I was amused by a hypothetical situation in which one buys a million dollar quarter horse, and signs the horse-deed or adoption papers or whatever is necessary to be the legal owner of an expensive animal, and as soon as the animal is rightfully one’s own, casually mention to the horse dealer that one’s plan is to eat the horse.
Would it be legal to host a dinner party in which this one-million-dollar quarter horse would be the main course?
Would this constitute cruelty to animals, even though horses are consumed regularly in some countries?
What about other animals sold as pets? Can I walk into a pet store and purchase a scarlet macaw and as I am walking out with it, tell the pet store owner I plan to eat it?
Can they do anything about that- assuming that before I ate the animal I killed it in a humane fashion?
By the way, I am not planning to do these things, a friend of mine and I were just wondering.
Prop 6 passed in CA a few years ago which prohibited the slaughter and sale of horses for human consumption (I voted “no”, but it was a forgone conclusion that it was going to pass anyway, and it did, by a wide margin). IIRC, slaughter and sale for human consumption of all animals normally considered pets is forbidden. Which leads you to wonder about the semantic gymnastics required to be able to sell frozen rabbits in the supermarket.
You may be in the clear on killing such an animal for private consumption - I’m not sure.
I think your biggest issue here is misrepresentation. I doubt it is illegal to kill and eat any non-human animal so long as you do it in a humane manner–BUT I would be very willing to bet that the seller could regain possession of the animal on the grounds that you misrepresented your purpose in buying it in the first place. Most individuals selling a (monetarily or emotionally) high-value horse will make you sign some sort of contract stating your intent, breeding rights, and use rights. If the horse is a working, show, racing, or breeding animal, the contract will state specifically how you will be expected to use him or her–if you break the contract the seller is usually able to regain posession. I am guessing that if you tell the owner your intent is to eat the animal, they would be able to legally act to get the critter back. If you do it and then the previous owner finds out, they could probably sue you for the worth of the animal and whatever else they might be able to sue you for. The same is true for purebred dogs and cats coming from reputable breeders. Hell, I even had a contract for the pet rats I bred.
Regarding the pet store thing–I manage a pet store, and we have a lengthy process for buying an animal to screen out nutjobs and careless/uncommited folk, and you CERTAINLY wouldn’t make it out the door with a scarlet macaw if you did not have some serious preparation and a lot of background knowledge of the care and keeping of a large psittacine parrot. There is also typically a “waiting period” while the bird completes hand-feeding and we put you through your paces during that time as well, too. You have to meet with our avian specialist and prove that you have the right caging, toys and equipment for maintenance. There is virtually no way you would be able to buy a bird from us unless you’re good and ready to keep it for a LONG long time, and I seriously doubt you would be able to fake it, either. In addition to all that, you do sign several papers among which are a warranty and a contract. If you did manage to get through all that and get out with a bird big enough for the eatin’ and we found out your intent, we WOULD get it back, or take legal steps accordingly.
whew That having been said, 99.99999999% of pet stores don’t give a f*k what you do with the animals you buy from them, and rarely ask anything about your preparation or abilities to care for said animals, especially when it is a high-dollar critter such as a scarlet macaw. The sooner you kill it from neglect or bad nutrition, the sooner they can sell you a new one. Point being, it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to acquire an animal from a pet store to eat, but you probably wouldn’t want to eat birds from a skeezy pet store either–I don’t know how PBFD or polyoma affects people but you REALLY don’t want to catch psittacosis (aka avian chlamydia).
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I would be very close to absolutely certain that intent to eat an animal does not constitute cruelty, so long as you kill it humanely. Selling meat rabbits is certainly not illegal, however, I am not sure about the legality of selling “pet” animals such as horses, dogs and cats for food. I highly doubt there is any restriction on eating exotics such as macaws, I’m sure the issue does not come up very often.
Actually, one other thought. Doesn’t the USDA regulate the commercial keeping and selling of animals used for food? This is a random guess, but I think that it might not be legal for pet stores to sell animals for purposes of eating–another ground for refusal of sale and such.
And finally, aside from the novelty, I would guess that most of the animals kept as pets would not be terribly tasty. Dog, maybe, horse, sure, but there’s not a whole lot of heavy muscle on your average psittacine parrot.
Horsemeat is legal in most states (appropriately handled as per USDA and appropriately labelled, etc). The flap surrounding the aforementioned Prop 6 in California made it clear that this proposition was blazing new ground, and would make CA the only state in the union to outlaw horsemeat. That was 1998. There was some talk that Massachusetts was going to follow suit. I don’t know if any other states have passed similar legislation.
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The proposition had the wrong end of the stick. Most of the argument by Prop 6 proponents that didn’t fall into the pure emotional “its disgusting to eat such lovely animals” category concerned itself with the mistreatment of the animals by the industry (who were mostly selling to an export market in Europe and Japan). In that case, the appropriate thing is better oversight concerning livestock raising and meat packing operations, not a decision that eating a horse is somehow unacceptable when eating a cow isn’t.
</editorial_opinion>
It seems you know more about this than I do, but I would be very suprised to learn that such a contract could be enforceable in a court of law. In general, the law takes a very dim view of contracts that purport to have a perpetual effect that limits an owner’s right to do anything he or she wants with his property or that limits alienation (that is, the ability to sell or otherwise dispose of property as one sees fit).
In broad terms, a sale is a sale and ownership is ownership. Now, if the transaction were instead a lease or a license, then that’s different.
If what the owner is doing is illegal, then that’s another issue. The state can bring criminal charges against a horse owner for eating his or her horse, if, indeed that is against the law. But the seller wouldn’t have any remedy.
There are remedies for fraud and misrepresentation, but so long as you paid the agreed price, I would be surprised if the court actually made you give the horse back. If the full contract price had not yet been paid, then I would think that the most a seller could get is an order telling the buyer to pay up.
You’d have no problem eating pet fish, the only hang up might be the store owner or importer not wanting to sell to you if you said you were going to eat them. Fish die all the time; in fact I think they’re probably the least-value-attached kind of pet there is as far as regular deaths go… all you usually hear is “damn, I’m out $3.00… oh well - FLUSH”.
I’ve eaten yellow perch I’ve had as “pets” before (well more research subjects). I see aquarium fish frozen whole in asian supermarkets all the time, and some pet fish you can buy are grown in your same country as food fish (channel cats, tilapia, etc)
And not all aquarium fish are cheap and disposable either; go price some mature imported japanese koi, wild discus, or a captive-bred arrowana - you could be talking in the thousands for one fish. It depends on the animal in question.