Inside the office of the Virginia Attorney General in downtown Richmond resides something not found anywhere else in the United States: a team dedicated to working on animal law.
Virginia’s Animal Law Unit is a team of attorneys and investigators who focus on animal abuse and neglect, trafficking and training in animal law issues for law enforcement and other state attorneys.
“I like to say that my role as attorney general is that I often say we’re the people’s protector,” Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said, adding that in many cases, animals in Virginia are very much considered part of “the people.”
The Animal Law Unit garnered national attention recently due to the highly publicized Natural Bridge Zoo case, in which a 2023 undercover investigation and ensuing law enforcement raid resulted in the seizure of 100 animals from the Rockbridge County facility.
In late January, a judge in Rockbridge County General District Court issued a split decision, returning 39 of the animals to the zoo’s custody. Both the state and the zoo appealed the decision, and the case will be presented to a jury in Rockbridge County Circuit Court over the course of a four-day trial beginning Monday.
The Animal Law Unit’s genesis came in 2015 during Mark Herring’s first term as attorney general. Herring, now partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, remembered the office’s animal law prosecution as one of its strengths when he assumed the role in 2014. The idea came to him to set some of those attorneys on the beat full time. He designated Michelle Welch, now a senior assistant attorney general and still the director of the ALU, at its head. Welch had already made a name for herself in the world of animal law, and her leadership made the unit’s creation a no-brainer for Herring.
“I thought the abilities and talent of those lawyers were an underused asset, and without having to ask the legislature for any more resources, funding, we could give the lawyers who did that kind of work [a platform],” Herring said.
In the years since, working under both Herring, a Democrat, and Miyares, a Republican, Welch and the ALU have closed more than 3,000 matters, including some of the highest-profile cases the attorney general’s office has handled in the past year.
“How a society treats its animals says something about who we are as people,” Herring said. “And so the Animal Law Unit says something about who we are as Virginians.”
Lions, chickens, coyotes and dogs
The Natural Bridge Zoo case is the latest in a number of highlights the Animal Law Unit has handled on behalf of the commonwealth.
Take, for example, the latest major victory for the unit: the wildlife trafficking case against Bhagavan “Doc” Antel of TV fame from Netflix’s “Tiger King” series. Antel was accused of illegally purchasing endangered lion cubs in Frederick County that he intended to display at his South Carolina zoo. After a jury trial that wrapped up in October, he was convicted of two felony counts of wildlife trafficking and another two of felony conspiring to wildlife traffic, was fined $10,000 and was banned from any animal-related business in Virginia for five years.
Then there was a 2016 case against Tyson Foods in Mecklenburg, Buckingham and Lunenburg counties. In that case, camera footage revealed employees abusing the fowl inside the world’s second-largest chicken processor’s breeding facilities. Nine people were eventually convicted.
Around that same time, the ALU prosecuted 10 people across the state involved in trafficking illegally purchased foxes and coyotes. That case followed a two-year undercover investigation by the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.
In 2019, the ALU won a record verdict in Virginia for a dogfighting conviction, a 10-year sentence for Eldridge Freeman Jr. The state seized 26 dogs from Freeman’s Dinwiddie County home and found evidence of brutal dogfighting in a 14-by-14-foot pen on the property. He was convicted of 37 counts of dogfighting.
The ALU broke up a Page County cockfighting ring in 2020, and the following year won the largest such sentence in U.S. history: five years incarceration and a nearly $30,000 fine against Dale Comer Jr. It repossessed 355 birds from his property, and Comer was found guilty on 26 counts of animal fighting, 20 counts of animal cruelty and possession of methamphetamine.
And, of course, the ongoing case against the Natural Bridge Zoo.
All told, the Animal Law Unit has closed more than 3,000 animal law matters since its 2015 inception, including criminal special prosecutions, legislative and law enforcement consultations, and training events.
Silent witnesses
It’s cases like the multifaceted Natural Bridge Zoo one, Miyares said, that make Welch the perfect person for the job.
“She has extraordinary passion about her job,” said the attorney general. “She’s dedicated, and she’s focused.”
And unflappable. Miyares said that, on occasion, Welch has received threats and intimidation in the midst of trying cases.
“That doesn’t work with Michelle,” Miyares said. “She is smart and a savvy attorney. The great irony is that the animal law unit has some of the most high-profile cases in our office.”
Welch’s passion for the job shows through in her public statements about the ALU’s work. She declined to be interviewed for this story, citing her policy against discussing ongoing cases.
“[Animals] are capable of suffering. They do feel pain and they don’t deserve to be abused,” Welch said in a 2022 interview with Richmond television station WTVR-TV. “It became clear to me that they needed a real advocate, a prosecutor who was going to do that case really effectively.”
In a way, Welch has been looking out for the helpless since she began looking out for herself.
Welch, 58, grew up poor in South Richmond before her family moved to Florida and South Carolina in her high school years, according to a profile published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 2005, when she was running for commonwealth’s attorney.
She came back to Virginia for college, working at Shoney’s to pay her way through the University of Virginia, the newspaper story said. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 1990 and went to work as a paralegal. She attended law school at University of Richmond, graduating in 1999, and began as a prosecutor in the Richmond commonwealth’s attorney’s office the following year.
Her animal law work began almost immediately. In October 2003, commonwealth’s attorneys in the Richmond region began an animal abuse task force and put Welch at its head.
“My ultimate goal would be to wipe out animal abuse,” she told the Richmond Times-Dispatch at the time. “That’s a pretty lofty goal, but I think we can get there. I think we have to be optimistic, or we wouldn’t accomplish anything.”
In 2006, Welch moved to the attorney general’s office during the tenure of Bob McDonnell, the first of five attorneys general under whom she has worked in Richmond. She continued her animal law work as a special prosecutor for the office, assisting on cases all over Virginia.
A particularly attention-garnering 2014 case cemented Welch on the map in the animal abuse field. She led the investigation and eventual prosecution of the leaders of the Big Blue Sporting Club, a cockfighting ring that spanned the Virginia-Kentucky border. The states recouped more than $900,000 of illegal income from the ring and prosecuted five major players, resulting in more than four years of jail time.
The following year, Herring saw an opportunity for his administration to further collaborate with local law enforcement. Welch’s work had been garnering national attention, and so the administration sought to expand on that with the creation of the first-of-its-kind Animal Law Unit.
Welch had “both the skill set and desire” to dedicate her career to the cause, Herring said.
The ALU served a key purpose for the statewide office as well, helping to uncover ancillary criminal activity alongside the animal abuse and neglect about which the unit began its investigations, Herring added. That work continues today.
“The people that are perpetrating these acts, so many of them … also are engaged in other criminal enterprises,” Miyares said.
“Sometimes you have … a high degree of suspicion this person is engaged in narcotics dealing,” he continued, but the evidence isn’t present for a warrant on those charges. Sometimes the way in the door concerns that person’s treatment of animals. And once that investigation turns up results, investigators can broaden their scope.
“It is a useful tool in the toolbox for law enforcement,” Miyares said.
Prosecuting animal law is a different ballgame than most of the work his office does, Miyares said.
“It requires a certain level of specialization and sophistication that Michelle brings,” the attorney general said. “It’s almost like a [repossession] case. It can have a lot of moving parts. It’s just a very different area of the statute.”
A significant challenge, of course, is that many of the witnesses to that sort of crime can’t speak. The burden of proof is much tougher when oral testimony can’t be provided.
“Proving beyond a reasonable doubt with a silent witness presents a unique challenge,” Miyares said. “You can’t come in and have them sit down and do a witness interview. … It’s just a very different type of criminal case that you have to build, and Michelle’s become an expert on it.”
As important as the casework is, the Animal Law Unit’s work with local law enforcement is just as crucial, Miyares said. Welch and her team spend a good portion of their time providing training and resources to those on the municipal level.
It was one of the things the attorney general heard most about when he took office in 2020. One of his first orders of business was an internal review of the office’s practices. He wanted to see what was working and what wasn’t on his way in the door, and people kept coming to him to sing the Animal Law Unit’s praises.
“‘They helped us on this case, or they trained my deputies in this,’” people would tell the new attorney general. “So obviously that got my attention. … I don’t really know these attorneys [in the ALU], but they clearly have a good reputation because of the number of people, Republican and Democrat, sheriffs and deputies, who were stopping me.”
He decided not to tweak a process that was getting such prolific results.
“It would be really, really foolish of me to say that this was an idea that was put forth by my predecessor and discount it because he was from a different political party,” Miyares said. “I never claim that either party has a monopoly on good ideas.”
And, the attorney general added, animal welfare is an interest that crosses party lines.
“There’s generally a universal revulsion that private citizens have when they see animal abuse,” he said. “It’s something that almost everybody can recognize.”
Changing laws and expanding prosecutions
So why, then, haven’t more states followed suit with animal law teams of their own? Some of it is just catching up to the law. Statutes, and therefore punishments, regarding animal neglect and abuse traditionally have not been very robust. But that is changing.
“In the past 20, 25 years, most of those anti-cruelty laws have been amended and strengthened,” said Joyce Tischler, professor of practice in animal law at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.
Often in the past, animal abusers would be convicted, only to have those animals returned to them. That largely is a thing of the past. And as those laws get strengthened, so, too, do attorneys general’s efforts to prosecute them. Oregon has one state attorney dedicated to animal law, Tischler said, and she knows of counties in both Florida and Oregon that have units that operate on a smaller scale than the Virginia ALU.
Miyares said he’s fielded questions from attorneys general in other states about the Animal Law Unit when they see cases covered in the press.
“They just have an interest,” he said. “I think there are some other states that are going to take a look at it.”
One of the hurdles, Tischler said, is the complicated nature of so many animal law cases.
“These are very difficult cases,” she said, “and when you’re dealing with hundreds or a hundred animals … somebody has to figure out which ones are so bad that clearly the proof is there that a crime has been committed.”
The Natural Bridge Zoo case, for instance, is really 100 cases. Welch’s team must make an argument that each of the animals it seized from the zoo — more than two dozen different species — met the standard of being abused or neglected.
And when law enforcement tackles those complex cases, they must also work the logistical side of transporting and caring for the animals in question. If the case involves a breeding facility or a zoo with a large number of animals involved, it can be a daunting enterprise.
“It must have been a big day for the people who transported those animals away from this roadside zoo,” Tischler said, referring to the Natural Bridge case.
Another factor is the law itself. In most places, animals are considered property without similar rights that humans enjoy. A dog owner, for instance, can take their healthy dog to a veterinarian and request that it be put down, and the vet can euthanize that dog under the law. Drawing a line between an animal owner’s right and abuse or neglect can be tedious.
For its part, Virginia hopes to remain at the cutting edge of demarcating that line and prosecuting those who cross it. Herring saw it that way in 2015 when the ALU was created, and he still does.
“The state has an interest in seeing that its laws are enforced as is the case with all laws,” the former attorney general said. “But in addition, when it does come up, it’s important to prosecute, one so the cruelty stops but also to make it clear that this activity won’t be tolerated in Virginia because we are a state that believes animals should be treated humanely and that wild animals should not be trafficked.”
For Welch’s part, she has said that mission is what keeps her motivated.
“It really is an honor to protect animal victims and seek justice on behalf of them,” Welch said in the 2022 WTVR interview. “That is where I get my energy. Animal abusers need to be brought to justice.”