TX court upholds horse slaughter; TX town bans it

A federal court today refused to grant an injunction against the implementation of a USDA plan to allow horse slaughterhouses to pay for inspectors, following Congress's defunding of inspections last year. Although the account in the the Dallas Morning News (subscribe or opt-out) is spare on this point, the court dismissed two of the counts (shock!) for lack of standing. (Given that folks in the U.S. don't favor horse meat, what would a good plaintiff look like in this case?) This decision is no doubt bad for horses but is the right one from a statutory interpretation viewpoint. As we've argued here, Congress could have been far more precise if it wanted to ban horse slaughter, but was not. As the court put it, the defunding was only a "half-step" towards ending horse slaughter. The court's decision draws attention to the blustery but ineffective approach generally taken by Congress towards animals.

In better news, one of the three horse slaughterhouses in the U.S. has been declared a nuisance.

Update (3/14, 3/16): An AP article has more details on the standing issue and an interesting tie-in with the nuisance one. The court found no "environmental, aesthetic, informational or economic interests" facially at stake for the plaintiffs. Unlike the HSUS poultry litigation discussed here, horse meat consumers would not be ideal plaintiffs, as such consumers would be benefited by the inspections. Interestingly, the one theory of injury which was successful was environmental injury to individuals who own property near slaughterhouses. Although this is perhaps as much an economic injury (house prices) as an environmental one, the characterization of an injury as environmental is consistent with the original line of cases from which aesthetic/emotional standing for animals arose, conservation cases like Sierra Club v. Morton.