Federal Appeals Court Rules That DCM Lawsuit May Proceed Against Hill's Pet Nutrition!

At long last, validation.

It was going on two years ago (election night 2024) when the trial judge in our huge class action lawsuit against Hill's Pet Nutrition erroneously determined that we didn't have a case and dismissed our suit. The reasoning in her 2024 dismissal order was very obviously wrong, evincing a failure to grasp some basic scientific principles and refusing to apply controlling legal authority that clearly demonstrated that our case should proceed.

Your guess as to why she did this is as good as mine, but it may or may not be relevant that Hill's is headquartered only a few miles from the judge's hometown (where she has lived throughout the entirely of her 40-year legal career) and employs thousands of people in her local community.

Regardless, it's sad but true that when a trial judge rules against you, your only real recourse is to appeal the decision to a higher court. So that's exactly what we did in late 2024. We lodged our appeal with the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the highest federal courts in the country (only one level below the United States Supreme Court) and one located in Denver, CO, more than a thousand miles away from Hill's backyard.

We've been arguing our case in front of the Tenth Circuit ever since. It has been a trying time for me personally, as every time someone has asked me "what's new with that huge lawsuit that you spent all those years investigating?" I've had to essentially tell them that the case got dismissed but that we're optimistic it'll get reinstated some day.

Fortunately, last week that day finally came.

In a 32-page order, the appeals court determined that our case was wrongfully dismissed back in 2024, revived our claims against Hill's, and ordered the trial judge to restart the litigation immediately. Although the court did not make any rulings as to whether or not Hill's and its various co-conspirators are actually liable for misconduct (we're still very early in the overall process and those questions won't be resolved for a long while yet), it determined that if we can prove the facts we have alleged, then Hill's will be held liable for its misconduct.

The ruling is great news for KetoNatural, as well as the many other "BEG" brands whose reputations were tarnished by the DCM controversy and anyone else with an interest in seeing justice and fairness prevail in a pet food industry that has grown increasingly rotten in recent years.

It is also something of a landmark legal ruling, because the appellate court firmly rejected Hill's argument that its various false statements to veterinarians about the science of DCM were all merely "educational" and "informative," not commercial speech designed to sell Hill's products. Instead, the court recognized the obvious reality that when Hill's tells vets something about nutritional science, it is doing so for the purpose of selling its products -- not in order to educate the public out of the goodness of its corporate heart. 

This is a big deal because, as I have written about extensively elsewhere, publishing misleading faux-scientific information under the guise of "educating" the veterinary community has been a central pillar of Hill's marketing strategy for going on forty years now. From providing free "continuing veterinary education" programs to clinicians to literally creating its own textbook for use in vet schools, Hill's has co-opted most of the traditional auspices of professional science in order to disseminate (often misleading) information that serves its own commercial interests. 

Hill's has gotten away with this for a long time because real, good faith educational speech isn't actionable as false advertising under federal law. This is because the public has a strong interest in promoting scientific discourse and education, not inhibiting it. So we don't want to discourage good faith scientific debate by making educators civilly liable every time they say something wrong about the science.

But the appellate court correctly recognized that what Hill's does is something altogether different -- it dresses up advertisements as science education. And, going forward, the company will no longer be able to publish false or misleading messages in its veterinary communications without running the risk of being sued again for false advertising. So watch this space!

What's next for the case? A phase of the civil litigation process called "discovery." This is where the parties conduct detailed factual investigations by taking sworn depositions of witnesses, reviewing one another's internal files, and more. While the evidence revealed through these processes is often kept out of the public eye, US courts have a long history of allowing public disclosure of discovery information that is in the public interest. And, as Hill's itself has repeatedly argued in our case, the issue of whether or not grain-free diets cause DCM is a matter of major public importance. So my hope is that we'll be allowed to create some kind of public-facing discovery archive in the case, similar to what was created as a result of the 1990s tobacco industry litigation.

Stay tuned, because I'll be doing my best to keep you updated as the case makes its way forward. In the meantime, if you'd like to read a bit more about it here are a few links:

• Truth About Pet Food
• Bloomberg
• Pet Food Industry 

Thanks for reading!