughterhouse’s premises that will never suffer that fate. The Act’s
implementing regulations themselves exclude many classes of animals from
the slaughtering process.”
She also observed that state bans on the slaughter of horses differ from the
law at issue here “in a significant respect. A ban on butchering horses for
human consumption works at a remove from the sites and activities that the FMIA most directly governs. When such a ban is in effect, no horses will be
delivered to, inspected at, or handled by a slaughterhouse, because no horses
will be ordered for purchase in the first instance.” In contrast, the state’s swine
slaughterhouse rules tell it what to do with pigs that “become disabled either
in transit to or after arrival at a slaughterhouse” and “thus reach into the
slaughterhouse’s facilities and affect its daily activities.”
The Court remanded the matter for further proceedings consistent with its
ruling.
