Kane
Supreme Court
won't hear Cavel
It’s
the end of the road for the country’s last horse slaughter plant, after the
U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an appeal by Belgium-based Cavel International Inc.
The doors to Cavel’s DeKalb facility have been closed since last summer, when
the company failed to prove to a federal appeals court that an
The ban was signed into law last May, and the company
immediately filed suit to overturn it. A federal judge upheld the ban in July,
and a federal appeals court upheld that ruling in September.
“We thought we had a good chance, and it’s always an
uphill battle,” Cavel attorney J. Philip Calabrese
said. “We thought the court might be interested in this case. It was always a
long shot, but we thought we had a good chance.”
About 65 of the 10,000 cases presented to the U.S.
Supreme Court are heard each year, Calabrese estimated Monday.
“Cavel’s been closed for
some time so [the ruling is] not really going to change anything at this
point,” he said. “Obviously, we are disappointed in the outcome but I think
they Supreme Court has said what they had to say, and
that’s that.”
For years, the facility has been the center of debate
and the focus of various animal rights groups that said the slaughter was
inhumane and argued horses are companion animals not appropriate for human
consumption. The horse meat was not sold in the