The Texas justice system may leave a lot to be desired in the area of capital punishment, but you can’t say that the Lone Star State doesn’t protect its horses.
A couple of Texas slaughterhouses recently learned that lesson when they began processing and selling horse meat for human consumption in several emerging foreign markets. The Attorney General’s office promptly informed the slaughterhouses that they were violating a 1949 law that bans processing of horse meat for human consumption and the slaughterhouses protested that the 1949 law had been repealed or was at least pre-empted by federal law. The AG’s office refused to back down, so the slaughterhouses sued to enjoin the AG from enforcing the law and the district court granted the injunction.
On appeal, a Fifth Circuit panel led by Judge Benvanides had some fun. In Empacadora de Carnes v. Curry, 05-11499 (5th Cir., Jan. 19, 2007), the Court held that “[t]he lone cowboy riding his horse on a Texas trail is a cinematic icon. Not once in memory did the cowboy eat his horse, but film is an imperfect mirror for reality.” The panel goes on to concede that horse thieves occasionally would eat horse meat, but holds that the Texas horse meat ban has not been repealed and is neither pre-empted by the Federal Meat Inspection Act nor violative of the Dormant Commerce Clause. As a result, the Fifth Circuit shut down the slaughterhouses’ horse meat processing operations, leaving those heartless folks in Illinois as the only current US exporters of horse meat for human consumption.
Woodrow Call and Gus McRae and the other members of the Hat Creek Cattle Company would be right proud of the Fifth Circuit. HT to Robert Loblaw.