About a decade ago, Tom Dronsfield responded to a home in Lee, where an intruder was digging up the lawn.
“The thing,” a 200 lb. pig, he recalled, “wanted to charge me.”
Dronsfield, chief of police in Lee, a rural town of fewer than 5,000 residents, said calls involving livestock aren’t uncommon, but his force receives no formal training regarding animal cruelty or other kinds of encounters with large animals. When they reach the limits of their expertise, he and his officers call the New Hampshire Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or SPCA.
The two SPCA agents who aided him in his stand-off ten years ago corralled the pig to safety with plastic partitions, Dronsfield said. Today, if he were to receive even a commonplace report of a cow lying immobile in a field, he might defer to their knowledge again.
Many interactions between humane societies and local police departments are routine; the scene at Hickory Nut Farm in May, 2024, was far different: A visitor to the farm had observed unsanitary living conditions and reported concerns about the health of a herd of 54 goats. When the Lee Police Department arrived, assisted by the NHSPCA, all the animals were seized and placed in protective custody. A cruelty investigator found deceased animals on the property. Another adult female goat died within one day of her arrival at the organization’s shelter, as she was “completely depleted from lack of food and water,” the NHSPCA’s Lisa Dennison said at the time.
Dronsfield and Dennison share concerns about a bill designed to alter the involvement humane organizations can have in investigating similar animal cruelty cases. Where advocates like the New Hampshire Farm Bureau see the expansive bill as a move toward preserving due process for farmers, Dronsfield said he fears it will “handcuff” law enforcement by compromising their ability to rely on longtime partners in the animal welfare world.
The contentious bill, House Bill 1766, is headed to the governor’s desk and may, in its substance, return to her desk at least twice, wedged into unrelated bills, including legislation regarding cloud seeding and the ability of shelters to place pregnant animals into foster homes.
“Officers may do a single cruelty case in their career, or maybe one in a year or two in a year. But we assisted, last year, 82 different towns on all types of calls,” said Dennison, who is retiring as president of the NHSPCA after 32 years. “We are not involved in determining probable cause […] but what the individuals who are crafting this law don’t like is that we look in the first place, that we are involved in bringing it to the police attention, that we’re involved in educating the police.”
Neither flank is coy about the influence of the goat seizure in accelerating this legislation.
Donna-Lee Woods, owner of Hickory Nut Farm, told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that the police operation at her property felt like an ambush. “The chief served me with a search warrant and if I didn’t sign it, he would arrest me. I was in complete shock. I could not think. I was scared and shaking. I had no idea what my rights were. I have never felt that bullied before,” she said.
Woods, who is a member of the New Hampshire Farm Bureau, was never charged. When police seized her herd, she turned to the bureau for guidance, providing the impetus for the conversations with lawmakers and the Department of Agriculture, Markets and Food that yielded the bill.
The bureau brought a pair of priorities to the table, said policy director Rob Johnson. Currently, any veterinarian can assist police departments in making a determination of probable cause in an animal cruelty case. The bill would instead filter that authority through the office of the State Veterinarian, housed within the Agriculture Department, requiring that official or their designee accompany investigating officers to establish whether livestock should be seized.
“Farmers have a great deal of trust in the Department of Agriculture and the State Vet, who I would say is the chief livestock expert in the state,” Johnson said. [The change] allows for a conversation, an evaluation amongst experts.”
They also sought to make the role of humane societies, which are often responsible for keeping animals as live evidence in animal cruelty cases, marginal to investigations of cruelty to livestock.
Humane organizations could forward a complaint to local authorities, but the bill stipulates that, as these organizations may reasonably be called upon to take custody of any livestock seized as a result of a complaint, they’re forbidden from participating in the decision to seize the animals.
Johnson views the measure as a question of fairness to farmers. “That’s an issue of impartiality, of due process. Any livestock owner, you wouldn’t want the individual investigating you to also be able to take the animals and then have the ability to sell them, which has been done in different situations,” he said.
A raft of other measures included in the bill bring about positive changes, said animal law attorney Patricia Morris.
The bill would require authorities to give owners written notice of the number of animals that were seized, the reason for the seizure and other relevant information, and it instructs the Department of Justice to inform people charged with animal cruelty of their right to have confiscated livestock evaluated by a licensed veterinarian of their choosing.
But Morris said the bill not only inverts the conflict of interest, giving outsized oversight to the State Veterinarian, but it is also incongruous with the reality of animal cruelty and the bandwidth the Department of Agriculture has to deal with such cases.
The bill’s original fiscal note, introduced late in the legislative process, asked for more than $600,000 to fund both a veterinarian and an animal health technician position within the Department of Agriculture over three years. The version of the bill adopted by both bodies of the Legislature allocates no such funds, however.
“If the State Vet comes in, they work for the state, the prosecutor works for the state. I would have a field day if I was the defense attorney,” Morris said. “But then again, animal cruelty isn’t a 9-to-5 thing. So, what happens when there’s a call on Saturday night at 7:30 to the State Vet that we’ve got a horse’s life that we think is in imminent danger, and it goes to voicemail?”
Morris serves on the Governor’s Commission for the Humane Treatment of Animals, which advises the governor but does not make decisions on her behalf.
The commission unanimously opposes the legislation, she said, but it’s unclear how the governor will weigh the cruelty to livestock bill and the other bills that have been amended to include the same language.
