The Federal Meat Inspection Act (FMIA or Act), 21 U.S.C. § 601 et seq., regulates the inspection, handling, and slaughter of livestock for human consumption. We consider here whether the FMIA expressly preempts a California law dictating what slaughterhouses must do with pigs that cannot walk, known in the trade as nonambulatory pigs. We hold that the FMIA forecloses the challenged applications of the state statute.
The FMIA regulates a broad range of activities at slaughterhouses to ensure both the safety of meat and the humane handling of animals.
The Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has responsibility for administering the FMIA to promote its dual goals of safe meat and humane slaughter. Over the years, the FSIS has issued extensive regulations to govern the inspection of animals and meat, as well as other aspects of slaughterhouses' operations and facilities. See 9 CFR § 300.1 et seq. (2011). The FSIS employs about 9,000 inspectors, veterinarians, and investigators to implement its inspection regime and enforce its humane-handling requirements. See Hearings on 2012 Appropriations before the Subcommittee on Agriculture of the House Committee on Appropriations, 112th Cong., 1st Sess., pt. 1B, p. 921 (2011). In fiscal year 2010, those personnel examined about 147 million head of livestock and carried out more than 126,000 "humane handling verification procedures." Id., at 942-943.
The FSIS's inspection procedure begins with an "ante-mortem" examination of each animal brought to a slaughterhouse. See 9 CFR § 309.1. If the inspector finds no evidence of disease or injury, he approves the animal for slaughter. If, at the other end of the spectrum, the inspector sees that an animal is dead or dying, comatose, suffering from a high fever, or afflicted with a serious disease or condition, he designates the animal as "U.S. Condemned."
The inspector also has an intermediate option: If he determines that an animal has a less severe condition—or merely suspects the animal of having a disease meriting condemnation—he classifies the animal as "U.S. Suspect." See 9 CFR § 309.2. That category includes all nonambulatory animals not found to require condemnation.
The regulations implementing the FMIA additionally prescribe methods for handling animals humanely at all stages of the slaughtering process. Those rules apply from the moment a truck carrying livestock "enters, or is in line to enter," a slaughterhouse's premises. Humane Handling and Slaughter of Livestock, FSIS Directive 6900.2, ch. II(I) (rev. Aug. 15, 2011). And they include specific provisions for the humane treatment of animals that cannot walk. See 9 CFR § 313.2(d). Under the regulations, slaughterhouse employees may not drag conscious, nonambulatory animals, see § 313.2(d)(2), and may move them only with "equipment suitable for such purposes," § 313.2(d)(3). Similarly, employees must place nonambulatory animals, as well as other sick and disabled livestock, in covered pens sufficient to protect the animals from "adverse climatic conditions." See § 313.2(d)(1); § 313.1(c).
The FMIA contains an express preemption provision, at issue here, addressing state laws on these and similar matters. That provision's first sentence reads:
In 2008, the Humane Society of the United States released an undercover video showing workers at a slaughterhouse in California dragging, kicking, and electro-shocking sick and disabled cows in an effort to move them. The video led the Federal Government to institute the largest beef recall in U.S. history in order to prevent consumption of meat from diseased animals. Of greater relevance here, the video also prompted the California legislature to strengthen a pre-existing statute governing the treatment of nonambulatory animals and to apply that statute to slaughterhouses regulated under the
As amended, the California law— § 599f of the state penal code—provides in relevant part:
The maximum penalty for violating any of these prohibitions is one year in jail and a $20,000 fine. See § 599f(h).
Petitioner National Meat Association (NMA) is a trade association representing meatpackers and processors, including operators of swine slaughterhouses. It sued to enjoin the enforcement of § 599f against those slaughterhouses, principally on the ground that the FMIA preempts application of the state law.
We granted certiorari, 564 U.S. ___, 131 S.Ct. 3083, 180 L.Ed.2d 884 (2011), and now reverse.
The FMIA's preemption clause sweeps widely—and in so doing, blocks the applications of § 599f challenged here. The clause prevents a State from imposing any additional or different—even if non-conflicting—requirements that fall within the scope of the Act and concern a slaughterhouse's facilities or operations. And at every turn § 599f imposes additional or different requirements on swine slaughterhouses: It compels them to deal with nonambulatory pigs on their premises in ways that the federal Act and regulations do not. In essence, California's statute substitutes a new regulatory scheme for the one the FSIS uses. Where under federal law a slaughterhouse may take one course of action in handling a nonambulatory pig, under state law the slaughterhouse must take another.
Consider first what the two statutes tell a slaughterhouse to do when (as not infrequently occurs) a pig becomes injured and thus nonambulatory sometime after delivery to the slaughterhouse.
Similarly, consider how the state and federal laws address what a slaughterhouse should do when a pig is non-ambulatory at the time of delivery, usually because of harsh transportation conditions.
The Humane Society counters that at least § 599f(a)'s ban on buying nonambulatory animals escapes preemption because that provision applies no matter when or where a purchase takes place. The argument proceeds in three steps: (1) § 599f(a)'s ban covers purchases of nonambulatory pigs made prior to delivery,
But this argument fails on two grounds. First, its preliminary steps have no foundation in the record. Until a stray comment at oral argument, see Tr. of Oral Arg. 50, neither the State nor the Humane Society had disputed the NMA's assertion that slaughterhouses buy pigs at delivery (or still later, upon successful ante-mortem inspection). See Brief for Petitioner 46, n. 18; Brief for Non-State Respondents 44; Brief for State Respondents 16, n. 5. Nor had the parties presented evidence that a significant number of pigs become nonambulatory before shipment, when any offsite purchases would occur. The record therefore does not disclose whether § 599f(a)'s ban on purchase ever applies beyond the slaughterhouse gate, much less how an application of that kind would affect a slaughterhouse's operations. And because that is so, we have no basis for deciding whether the FMIA would preempt it. Second, even assuming that a State could regulate offsite purchases, the concluding step of the Humane Society's argument would not follow. The FMIA's preemption clause expressly focuses on "premises, facilities and operations"—at bottom, the slaughtering and processing of animals at a given location. So the distinction between a slaughterhouse's site-based activities and its more far-flung commercial dealings is not, as the Humane Society contends, an anomaly that courts should strain to avoid. It is instead a fundamental feature of the FMIA's preemption clause.
For that reason, the Humane Society's stronger argument concerns California's effort to regulate the last stage of a slaughterhouse's business—the ban in § 599f(b) on "sell[ing] meat or products of nonambulatory animals for human consumption." The Government acknowledges that the FMIA's preemption clause does not usually foreclose "state regulation of the commercial sales activities of slaughterhouses." Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 17. And the Humane Society asserts, in line with that general rule, that § 599f(b)'s ban on sales does not regulate a slaughterhouse's "operations" because it kicks in only after they have ended: Once meat from a slaughtered pig has passed a post-mortem inspection, the Act "is not concerned with whether or how it is ever actually sold." Brief for Non-State Respondents 45. At most, the Humane Society claims, § 599f(b)'s ban on sales offers an "incentiv[e]" to a slaughterhouse to take nonambulatory pigs out of the meat production process. Id., at 46. And California may so "motivate[ ]" an operational choice without running afoul of the FMIA's preemption provision. Ibid. (quoting Bates v. Dow Agrosciences LLC, 544 U.S. 431, 443, 125 S.Ct. 1788, 161 L.Ed.2d 687 (2005)).
But this argument mistakes how the prohibition on sales operates within § 599f as a whole. The sales ban is a criminal proscription calculated to help implement and enforce each of the section's other regulations—its prohibition of receipt and purchase, its bar on butchering and processing, and its mandate of immediate euthanasia. The idea—and the inevitable effect—of the provision is to make sure that slaughterhouses remove nonambulatory pigs from the production process (or keep them out of the process from the beginning)
California's and the Humane Society's broadest argument against preemption maintains that all of § 599f's challenged provisions fall outside the "scope" of the FMIA because they exclude a class of animals from the slaughtering process. See 21 U.S.C. § 678 (preempting certain requirements "within the scope of this [Act]"). According to this view, the Act (and the FSIS's authority under it) extends only to "animals that are going to be turned into meat," Tr. of Oral Arg. 28—or to use another phrase, animals that will "be slaughtered ... for purposes of human food production," Brief for State Respondents 19 (emphasis deleted). Section 599f avoids the scope of the Act, respondents claim, by altogether removing nonambulatory pigs from the slaughtering process.
We think not. The 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. Swine with hog cholera, for example, are disqualified, see 9 CFR § 309.5(a); so too are swine and other livestock "affected with anthrax," § 309.7(a). Indeed, the federal regulations prohibit the slaughter of any nonambulatory cattle for human consumption. See § 309.3(e). As these examples demonstrate, one vital function of the Act and its regulations is to ensure that some kinds of livestock delivered to a slaughterhouse's
Nor are respondents right to suggest that § 599f's exclusion avoids the FMIA's scope because it is designed to ensure the humane treatment of pigs, rather than the safety of meat. See, e.g., Brief for State Respondents 29; Brief for Non-State Respondents 39-40. That view misunderstands the authority—and indeed responsibility—that the FMIA gives to federal officials. Since 1978, when Congress incorporated the HMSA's standards, the FMIA has required slaughterhouses to follow prescribed methods of humane handling, so as to minimize animals' pain and suffering. See 21 U.S.C. §§ 603(b), 610(b); supra, at 968-970. A violation of those standards is a crime, see § 676, and the Secretary of Agriculture can suspend inspections at—and thus effectively shut down—a slaughterhouse that disobeys them, see §§ 603(b), 610(c). To implement the Act's humane-handling provisions, the FSIS has issued detailed regulations, see 9 CFR pt. 313, including some specifically addressing animals that cannot walk, see §§ 313.2(d), 313.1(c). Those rules, as earlier noted, apply throughout the time an animal is on a slaughterhouse's premises, from the moment a delivery truck pulls up to the gate. See supra, at 968-970. So the FMIA addresses not just food safety, but humane treatment as well. Even California conceded at oral argument that the FSIS could issue regulations under the FMIA, similar to § 599f, mandating the euthanasia of nonambulatory swine.
The Circuit decisions upholding state bans on slaughtering horses, on which the Ninth Circuit relied, do not demand any different conclusion. We express no view on those decisions, except to say that the laws sustained there differ from § 599f 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. But § 599f does not and cannot work in that way. As earlier noted, many nonambulatory pigs become disabled either in transit to or after arrival at a slaughterhouse. See supra, at 970-972, and nn. 5-6. So even with § 599f in effect, a swine slaughterhouse will encounter nonambulatory pigs. In that circumstance, § 599f tells the slaughterhouse what to do with those animals. Unlike a horse slaughtering ban, the statute thus reaches into the slaughterhouse's facilities and affects its daily activities. And in so doing, the California law runs smack into the FMIA's regulations. So whatever might be said of other bans on slaughter, § 599f imposes requirements within—and indeed at the very heart of—the FMIA's scope.
The FMIA regulates slaughterhouses' handling and treatment of nonambulatory pigs from the moment of their delivery through the end of the meat production process. California's § 599f endeavors to regulate the same thing, at the same time, in the same place—except by imposing different requirements. The FMIA expressly preempts such a state law. Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the Ninth Circuit, and remand this case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.