About Watchdog
U.S. government oversight records on animal-research facilities are technically public and practically buried: scattered across PDFs behind a search that doesn't work. Watchdog makes them readable, navigable, and traceable to the source.
Watchdog is open source. Found something wrong? Open an issue or email me.
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 to its public portal roughly four weeks after the inspection; some take much longer. The Data Liberation Project collects every posted report into an open dataset. That dataset is what Watchdog reads. Both it and Watchdog's derived dataset are shared under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
How it works
One page per facility. Every inspection, every citation, keyed by the facility's APHIS registration number, with the source PDF one click away.
Registrations that belong together. One operation is rarely one registration. Marshall Farms, Marshall Pet Products, and Marshall BioResources are three separate APHIS organizations. Search any one of them and you learn about one of them. Watchdog links registrations that share a customer number, an address, or an officer, so you see the operation instead of a fragment of it. Every link says what it's based on.
The regulator's own words. Terms are APHIS's, never renamed. Each defined term carries the regulator's own 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 USDA/APHIS inspection records and nothing else. It doesn't rate, rank, or characterize facilities; even the affiliation map only shows what connects to what, not what it means. An absence here is not evidence of compliance. It may only mean the record isn't out yet.