A pair of flickering yellow eyes pleaded with Teresa Paradis from behind the thin wires of a cage.
Sunapee, a tabby cat with a low-hanging belly, leaped from one level of her enclosure to another, agitated, skittish and hissing with discontent.
She steadied herself and watched intently as Paradis unlatched the door.
“She’s a wreck,” Paradis said. “She just wants out of here.”
Until three months ago, Sun was a stray walking the streets of Bradford. A good Samaritan noted her distended stomach and took her to Live and Let Live animal rescue in Chichester, where she could safely ride out the final days of her pregnancy away from the threats of extreme weather, errant cars and natural predators.
But a confined pregnancy spent at the end of a lengthy kennel isn’t what Paradis, the rescue’s founder and executive director, would have preferred. Ideally, Sun would be in a home with more attention and love directed her way as she prepared for her litter.
“If she were in foster, she’d have a family with her. They’d be rubbing on her. She’d have a quiet place to go to have her baby. She wouldn’t be stressed like this,” Paradis said. “She wants a dark, quiet place, not surrounded by all these strange cats. It’s unnatural.”
Paradis felt apprehensive about choosing that path for Sun despite having taken it innumerable times before.
The state regulations that allow vendors to temporarily place pets in foster homes are limited in their scope, allowing shelters and rescues like Live and Let Live to foster animals only for the purpose of medical or behavioral rehabilitation. The law prohibits fostering for the sake of expanding their capacity, which is set by each vendor’s license. It also grants the shelter or rescue’s veterinarian the discretion to decide which animals require a foster home.
For nearly 20 years, Paradis has placed pregnant animals, particularly cats, and their young kittens in temporary homes without issue. She’s not alone. In Claremont, the Sullivan County Humane Society, like many others, has used foster homes for pregnant animals and their babies since its founding in 2011.
Recently, however, the New Hampshire Department of Agriculture, Food and Markets has started to crack down on this longstanding practice.
Over the course of the past year, the Department of Agriculture, which houses the office of the state veterinarian, has communicated to shelters and rescues that pregnancy and lactation are not abnormal medical or behavioral conditions, and as a result, they do not qualify for placement in a foster home. For veterinarians, pet vendors and animal welfare advocates, the department’s stance represents not only a novel interpretation of the state’s animal fostering law but an immediate danger to two vulnerable animal populations: mothers-to-be, who may face medical complications during pregnancy, and newborns with fragile immune systems.
“I hate to see kittens growing up in the shelters because they are immune system bombs, they go through phases of susceptibilities to basically anything,” said Dr. Sara White, a veterinarian who has worked with shelters in New Hampshire and Vermont for 25 years. “If they’re in an organization that’s taking in animals from a lot of random sources, it’s like trying to have a daycare in the middle of a busy train station.”
In email correspondence obtained by the Monitor, Assistant State Veterinarian Nathan Harvey indicated this more stringent enforcement stems from Agriculture Commissoner Shawn Jasper’s concerns “about the inappropriate and excessive usage of foster homes” in New Hampshire, noting further that fostering otherwise healthy pregnant and lactating animals “constitutes an extension of space.”
The Department of Agriculture declined to comment on this story and delayed a public records request prior to publication.
The sparse explanations the department has offered to shelters have created more confusion than clarity.
One question plagues Paradis more than others.
“Pregnancy has always been considered a medical issue. It is in the human world, and it is according to the vets, too. This whole idea of the Department of Agriculture suggesting that pregnant animals aren’t qualified for foster, this is brand new,” she said. “Why are they doing that? I have no idea.”
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Sgt. Tibbs, a beloved 19-year-old cat, goes missing on the streets of Manchester, New Hampshire. His owner fears the worst. But when she finds out her cat was never missing at all, the truth turns out to be worse than she feared. From the Document team at New Hampshire Public Radio, a four-part series about what we owe our pets – and what we owe our neighbors.
‘Everybody was in tears’
Cheryl Koenig broke down at the sight of the three emaciated kittens.
It had been five days since they returned from a foster home with their mother to the Sullivan County Humane Society at the instruction of the Department of Agriculture. It had been five days since their mother last ate.
“We took her to the vet, and she wrote a note saying, ‘This cat needs to be in a foster home because she’s not doing well. She’s not eating and her kittens are going to die because she has no nutrients,'” Koenig recalled. “I was in tears, everybody was in tears because these cats were going to go backwards, they weren’t making any progress.”
The standard operating procedure Koenig had placed on file with the Department in 2023 and again in 2024 explicitly stated that pregnant and nursing animals and their newborn kittens would be placed in foster care.
“These guidelines were accepted by your office, so that is the protocol that we follow,” she explained in an email to the Department of Agriculture.
The response she received from Harvey, the assistant veterinarian, was terse and prescriptive: “If your current SOP document for Sullivan County Humane Society states that female cats can go to foster for pregnancy or nursing kittens, it’s time to update your SOP.”
Faced with a scarcity of other options, Koenig, the founder and volunteer director at the Sullivan County Humane Society, brought three mother cats and their kittens back to her facility.
One refused to eat. Another grew alarmingly thin. Koenig and her veterinarian ultimately decided to send them back to their foster homes, defying the department’s instructions.
“I’m not going to put anything in my SOP that isn’t in the best interest of the animals,” Koenig said. “Now, if they show me where the law changed, we’ll comply.”
The law that stipulates which animals pet vendors can place in foster homes in New Hampshire has not changed.
Koenig scrupulously examined her previous communications with the Department of Agriculture for any shred of insight. She consulted with White, her veterinarian, and she hired a lawyer to work through the muddied waters of her license renewal, the same lawyer who represented Live and Let Live Farm Rescue in a previous licensing battle.
For Paradis, who said she’s faced several years of unpredictable animosity from the Department of Agriculture, hearing that another shelter had been instructed to bring back its fosters left her with a bewildered sense of solace.
The situation felt bleak, to be certain, but at least Live and Let Live wasn’t alone.
Karen Yeaton, a volunteer at Live and Let Live, explained as she and Paradis moved through the cat kennel: “We felt we were being singled out,” she said. “It was actually kind of a relief for us, like, ‘Okay, it’s not just us.'”
Yeaton, Paradis and Koenig would later learn that their concerns were more widespread.
Letters unanswered
At the end of May, the Department of Agriculture sent an email to all New Hampshire’s licensed pet vendors detailing its new interpretation on fostering animals.
White did not receive that email, but as a veterinarian living just across the state border in Hartland, Vermont, and operating a mobile spay and neuter clinic in her state and throughout New Hampshire, she heard about its contents through a grapevine of incredulous shelter workers.
In it, Harvey had made clear that the department had started instructing pet vendors during the 2024-2025 license year that “fostering healthy pregnant or lactating animals is not allowed in New Hampshire pet vending laws and rules.”
It was the first written communication from the department to address its tightening grip around the foster law, and it left White mystified.
“I felt as though they had created an interpretation that was endangering the health and welfare of animals, particularly of animals that I was going to see,” she said. “Fostering is the best practice, and that comes from the animal shelter guidelines. They’re not saying it must be used, but it provides significant health benefits.”
Kathy Collinsworth, president of the New Hampshire Federation of Humane Organizations, penned a letter to the Department of Agriculture with three other members of the federation’s board. Their member organizations received Harvey’s May email and had serious concerns.
The foster care system is “a critical component to modern animal welfare,” their letter stated. Benefits ranged from “the quiet, low-stress environments that foster homes offer, which also dramatically reduces their risk of exposure to contagious diseases” to the role of foster care in socializing infant animals.
They contended that more frequent interactions with human caretakers boost a kitten’s adoptability, and they provided the footnotes to substantiate their argument.
“While shelter kittens may only receive limited daily interaction during routine cleanings, those in foster homes are typically exposed to varied stimuli, human interaction and environments that support their behavioral development,” the letter read.
Kurt Ehrenberg, an animal welfare lobbyist with Humane World for Animals, was included on the federation’s email.
He wasn’t sure if the department could be swayed.
In his own letter to the department earlier that month, he’d explained that their decision couldn’t have come at a worse time: Adoptions have slowed since the pandemic, and 250,000 fewer animals found loving homes in 2024 compared to 2019, according to Shelter Animals Count. The pandemic also created a backlog of around 3.7 million spay and neuter surgeries across the country, and shelters are still seeing more litters as a result.
Ehrenberg, Collinsworth and White all sent their letters to the Department of Agriculture in July. It wasn’t until August 25 that they received a response.
Collinsworth had asked for clarification on the state’s animal fostering statute, and requested a meeting with the department to discuss any review process that might lead to updates or revisions to the law.
Ehrenberg hoped that the department would at least explain its rationale.
“I have one question for the commissioner,” he said in an interview. “Why? Why the sudden change of action that is clearly detrimental to the health and safety of animals?”
‘This animal needed a foster’
Since 2015, changes to New Hampshire’s animal fostering statute have made the state’s regulations some of the most stringent in the United States.
With a mobile spay and neuter clinic that straddles both New Hampshire and Vermont, White has seen both sides of the coin.
In 2024, Vermont established a new animal welfare division within the state’s Department of Safety, which hired its first director earlier this year. From White’s point of view, while Vermont continues to make progress toward safeguarding animal rights, the Granite State’s pendulum has swung to the extreme of excessive restriction.
“We use New Hampshire as a cautionary tale of how regulation can go too far,” White said. “It makes the ‘Live free or die’ state seem pretty ironic, where it’s the over-regulated state on the New Hampshire side and the laissez-faire state on the Vermont side. You need a little bit of regulation; you need enough to protect animals without encumbering places that are trying to do the right thing.”
At Live and Let Live in Chichester, Paradis and Yeaton insist that the right thing — not only morally but legally — is what they are trying to do.
Last year, the department denied the rescue’s license renewal application, prompting a protracted legal battle that ended when the court granted Paradis an injunction, allowing her to continue.
While the court order did not impose a limit on how many animals Live and Let Live could have on site, the rescue’s most recent license, issued by the Department of Agriculture in July of 2023, did stipulate its capacity: no more than 10 dogs and 20 cats in the facility at one time.
Sun, the mother cat found as a stray in Bradford, became the 18th cat at Live and Let Live when she arrived. Paradis and Yeaton point to that fact as evidence that they are not attempting to circumvent the state’s animal fostering law, which prohibits leveraging the foster care system as a way of expanding a shelter’s capacity.
“Realistically, we’re limited by our capacity, our physical space, we’re limited by the amount of people we have around to help. We’re limited by the amount of money we have — no government funds, no state funds, no municipal funds, it’s all donation and grants. This rescue functions within those guardrails,” Yeaton said.
Disillusioned with the Department of Agriculture, Yeaton, who chairs the Pembroke selectboard, said she believes in the democratic process as a path toward resolution, even if it’s long and laborious.
She said she would welcome the challenge if the department sought to formalize its new fostering interpretation with a bill next legislative session.
“There would be all this discussion and consideration and committee reviews and public hearings,” she said. “If someone wanted to put that bill forward, I would completely support the process of that. I would also be the first one up there speaking against it at a hearing.”
Like Koenig at the Sullivan County Humane Society, Paradis chose to defy the state’s new directive and placed Sun in a foster home in Chichester in late August.
Early in the morning on Saturday, Aug. 30, Sun delivered a litter of six striped kittens.
When Paradis visited the feline family a week later, the babies were just beginning to open their eyes. At three weeks, their hearing is sharpening and they are beginning to explore their temporary home.
Once they’re eight weeks old, the kittens will get their first vaccines and a microchip. A veterinarian will check them for parasites and issue each one a clean health certificate, their passport to a permanent adoptive home.
Paradis harbors no regrets about placing their mother into a foster home.
“My purpose here is for one thing, and it’s what’s best for the animal, and she couldn’t find her peace here,” Paradis reflected. “I know the animals, and I know what they need. I’ve been doing this almost my whole life, and I’m going to be 70 soon, so I know what they’re asking for. I know what they’re afraid of. And this animal needed a foster.”
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