IROPO International Registry of Pet Offenders

Get involved

Help build a trustworthy registry

IROPO is a volunteer-driven, open-source project. Every contribution, from a single data source to a code change, moves it forward.

View on GitHub Contributing guide

Most needed

Share a data source

The next phase of the project depends on finding reliable public records: court case portals, state or county animal abuser registries, agency press releases and open data portals. If you know of one, tell us:

  • what jurisdiction it covers and who publishes it
  • its web address and whether it can be searched or downloaded
  • any terms of use that limit how it can be reused

Please share sources, not names or allegations about individuals. Tips about specific people cannot be accepted. To report suspected cruelty, contact local animal control or police.

Suggest a source

Good first contributions

  • Check your state's page for errors and report corrections
  • Review the legacy ORI crosswalk entries flagged for review
  • Research whether your state's courts publish animal cruelty case records
  • Improve documentation in the pipeline or site

Volunteer your skills

Data and research

Find and evaluate court portals, registries and agency records in the US, China and India; document how each can be accessed and reused.

Engineering

Improve the Python data pipeline, build importers for new sources, and extend the Astro site.

Legal

Attorneys and law students can help scope privacy, defamation and records-law questions for each jurisdiction, including China and India.

Design and writing

Make complex data understandable, improve accessibility, and write clear explanations for the public.

Animal welfare partners

Shelters, rescues and humane societies can tell us what they need to screen adopters responsibly.

Outreach

Share the project with communities who care about animals and help us reach volunteers and funders.

Introduce yourself by opening an issue with what you would like to work on.

For developers

The site is built with Astro and the data pipeline with Python. To run both locally:

git clone https://github.com/the-robots/iropo.org.git
cd iropo.org
npm install && npm run dev        # website at localhost:4321

cd pipeline
uv sync && uv run iropo-data all   # refresh data/processed
uv run pytest

No API key is required. Read the contributing guide and the code of conduct before opening a pull request.

Spread the word

Share iropo.org with animal-welfare groups, shelters, rescues and journalists. Linking to a specific state page is the fastest way to show people what the data says where they live.

Find your state