Late last month, Teresa Paradis, the owner of Live and Let Live Farm in Chichester, received a jarring letter from the state Department of Agriculture.

Although scant on details, the letter’s effect was clear: the farm – a beloved rescue organization set on 67 sprawling acres in Chichester that takes in animals ranging from horses to geese – had been stripped of its pet vendor license. No dogs or cats could come or go; the canine and feline operation had effectively been frozen.

The department’s assistant veterinarian, Nathan Harvey, wrote that Live and Let Live had failed to comply with seven categories of standards during two inspections over the past year. But the license rejection struck Paradis as a heavy-handed, punitive action that stemmed from a five-year feud between her farm and the department.

Since an interaction with a department inspector that Paradis said occurred in 2019, Live and Let Live Farm has been fined at least $4,000 for various violations by the department. The organization, which opened in 1997, had never been fined prior, according to Paradis.

Last year, Paradis sued the department, alleging it was requiring the farm – the largest equine rescuer in New England – to obtain a license to transport horses that was meant for livestock dealers, not animal rescue organizations. This June, a Merrimack County Superior Court judge issued a preliminary finding in the farm’s favor, ruling that while the litigation remained pending, the farm did not need the license the department claimed was required.

Fifteen days after that ruling, Paradis received the letter from Harvey. Paradis, 68, views it as yet another act of retaliation that has already had real consequences, particularly for animals. In the nearly three weeks since the pet license was denied, she has received multiple requests per day to take in dogs and cats that she has had to turn down. The department’s decision will almost assuredly lead animals who otherwise would have found their way to Live and Let Live to instead be euthanized, Paradis said.

“I’m getting calls from locals a lot. I can’t do a thing,” Paradise said in an interview Thursday in the farm’s recreation room. “This is all retaliation.”

Shawn Jasper, the commissioner of the Department of Agriculture and a former Republican Speaker of the House, has been in direct contact with Paradis. He said he has investigated Paradis’s allegations and vehemently denied that the department is retaliating against her.

“We don’t make anything personal here,” Jasper said in an interview. “Everything is done by the books.”

A 2019 request

In the late summer of 2019, Paradis got a call from an inspector at New Hampshire’s Department of Agriculture.

“I have some horses that need to come there,” inspector Alicia Rosa said, according to Paradis.

But Live and Let Live Farm was already full, with upwards of 80 horses housed across approximately two dozen paddocks. Though Paradis had taken in other horses recovered by the department in the past, including a notorious 16-horse seizure in Littleton in 2012, she told Rosa she couldn’t handle any more.

The next day, according to Paradis, Rosa called back.

“You have to take them,” Paradis said Rosa demanded.

Again, Paradis said she couldn’t.

Rosa said she had already told others that the horses would be accepted at the farm. The conversation between the two women, who had had an amicable working relationship for years, ended curtly, Paradis recalled.

They didn’t interact again until months later when Rosa visited the farm to conduct a routine inspection. During that inspection, Paradis got written up and fined for a string of violations. It was the first time the farm had been fined in its 22 years of existence.

“It felt like she was looking for things,” Paradis recalled.

It was, Paradis now believes, the first instance in what she contends has spiraled into a five-year campaign of retaliation by Rosa and the Department of Agriculture.

“This is an agency that wields a lot of power in this state,” said Karen Yeaton, the chair of the Select Board in Pembroke, and a frequent volunteer at the farm. “They walk into facilities and they expect to be listened to and they expect people to do what they tell them. And we’ve got someone who stood up against that when it was wrong, and they don’t like that.”

Jasper, for his part, denied the interaction with Rosa occurred at all – though a 2021 letter from the state veterinarian to Paradis referenced the situation.

“I certainly talked to Alicia Rosa at the time and she reiterated what the department policy was and that none of that happened,” Jasper said. “She didn’t contact her and insist that she take animals.”

Rosa declined to comment. She left the department this spring after going out on maternity leave and choosing not to come back, Jasper said.

A lawsuit

Due to the pandemic, the department did not visit Live and Let Live for most of 2020, Paradis said. The next time Rosa came for an inspection, in the spring of 2021, she again wrote the farm up for violations, and fined it $1,000, according to Paradis and a letter from the state veterinarian, Stephen Crawford.

At that time, Paradis reported to Crawford that Rosa was retaliating against her following the 2019 interaction, and asked for a new inspector to replace her.

Crawford declined. “As discussed, license holders do not dictate who performs state inspections,” he wrote.

“That’s when she started getting worse,” Paradis said.

Each time Rosa visited, according to Paradis, she wrote the organization up for more violations and fines, which Paradis characterized as specious. A piece of food was found in the water container for a rabbit; another rabbit on a specific diet did not have enough food present, Rosa found, according to Paradis.

“We try to work with our pet vendors to make sure that they are licensed and conforming with the law, and at some point, we have to stop with being gentle and have to start issuing the fines,” Jasper said in an interview Friday.

Things came to a head in the spring of 2023 when, according to Paradis, Rosa demanded that the farm fill out a form for livestock dealers differently than the department had directed them to do previously.

The way Rosa wanted the form filled out would have required Paradis to attest that she was a dealer or worked with dealers, which send livestock to auction or slaughter. Paradis refused.

“If you’re going to make me file this license as a dealer, we’re not doing it,” Paradis recalled saying.

Last August, she sued.

A trial is not scheduled until next March, but Paradis has already survived an effort by the department to dismiss the lawsuit.

“When accepting [the farm’s] allegations as true and viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to it, the Court finds that [the farm’s] allegation that it does not qualify as a livestock dealer” is “reasonably susceptible,” Judge John Kissinger wrote in an order released this March.

The case appears to hinge in part on whether Live and Let Live is “in the business of buying, selling, or transporting livestock.” Paradis maintains that while the non-profit does charge an adoption fee of several hundred dollars for its horses, that money is not a material part of its operations. The department countered in its dismissal filing that the exchange of money for animals – regardless of the nature of the organization – qualifies the farm as a livestock dealer.

Most recently, Paradis’s lawyer, Rick Lehmann, requested and the court granted an extension to to transfer livestock without a license until the conclusion of the case.

What now?

Two weeks after that ruling, Paradis received the letter shutting down the dog and cat wing of the animal rescue. The form states that Live and Let Live failed to comply with minimum standards in the categories of lighting, visible signs of insects, shelter from sunlight, sanitation, classification and separation, protection from disease, and origin and medical history.

The denial letter did not provide additional information, or explain how to rectify the issues, but does state that some of the violations “are consistent with those identified during previous inspections.”

“They provided totally unactionable information,” said Yeaton, who reached out to state lawmakers over the past two weeks.

Lehmannn, Paradis’s attorney, has requested an adjudicatory hearing, but it is not clear when one will be held.

Meanwhile, the lives of about 15 dogs and cats, including 12-week-old boxer puppies Genevieve and Daphne, remain in limbo. Pregnant cats and dogs in the South, which Live and Let Live often takes in, might be euthanized instead, Paradis fears.

“The ripple effect is killing animals,” Paradis said.

Jeremy Margolis can be reached at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.