06/09/2026
The United States Department of Agriculture spent nine years arguing that the cats at Ernest Hemingway's old house were an exhibit.
Not pets. An exhibit, in the legal sense, the way a circus is an exhibit.
There are nearly sixty cats living on the grounds of the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida. All of them carry the polydactyl gene and about half actually show it, which means extra toes on the paws and a permanent look of wearing mittens. They wander the garden. They sleep on the furniture. They are the reason a meaningful share of the visitors buy a ticket at all.
That last part is what made this a federal matter.
In October 2003, after a visitor complaint, USDA regional director Dr. Elizabeth Goldentyer took the position that the museum was operating an animal exhibit under the Animal Welfare Act, and that operating one requires a federal exhibitor's license. Inspectors came. Paperwork followed. The museum's position was that these were house cats living in a house, which is not a category the federal government regulates.
In August 2008 the two sides reached a deal. The museum agreed to a higher fence, upgraded shelters for the cats, and special bowls designed to drown bugs.
That sounds like an ending. It was the middle.
The agreement was explicitly temporary, granted, in the court's later words, "without prejudicing the Museum's right to contest the USDA's legal authority." Which is exactly what the museum did next. It sued in October 2009. It lost in August 2011. It appealed.
On December 7, 2012, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Dubina, Pryor and Hill, ruled unanimously for the government.
The reasoning was not narrow. It had two legs, and both of them are bigger than the cats.
First, the court held that the museum is an "exhibitor" under the Act, which turned on deferring to the USDA's expansive reading of a single word: "distribution." Second, and by choice rather than necessity, the court went straight at interstate commerce and held that "the Museum's exhibition of the cats substantially affects interstate commerce." For support it cited Wickard v. Filburn, the case about a farmer's own wheat, and Gonzales v. Raich, the case about ma*****na grown at home and never sold.
Those are the aggregate-effects cases. They are the outer edge of what Congress can reach.
So the ledger reads like this. A complaint from one visitor in 2003 produced a federal license requirement, a temporary settlement about bug bowls, a lawsuit, a loss, an appeal, and a published circuit opinion resting on the same doctrine that decided how much wheat an Ohio farmer could grow for his own chickens.
The cats went on doing exactly what they had been doing before the USDA arrived, during the litigation, and after the ruling came down, because none of them were parties to it.
Somewhere in the Eleventh Circuit's reasoning, a cat asleep in a Key West garden is doing the same constitutional work as a wartime wheat crop.
