TOPEKA, Kan. (Legal Newsline) - The governing board of the Kansas State Fair had the power to disqualify the 2016 grand champion of the market-lamb competition after a veterinarian noticed suspicious signs it had been injected with a foreign substance, an appeals court ruled, rejecting the owner’s argument the board overstepped its authority.
While the State Fair’s contest rules are “not a model of drafting clarity,” the Kansas Court of Appeals said in a May 6 decision, they are clear enough about the consequences for competitors who engage in “unethical fitting” to change the appearance of their animals. Owners who do so lose their championship belt buckle and cash prize. The animals suffer a worse fate regardless: After the competition, they are taken to the slaughterhouse and their meat is sold.
Gabryelle Gilliam’s Lamb 11824 was crowned grand champion of the 2016 State Fair, winning a belt buckle and $4,000 prize. After the animal was slaughtered, however, a veterinarian examined the carcass and found multiple injection marks on the back of both hind.
The Kansas State Fair Board decided Gilliam had engaged in unethical fitting, even though no traces of drugs or other foreign substances were found in the lamb’s tissue. Her father argued someone else might have injected the lamb for nefarious purposes.
The Board considered Gilliam's protest at its meeting in January 2017. Gilliam, now represented by an attorney, later told the board she gave Lamb 11824 a vitamin B-12 injection before the competition.
The board disqualified her lamb anyway and Gilliam filed a petition for judicial review in April 2017. Reno District Court Judge Trish Rose ruled that the rules stated only a veterinarian could determine if unethical fitting had occurred.
The appeals court reversed that ruling, finding that the Board had the final authority to disqualify competitors. Most administrative rules have the force of law because they are adopted through a formal process of notice and comment, the appeals court said. But “the 2016 State Fair rules are a different animal,” the court ruled, because they aren’t the product of a formal rulemaking and instead represent and agreement between the Fair authority and participants in its contests.
The State Fair rules unequivocally prohibit “the showing of unethically fitted livestock.” Examples of fitting including treating any part of the animal’s body with irritants or other substances to change their shape, surgery, or inserting foreign material under the skin.
Gilliam seized upon a statement that animals will be disqualified “in the event” they are declared by a veterinarian to have been unethically fitted. But the appeals court said the veterinarian is limited to making factual findings which the Board then uses to decide whether to disqualify an animal.
“It is not the role of a reviewing court to reweigh the evidence or reevaluate the agency's credibility determinations,” the appeals court concluded.