A New Mexico rancher has reportedly petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to operate the first horse slaughterhouse since the ban for such operations was lifted in November 2011. Since 2006, the federal government has essentially blocked horse slaughterhouses because Congress did not fund their legally required USDA inspections. Those inspections, however, were approved by lawmakers in last year’s agricultural spending bill. According to a news source, Rick De Los Santos, part-owner of Valley Meat Co. in Roswell, plans to slaughter 20 to 25 horses a day and export the meat to Mexico for human consumption. He asserts that more than 100,000 American horses are shipped to slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada, with some of the meat exported to Europe and Asia. “Everyone who’s ever eaten tacos in Mexico, I guarantee you they’ve eaten horse meat down there,” De Los Santos said. “It would never be my intention to…
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The European Commission recently released a new animal welfare strategy designed to close gaps in the current laws and remedy a lack of uniform enforcement. According to a January 20, 2012, press release, the strategy ultimately aims to (i) provide consumers with more information about “what animal-welfare claims made on product labels really mean,” (ii) ensure that existing rules “really do benefit animals,” and (iii) improve training for animal handlers. In addition, the Commission has pledged to address the transportation of animals to slaughter, as well as introduce a general animal welfare bill and bills pertaining specifically to pig welfare over the next four years. The announcement apparently followed a citizen petition covered in Issue 422 of this Update and initiated by World Horse Welfare (WHW), which called for an eight-hour limit on the transportation of livestock to slaughter. Nevertheless, the group has since criticized the new strategy’s failure to…
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…
