A brief public hearing illuminated the likely path forward for the state’s animal regulations, which agriculture leaders have sought to enforce over the past year and a half to prevent shelters from placing pregnant and lactating animals in foster homes.
Instead of relying on the Department of Agriculture to change its rules, Sen. Regina Birdsell has sponsored a bill that would define a “foster home” in terms that prioritize the best interest of animals, including those that are pregnant and lactating.
Senate Bill 475 was introduced earlier this month and is currently in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. A hearing has not yet been scheduled for the bill, but the review of the department’s rules has already begun.
“We started this process before and you never know where legislation is going to end up. So, we’re moving forward fully anticipating that, if we get this through and SB475 becomes law, we’re going to be back and we’re going to be revisiting some things in here,” Agriculture Commissioner Shawn Jasper said last week.
In May 2025, the Department of Agriculture, Markets and Food communicated to pet vendors across the state that it does not consider pregnancy and lactation to be abnormal medical conditions. Shelters and rescues in New Hampshire are permitted to place an animal in a foster home only in cases of medical or behavioral rehabilitation; in view of the Department’s interpretation of that statute, animals experiencing these physiological events would not qualify for placement in a foster home.
Previously, the practice had been commonplace and widespread, counted among the animal welfare industry’s best practices.
To codify its directive, the department had proposed a new definition of the term “rehabilitation.” Its meaning, their amendment to the administrative rules proposed, “specifically excludes pregnancy, nursing, basic training and housebreaking, and other normal physiological conditions.”
Many of the amendments reviewed at Thursday’s hearing drew curiosity and cautious support from animal welfare advocates in the room, including an amendment that would allow littermates brought into the state to stay together in the same enclosure for the duration of their mandatory quarantine period.
The amendment to redefine “rehabilitation,” however, faced modest rebuke.
Dr. Jordan Gagne, a shelter liaison to the New Hampshire Veterinary Medical Association and director of veterinary services for the Salem Animal Rescue League, said she understood the conversations surrounding the Senate bill but chose to speak because of the compelling clinical evidence about the benefits of a foster home for pregnant and lactating animals.
“While they are natural conditions, they’re also considered medical conditions that require close and careful monitoring,” Gagne testified. Her list went on: “This could be for the purposes of things like monitoring for early detection, intervention of dystocia or difficult birthing, low stress and lower traffic environmental management to encourage normal lactation and mothering behaviors, early interventions and detection of neonatal conditions, such as failure to thrive, et cetera, et cetera.”
Kathy Collinsworth, executive director of the New Hampshire Federation of Humane Organizations, objected to the “extraordinary limits” the amendment would impose on the fostering of animals.
In an August email to Collinsworth and the Federation’s member organizations, which the Monitor obtained through a records request, Jasper stated that “pet vending has become the number one drain on our time in the department and of course pet vending has nothing to do with agriculture.”
He suggested in a modified statement that the department could increase its oversight of the animal fostering system, thus enabling it to supervise the fostering of pregnant and lactating animals, through a “new dedicated fee.” Without it, he said, “we simply do not have enough staff to do what we are already being asked to do.”
The possibility of a fee did not resurface at Thursday’s hearing.