© 2013 The Texas Lawbook.
By Natalie Posgate
Staff Writer for The Texas Lawbook
A federal judge issued an injunctive relief Thursday that forbids the Amarillo-based American Quarter Horse Association from excluding cloned horses and their offspring from breed registry.
Judge Mary Lou Robinson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Amarillo concluded that doing so makes the AQHA, the largest breed registry in the world, have monopoly power in the market for high quality registered Quarter Horses – the most popular breed of horses in the United States.
This ruling is part of an ongoing legal battle between the AQHA and some Amarillo horse breeders about whether the AQHA violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and Texas Free Antitrust Act by not allowing the breeders’ clone horses to be registered.
The horses excluded from registry are a product of a breeding technology called somatic cell nuclear transfer, which the AQHA has refused to acknowledge in its handbook as a legitimate breeding method to produce Quarter Horses qualified for registry.
In doing so, the AQHA monopolizes the market for elite quarter horses and “unreasonably impairs competition” for breeders with cloned horses, plaintiffs claimed.
The jury issued its verdict July 30 unanimously in favor of the plaintiffs, with the reasoning that the AQHA violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act and Sections 15.05(a) and 15.05(b) of the Texas Free Enterprise and Antitrust Act.
On Aug. 14, Judge Robinson issued her opinion that affirmed the jury’s verdict and said an injunctive relief would be issued. On Monday, she awarded the full amount requested for attorneys’ fees to the plaintiffs, which total to nearly $900,000.
The plaintiffs in the suit are Abraham & Veneklasen Joint Venture, Abraham Equine, Inc. and Jason Abraham. Legal counsel for Abraham & Veneklasen and Abraham Equine were Amarillo attorney Nancy Stone and Cherokee, Okla. attorney Samuel Stein, respectively.
Representing Jason Abraham were Amarillo attorney Ronald Nickum and Brian Robison of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Dallas.
Wade Arnold, Mike Loftin and Autumn White of the Underwood Law Firm in Amarillo represented AQHA.
Loftin said that AQHA plans to appeal. He directed additional questions to AQHA’s media relations department, which was not available for comment.
The jury awarded no damages to the plaintiffs, which Robison said was hard to pinpoint the reasoning behind. Regardless, his side was “thrilled to get the liability findings and causation.”
Robison said the main legal hurdles that his team had to overcome were the challenges of explaining complicated economic concepts and biological and genetic concepts to a jury.
“Most people do not follow the science of cloning closely or understand that a clone is simply an identical twin separated by time,” he said. “Most breed registry rules focus on defining the breed. This rule (AQHA’s) excluded an entire category of admitted Quarter Horses based solely on how they were born.”
Robison added that one of the crucial strings of evidence that he and the other plaintiffs’ attorneys had to prove for a successful verdict was the primary motive for exclusion of the cloned horses: money.
“The power brokers at the AQHA who control the committee in charge of registration rules… invest millions of dollars in elite horses, make serious money breeding their elite horses, live quite well under the status quo, and face a serious economic threat if more elite horses enter the market to compete against them.
“Some of them admitted their economic motive for excluding clones when they spoke at AQHA meetings,” he added.
© 2013 The Texas Lawbook. Content of The Texas Lawbook is controlled and protected by specific licensing agreements with our subscribers and under federal copyright laws. Any distribution of this content without the consent of The Texas Lawbook is prohibited.
If you see any inaccuracy in any article in The Texas Lawbook, please contact us. Our goal is content that is 100% true and accurate. Thank you.