This is the central page for my ongoing effort to repost all the documents APHIS deleted

If you have any of those documents - whether it's one or 1,000 - please send them

Update [March 2]: Hundreds more documents (255 megabytes) added
Huge update [Feb 20]: 5,300+ deleted documents have been added

>>> On February 3, 2017, the federal agency in charge of animal well-being - the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) - quietly deleted thousands upon thousands of detailed documents about the treatment of animals at zoos, circuses, parks, aquariums, breeding operations, research labs, etc.

I quickly reposted nine years of annual reports. Then Delcianna Winders - an Academic Fellow at Harvard Law School's Animal Law & Policy Program - sent me a ton of missing documents. After Motherboard, Politico, Rachel Maddow, and Time spotlighted my efforts, lots more documents and leads came in. (I've also started adding the documents that APHIS began dribbling out on Feb 17th.)

This will be the central page for all of these APHIS documents plus any others that I get my hands on.

Note: Most of these files are individual reports, but many are compilations of multiple reports from the same facility, the same state, or the same year. Also, the webservers are constantly processing these numerous files, while I keep adding new ones, so it might take a while for everything to show up.

UPDATE: On February 17, 2017, APHIS reposted a microscopically small number of documents. Media headlines proclaimed that the APHIS database is returning! In the understatement of the decade, articles mentioned that not everything had been reposted, but nothing I read detailed the ridiculously tiny number of documents that were in this so-called "first batch," so I'll break it down. APHIS posted:

  • Inspection reports for 9 facilities. APHIS oversees 9,000 facilities. At best, that's 0.1%. And those 9 facilities are all run by the federal government, including the USDA itself. (APHIS is part of the USDA.) No privately owned facilities are covered.

  • Three years of annual reports (2013-2015) filed by laboratories that experiment on animals.

  • That's it.

  • Absolutely no notices of violations, enforcement actions, etc.

  • Absolutely no documents concerning breeders, kennels, zoos, aquariums, etc.

(APHIS added a few more documents at the end of February. Still just the tiniest fraction of what used to be there, and still nothing about breeders, kennels, zoos, horse shows, etc.)

The fact that any documents have been reposted is great news, of course. APHIS has taken the tiniest little baby step in the right direction. But I'll continue to post more missing documents. If and when the full database comes back online, I'll scrape and mirror the entire thing on an ongoing basis.

Inspection Reports

APHIS inspectors go to various places where animals are kept for commercial, entertainment, or research purposes: zoos, breeders, kennels, amusement parks, sanctuaries, labs, places that rent out animals to filmmakers, etc. They file reports of their inspections, and these reports used to be on the APHIS website.

At the link above, I've uploaded all the inspection reports I've gotten so far. The majority of these documents

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come from Delcianna Winders of Harvard. I recovered a bunch of additional inspection reports from 2008, and many individuals - Mary Cummins, Jenny Stephens, Jodie Wiederkehr of the Center For Ethical Science, and others - have sent multiple documents for specific facilities. All are in the collection linked above.

Important: Wendy Edwards sent along an astounding document: a spreadsheet with the details of 29,000 inspection reports from 2014 to the beginning of 2017. Just days before APHIS pulled down their database, Wendy extracted this spreadsheet, which contains - among much other info - the name, location, type, and license number of each facility that was inspected, along with the number of violations (if any) that were found. We may not have these 29,000 reports, but this is the next best thing. You can download it directly here.

Also: PETA has posted 21,000 missing inspection reports for facilities that exhibit wild animals: zoos, circuses, marine parks, etc.: here

Please send me any inspection reports you have, and I'll add them to the collection.

Violations and Enforcement Actions

When APHIS inspectors find violations at zoos, puppy mills, sanctuaries, and other facilities, they send notices of enforcement actions, which can take the form of warnings, cease-and-desist orders, fines, and criminal prosecution.

Delcianna Winders sent over 2,200 of these documents from the deleted database, and Maria Olsen scraped and sent more than 1,800 enforcement actions that Albert Bowen had uploaded to GitHub last year. Coral Amende, Mary Cummins, and many others have sent further notices. The above link will take you to all of these documents on the Internet Archive.

Also: Part of the mix includes a tranche of notices of violations and enforcement actions involving horse shows, exhibits, or auctions: here

Please send me any enforcement actions you have.

Annual Reports from Labs

Every facility that experiments on animals is required to file an annual report with APHIS. This includes universities, corporations (such as pharmaceutical companies), and military and government laboratories.

The above link contains complete (or virtually complete) sets for 1999-2007 and 2013-2015, plus around 2,500 individual reports (supplied by Maria Olsen's scrape of the Wayback Machine's collection).

More: The website Stop Animal Exploitation Now has annual reports for 1999-2007, plus some for later years, organized by state and facility: SAEN. (The vast majority of these are also in the collection linked above.)

Also: My original posting of the 1999-2007 reports is here. (All of these are also in the collection linked above.)

If anyone has other annual reports, please send them.

Rosters of Certified Dog Breeders

Ohio: Licensed Breeders and Dealers as of December 31, 2016 [Excel file]. Thanks to OCVA

Pennsylvania: Breeders (A License), 2009 [Word file]. Thanks to Jenny Stephens

Offsite: Pennsylvania: Licensed kennels, 2008 

Certified Facility Lists from 2008

It turns out that the database isn't the only material APHIS recently deleted. For years its website contained lists of facilities holding each type of certification that APHIS offers. Want to see the list of every certified breeder in the country? Every certified research facility? You used to be able to. 

Now, these lists are old. They appear to date from mid-2008, but APHIS kept them on its site for years, deleting them only during the info-purge in early 2017.

A Certificate Holders: Breeders
B Certificate Holders: Dealers/Brokers
C Certificate Holders: Exhibitors
E Certificate Holders: Exhibitors (registered but not licensed)
F Certificate Holders: Federal facilities
H Certificate Holders: Intermediate handlers
R Certificate Holders: Research facilities
T Certificate Holders: Transporters
V Certificate Holders: Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities

More information about these categories is in this PDF from APHIS.