Animal abusers are getting off easy

If someone illegally double parks in a one-way street and a cop walks by, the expectation is that they’d get fined. Similarly, you’d think that if a company that uses animals is caught mistreating them, they too would face some sort of legal repercussion. But for many businesses in the US, that’s not what’s happening.

This summer, an inspector with the US Department of Agriculture visited a dog breeder in Ohio where they found one of his dogs — a 4 1/2-year-old female Maltipoo — to be in bad shape. Several of her teeth were missing, she had gum recession, and when the inspector lightly pressed on some of the teeth she still did have, they moved. The breeder was issued a warning, which has no real consequences.

That was also the case when, three years prior, a USDA inspector who visited Alpha Genesis — a company that breeds and experiments on primates — learned that two of the company’s animals died after some of their digits (fingers and toes) became entrapped in a structure inside their cage. Another primate died after being placed in the wrong cage and attacked by another animal.

These incidents represent severe animal neglect and mismanagement — and alleged violations of the Animal Welfare Act. According to a new, exclusive analysis by the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), they’re part of a larger trend over the last five years of the USDA increasingly issuing warnings over actual enforcement actions, like fines.

“USDA is continuously looking for opportunities to improve regulatory compliance and believes that regulatory correspondence, such as an Official Warning, can be a useful tool to encourage compliance and deter future noncompliance,” a USDA spokesperson wrote in an email to Vox.

Passed in 1966, the Animal Welfare Act sets minimum standards, such as food, water, housing, and veterinary care for over a million animals used by around 17,500 businesses, which are subject to annual USDA inspections to ensure compliance with the law.

The problem is that the act is rife with loopholes. It excludes the animals abused in the greatest numbers: those farmed for meat, milk, and eggs, who now number over 10 billion each year. The legislation does cover animals used in laboratory experiments, but excludes mice, rats, fish, and birds — the species who make up the vast majority of animals used in research.

In other words, the bill covers less than 0.01 percent of animals exploited by US businesses.

The animals who are covered can be, and often are, still treated terribly, like in puppy mills, where dogs are treated more like breeding machines than man’s best friend; in zoos, where the mental well-being of many wild animals is severely damaged by captivity; and in research laboratories, where animals are subjected to painful experiments.

It stands to reason that if a business is found in violation — especially repeatedly — it would receive a hefty fine or worse, like a license suspension, animal confiscation, or criminal charge. But as AWI’s new analysis has revealed, the USDA’s enforcement has only gotten weaker in recent years.

Weak enforcement of a weak law

Part of the problem is that the USDA is severely understaffed; over the last few years, the agency has lost one-third of its inspectors while the number of businesses it needs to inspect has doubled.

But the root of the problem is that it often lets violators off easy: The department has long been criticized by both animal advocates and the US Office of Inspector General (OIG) — a government oversight agency — for terribly weak enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act.

Stretching back to the early 1990s, the OIG has documented the USDA consistently failing to hold repeat violators accountable, along with significantly reducing fines (in the early 2000s, fines were reduced by an average of 86 percent). The resultant fines are so small — thousands of dollars instead of tens of thousands; or tens of thousands of dollars instead of hundreds of thousands — that many violators see them “as a normal cost of business, rather than a deterrent for violating the law,” according to an OIG report.

But according to AWI’s analysis, the Supreme Court and the Trump administration bear some of the blame for enforcement getting worse in recent years.

In June 2024, the Supreme Court ruled in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy that the SEC violated the Seventh Amendment — the right to a jury trial — when an SEC judge fined a hedge fund manager for allegedly defrauding investors. The decision essentially stripped the agency of its power to impose certain fines.

It also seems to have had a chilling effect on other agencies, including the USDA.

In the 14 months after the Jarkesy decision, the USDA issued just five fines compared to 63 fines in the 14 months before it. And of these five, only one was issued during President Donald Trump’s second term, suggesting the new administration is going easier on businesses that allegedly violate the Animal Welfare Act, a problem also observed in Trump’s first term.

“Jarkesy has hamstrung us the most,” an anonymous USDA manager told Science magazine in August. “We have an inability to do anything, even when we see bad stuff.”

“The decision in Jarkesy v. SEC impacts all agencies that seek civil penalties before administrative law judges (ALJs),” a USDA spokesperson wrote. “USDA continues to assess its authorities in light of the decision.”

Mary Hollingsworth, director of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic and a former Justice Department trial attorney, told me what’s most needed to deter violations is stronger fines. For that to happen, the Animal Welfare Act needs to be amended to allow the Justice Department to take violators to federal court, where judges are “much more likely to impose a reasonable fine” than USDA judges, Hollingsworth said.

In the last Congress, a bill to do just that — among other Animal Welfare Act reforms — garnered 220 cosponsors, but didn’t get put up for a vote. The current Congress is weighing a reintroduced version of the bill. Stronger fines are especially critical for holding research facilities accountable, since it’s generally the only enforcement action the USDA can bring against them.

On the bright side, however, the Trump administration is at least — even if for the wrong reasons — trying to hack away at the core issue: reducing the number of animals used in experiments and moving toward non-animal methods.