About Watchdog
U.S. government oversight records on facilities that use animals are technically public and practically buried: scattered across PDFs behind a search that doesn’t link one record to the next. Watchdog puts them on one page per facility, traceable to the source.
Watchdog is open source. Found something wrong? Open an issue.
Where the records come from
Under the Animal Welfare Act, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) licenses and inspects facilities that use regulated animals: research facilities () and the breeders, dealers, and exhibitors that supply them (). When an inspection finds noncompliance, the inspector documents it as a citation, classified , , or , and flagged when a previous citation went uncorrected.
APHIS posts most reports roughly four weeks after the inspection, some much later. The Data Liberation Project collects every posted report and the citations in it into an open dataset, which Watchdog reads, checked daily.
ARLO, by Rise for Animals, holds tens of thousands of documents on research facilities obtained through open records requests: protocols, annual reports, grant documents, and older inspection reports. Watchdog links each ARLO institution to its APHIS certificate, so a facility’s page shows both. Watchdog is not affiliated with Rise for Animals.
The Data Liberation Project’s data and Watchdog’s derived dataset are shared under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
How it works
One page per certificate. Every inspection and citation under an APHIS certificate number, with the report PDF one click away. Other certificates APHIS lists under the same customer number are linked from the page.
The regulator’s own words. Terms are APHIS’s, never renamed. Each defined term carries the regulator’s definition, linked to its source in the Animal Care Inspection Guide or the AWA regulations (9 CFR). If APHIS hasn’t defined a term, Watchdog doesn’t either.
What's not here
Watchdog shows public APHIS inspection records and links to ARLO. It doesn’t rate, rank, or characterize facilities. An absence here is not evidence of compliance; the record may not be out yet.