8 min read BREAKING: U.S. Government Removes All Animal Welfare Info From Its Site This is f*cked up.

It just became nearly impossible to know what's happening to animals in zoos, puppy mills and research laboratories. Information about the roughly 9,000 facilities related to animals protected under the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) and inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) - including SeaWorld, dog breeders and puppy mills, zoos, circuses (including Ringling Bros.) and taxpayer-funded animal testing labs, among others - was removed from the USDA website on Friday. According to Justin Goodman, vice president of the White Coat Waste Project (WCWP) - a group working to stop taxpayer-funded animal experiments - there were two types of documents on the USDA site: 1) Annual Reports: These previously showed the self-reported number of AWA-regulated animals used over the course of a year at each facility. Here's a screenshot taken earlier this week:

A screenshot of a PDF downloaded by Goodman earlier this week of the report from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center lab in Milwaukee; the facility used 52 dogs in painful experiments in 2016. | Justin Goodman/WCWP

2) Inspection reports: These are reports are filed by USDA inspectors following visits to regulated facilities. This screenshot was also taken earlier this week:

A screenshot of a PDF downloaded by Goodman earlier this week of a USDA inspection report from labs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison | Justin Goodman/WCWP

The removal of the information comes a day after a bipartisan bill - known as the Federal Accountability in Chemical Testing (FACT) Act (HR 816), which would require labs to disclose how many animals they are using for testing- was introduced by Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.). The timing of the events sounded alarms for Goodman. "We were already concerned about a severe lack of transparency about animal experiments that are conducted and funded by the government, as were a growing bipartisan group of Congress members," Goodman said. "So it's particularly alarming that the day after ... the bill was introduced, the government decided to disappear the minimal information that was already available. It's possible that it's a coincidence, of course, but it doesn't make any less alarming." Of the 9,000 facilities that involve animals protected by the AWA, roughly 1,200 are labs, many of which use taxpayer money to run their experiments. Both Republicans and Democrats supporting the bill think that anything that could help cut down on wasted money and wasted animal lives would be a no-brainer. So sharing information about how many animals are used for scientific testing each year - a number that's been hard to track across the U.S., but could be as high as 100 million - could help make this possible. Goodman says this is a concern for more than just lab regulation transparency. "This covers every single breeder, circus, zoo, animal transporter across the country," Goodman said. "Every entity regulated under the Animal Welfare Act that the USDA published information about in terms of compliance and animal use - all of that information is now gone. SeaWorld, for instance, Ringling - all of that is gone." This is what the USDA page concerning the AWA looks like now:

Screenshot taken by The Dodo on Friday of where the USDA data used to be | The Dodo