In January, Vermont lawmakers were handed a road map for a sweeping modernization of the state’s fragmented and ineffective animal welfare system.
They didn’t follow it.
Instead, they passed two modest bills making technical changes to existing animal welfare laws. One bans breeding dog/wolf hybrids. The other makes it harder for someone convicted of animal cruelty to regain custody of their animals. Neither of the new laws comes with public funding.
Lisa Milot, the state’s first director of the Animal Welfare Division, authored the detailed report meant to address shortcomings in Vermont’s system. While lawmakers didn’t take up many of her suggestions, she said she’s not discouraged.
Instead, she took the passage of the modest bills as a signal that there is strong support for modernizing the state’s animal welfare system — just not the money to tackle the problems immediately.
“These are good first steps,” Milot said. “This is going to be an incremental, iterative process.”
Lawmakers established the Animal Welfare Division within the Department of Public Safety in 2024 in response to repeated complaints from residents and advocates that the state’s system for handling abuse complaints was confusing and disjointed.
The legislation was prompted by media reports about the acute suffering of farm animals and pets. Cases included the deaths of several baby goats at a farm in Charlotte and the seizure, over two years, of 74 malnourished horses from a farm in Townshend.
Milot, an attorney and former professor at the University of Georgia Law School who specializes in animal welfare law, was hired in March 2025 to head the new division. She is its sole employee. Currently, Milot’s position is funded through a $2 surcharge per dog license, which generates about $128,000 per year. After her $99,000 salary, little is left for anything else.
She’s charged with drafting a plan to develop and enforce animal welfare laws and to head up responses to animal abuse cases, including investigations. Her initial report to the legislature, submitted on January 20, does not paint a pretty picture.
She found that “preventable neglect is widespread” due to housing instability and lack of education, early intervention and access to veterinary care in rural areas. The state’s outdated animal welfare laws lead to “enforcement gaps and confusion,” she reported.
Investigating animal abuse complaints in Vermont falls to different state and local agencies, depending on the kind of animal involved and where the incident happened. People who try to make complaints can be frustrated by officials’ responses, she noted.
“An attempt to report may require calls to a Town Clerk, animal control officer, constable, Sheriff’s Department, local law enforcement agency, state police barracks, and game warden, each of which tells the caller to report it to a different agency,” Milot wrote.
A shortage of places to house any seized animals creates significant challenges for law enforcement and means many cases are not pursued. In 2024, Vermont State Police and the Fish & Wildlife Department opened 507 animal abuse cases. Only nine of them resulted in arrests, Milot’s report found.
Instead of relying on police to investigate animal neglect reports, she recommended a stronger civil response and focus on early intervention to prevent neglect. This includes improved education for animal owners, clearer animal care standards, and expanded access to affordable veterinarian clinics and boarding.
The goal is not simply to respond to harm after it occurs, but to reduce preventable suffering.
Lisa Milot
“The goal is not simply to respond to harm after it occurs, but to reduce preventable suffering, improve efficiency and coordination, and better allocate limited public resources,” she wrote.
A number of the solutions Milot outlined require ongoing funding, but that wasn’t in the cards this year. By the time Milot filed her report to the legislature — two weeks into the second year of the biennium — most lawmakers had already submitted the bills they wanted to pursue, she said. Further, the state budget is tight amid concerns about affordability.
“It is hard to make the case that money should be spent on this when there is so much human need,” Milot said.
She stressed, however, that the two bills that did pass, while modest, represent significant steps forward. Both await the governor’s signature.
H.578 will make it harder for people convicted of animal-cruelty offenses to get their animals back. Its sponsor, Rep. Emilie Krasnow (D-South Burlington), said she grew up in a home full of adopted animals and feels strongly that lawmakers need to look out for them.
“Animals, while they are not a voting constituency, I believe are our constituents as well, and we need to be their voice,” she said.
Krasnow said she was inspired by the story of “Bucky,” the nickname given to a dog from Derby who got his head stuck in a plastic bucket. The unlucky canine, whose real name was Chuck, wandered the woods around Lake Salem for 10 days before volunteers lured him into a trap with chicken nuggets.
Renee Falconer, the animal control officer who helped rescue the unfortunate pooch, had to raise money to pay for his care and to try to find him a new home.
Krasnow said she is aware of several cases in which the person suspected of abuse or neglect has been able to get their animal back. The bill will require owners to pay for the reasonable cost of care provided for their seized animals and allow humane officers to place a lien on the animals until payment is made.
The measure also prohibits a person convicted of animal cruelty from owning an animal for up to five years after a first offense and 10 years after a second. The restriction would only apply to farmers if they were convicted of cruelty to livestock. So, for example, a dairy farmer who mistreats his dog wouldn’t lose his right to own dairy cows.
To Milot, clarifying the rules around animal forfeiture is more important than tougher penalties. Legally speaking, animals are property and can only be taken away after specific processes are followed. That can leave animals in abusive situations or rescue shelters for far longer than necessary while a court determines their fate.
The bill speeds up the process. Instead of waiting for a state’s attorney to initiate forfeiture, the owner of the animal is given 14 days to request a hearing on the ownership of the animal; a judge’s decision is due 30 days later.
“If we can move animals through the seizure process much more quickly, we can start seizing many more of the animals that need to be seized, because we’ll have places to put them,” Milot said.
The bill updates laws to clarify that filming and uploading bestiality content to the internet is a crime. Lawmakers included the update after a Williston man was charged with sexually abusing a pit bull and uploading videos of it.
The other bill, H.841, requires dog/wolf hybrids to be sterilized, which effectively outlaws breeding them, as many other states have done. Some 70 percent of wolf hybrids are put down by age 2 because they can be aggressive, Milot said.
“It’s problematic to produce animals that we know will have a short lifespan because they don’t make good pets, but they’ll be marketed as pets,” she said.
The bill includes a financing tool that may help expand spay and neutering programs without public dollars. Milot’s division doesn’t have the budget to create a program, but the measure allows her to create a separate fund that can accept charitable dollars to be used to reimburse veterinarians for spaying and neutering animals owned by low-income Vermonters.
Rep. Chea Waters Evans (D-Charlotte), who sponsored the bill, said she accepts that in an era of “financial triage,” the division isn’t getting the funding it needs. But she noted that even with no staff, Milot has proven her ability to coordinate responses to animal abuse, such as the seizure in March of 55 huskies from a Hyde Park barn.
Milot recruited the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which enlisted 40 volunteers to document the conditions in the leased barn. The group helped get the dogs treated, transported to a shelter in Ohio and adopted. The Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department investigation into the former owner of those dogs is ongoing.
The case was the kind of success story the division was set up to accomplish, and Waters Evans hopes it helps convince lawmakers to fund the division properly.
“I’m excited that we’re moving forward on this at all, even though it’s a little more slowly than I would like,” she said. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “‘Good First Steps’ | Vermont’s new Animal Welfare Division director tries to reform a system on a shoestring budget”
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