21 U.S.C. § 644 — Regulation of transactions, transportation, or importation of 4–D animals to prevent use as human food

This section covers people, firms, and corporations in the business of buying, selling, transporting, or importing dead, dying, disabled, or diseased animals. It also covers those who deal in parts of animal carcasses when the animal died other than by slaughter. Such a business may not buy, sell, transport, offer for sale or transport, or receive for transport certain animals in commerce, or import them. The animals covered are dead, dying, disabled, or diseased cattle, sheep, swine, goats, horses, mules, or other equines. The same rule covers carcass parts from any of these animals that died other than by slaughter. This conduct is barred unless it follows regulations the Secretary may issue. Those regulations exist to make sure such animals, and any unwholesome parts or products from them, are kept out of human food. The section does not name the Secretary or agency involved beyond "the Secretary." It also does not spell out what the regulations must say; it only states their purpose. It does not set a penalty for violating this section within the text provided.

The record. The source credit indicates that this section was added to title II of the Act of March 4, 1907 (ch. 2907), by section 14 of Public Law 90-201, enacted December 15, 1967, and published at 81 Stat. 594. The 1907 act itself is the original meat-inspection statute, but the specific provision codified here as § 644 did not exist until the 1967 enactment inserted it as § 204 of that title. The source credit reflects a single amendment event—the 1967 addition—and does not show any subsequent amendments to this section's text. Historical context. Public Law 90-201 is commonly identified as the Wholesome Meat Act of 1967, legislation generally understood to have strengthened federal oversight of meat inspection, including gaps between federal and state inspection standards and the handling of animals not intended for slaughter. The broader Act is often described as responding to public and congressional concern, in the mid-1960s, about unsanitary or unsafe conditions in meat processing that fell outside existing federal inspection requirements. Consistent with that general understanding, a provision restricting commerce in dead, dying, disabled, or diseased animals would fit the Act's commonly cited purpose of preventing unfit animal remains from entering the human food supply. However, the record does not establish the specific legislative reasoning, debates, or findings that led Congress to include this particular provision, and no more specific intent should be inferred beyond this general historical association.