UPDATE [Feb 13]: There is now a central page for all the APHIS documents here
Thousands of deleted reports from 1999-2007
>>> On February 3, 2017, with absolutely no warning, the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) deleted its database of reports concerning animal welfare at zoos, circuses, aquariums, puppy mills, etc., as well as their archive of annual reports filed by facilities that experiment on animals. (They've left cumulative statistics for recent years, but all reports from individual facilities are gone.) This move instantly condemned an untold number of animals to suffering and death in secrecy.
In July 2016, I downloaded a number of big files from the APHIS website, containing thousands of annual
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reports filed by animal experimentation facilities from 1999 to 2007. These facilities include corporations, universities, military installations, and federal government labs. Those files were among the huge number of deletions.
To the right, I've reposted the files I downloaded. Because they're so big, I've uploaded them to the Internet Archive, and the links will take you there.
(The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine also captured these files starting on this page, plus 2,600 individual annual report PDFs from a wide time period here and here.)
If you have any other files deleted by APHIS - including inspection reports and enforcement records - please send them, and I'll get them back online. My contact info.
Related news articles:
USDA abruptly purges animal welfare information from its website [Washington Post]
U.S. Government Removes All Animal Welfare Info From Its Site [The Dodo]
1999
This single PDF contains 1,575 pages of annual reports from around the country.
[view at the Internet Archive]
[directly download PDF]
2000
In 2000, APHIS started posting individual PDF files for each state, plus Washington DC and Puerto Rico, containing all (or at least most) annual reports from facilities in that state.
[view at the Internet Archive]
[directly download zip file with all PDFs]
2001
[view at the Internet Archive]
[directly download zip file with all PDFs]
2002
[view at the Internet Archive]
[directly download zip file with all PDFs]
2003
[view at the Internet Archive]
[directly download zip file with all PDFs]
2004
[view at the Internet Archive]
[directly download zip file with all PDFs]
2005
[view at the Internet Archive]
[directly download zip file with all PDFs]
2006
[view at the Internet Archive]
[directly download zip file with all PDFs]
2007
[view at the Internet Archive]
[directly download zip file with all PDFs]
early 2000s
These PDFs each contain annual reports from a mixture of years in the first half of the aughts. I'm not sure if they overlap with the files above.
[view at the Internet Archive]
[directly download zip file with all PDFs]
APHIS gives this guide to the columns used in these reports (emphasis mine):
Each USDA-registered research facility is required by the Animal Welfare Act to submit an Annual Report (APHIS Form 7023) that documents its use of animals for research, testing, teaching and/or experimentation. USDA Animal Care compiles these numbers and produces five reports each year. Each report is based on a specific pain category – designated by a particular column on the Annual Report. The categories are:
Column B (animals held by a facility but not used in any research that year)
Column C (animals used in research; no pain involved; no pain drugs administered)
Column D (animals used in research; pain involved; pain drugs administered)
Column E (animals used in research; pain involved; no pain drugs administered)
Column F (total number of animals used in research; Column C + Column D + Column E)
....
Please note: We are in the process of beginning to separate Annual Reports with Column E information from those without starting with reports in 2005.