For years, inspectors documented numerous violations at Wilson's Wild Animal Park. But from 2016-2018, the number of USDA inspection citations issued fell by 65%. The zoo was among the facilities it stopped citing.
KARIN BRULLIARD: ‘When an animal welfare inspector from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) visited Wilson’s Wild Animal Park this summer, she identified no violations. The federal inspection report for the zoo in Virginia, which is home to about 200 exotic and barnyard animals, was pristine.
But that is not what local law-enforcement officers found the very next day. Sent by the state attorney general, their observations triggered a search one week later by a team of veterinarians, zoologists and law enforcement officers. They discovered an array of problems, according to later court testimony, including a pony with a swollen face, maggot-covered meat in the tiger cage, and what a prosecutor described as a “monkey dungeon”.
The search team seized 119 animals whose lives they deemed to be in danger. Last month, the zoo’s owner, Keith Wilson, and an employee were each charged under Virginia law with 46 counts of animal cruelty. The chasm between the USDA and local assessments provides a stark illustration of a dramatic decline in federal animal-welfare enforcement amid a deregulation push by the Trump administration.
From 2016 to 2018, the number of USDA citations issued to about 10,000 zoos, circuses, breeders and research labs under its regulation fell by 65 per cent… The Virginia zoo was among the facilities that the USDA stopped citing. For years, inspectors documented numerous violations there, including a lion enclosure with walls too short to prevent escape and a concrete-floored bear pen with little more than a tire-swing for entertainment…
In Virginia, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) pushed authorities to investigate Wilson’s operation for three years before Mr Herring’s office took it on, said Brittany Peet, a Peta Foundation attorney. She said: “We’re still constantly running up against state and local law-enforcement authorities [elsewhere] deferring to the USDA and refusing to take action because of clean USDA reports.”
Those clean reports have become far more common since Donald Trump took office in 2016. Former USDA inspectors and supervisors have told The Washington Post that they were instructed to focus on education over enforcement, to record problems as “teachable moments” instead of violations, and to not document violations that are self-reported by those they inspect’. SOURCE…
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