Aphis Animal Care MCP Server

@pipeworx/aphis-animal-care

USDA Animal Welfare Act licensees and registrants — commercial dog breeders, dealers, exhibitors, carriers and research facilities — together with the APHIS Animal Care inspection reports written about them, their critical/direct violation counts and links to the official signed report PDFs.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1861+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• aphis_licensee_search(state?, license_type?, name?, city?, zip?, certificate_number?, customer_number?, kind?, status?, limit?, page?) — who holds an AWA licence or registration. Answers "USDA licensed dog breeders in Missouri", "look up certificate 43-A-6814", "is this kennel USDA licensed". Returns name, certificate number, licence class, certificate status (Active / Cancelled / Revoked), facility city/county/ZIP.
• aphis_inspection_reports(state?, license_type?, name?, city?, zip?, certificate_number?, customer_number?, animal_category?, citation?, teachable_moments_only?, limit?, page?) — Animal Care inspection reports with inspection date, licensee, location, counts of critical / direct / non-critical violations and teachable moments, and report_pdf_url (the official signed report).
• aphis_inspection_filter_options(query?, kind?, limit?) — the 34 animal categories and 2,165 AWA citation section codes the inspection filters accept.

Auth

Keyless. No account, no cookies, no session token.

Data sources

• https://efile.aphis.usda.gov/PublicSearchTool/s/sfsites/aura — the Aura endpoint behind the USDA APHIS eFile Public Search Tool. Actions used: apex://EFL_PSTController/ACTION$doCustomerQuery (licensees/registrants), …$doIRSearch_UI (inspection reports), …$getSearchSetup (state and licence-type vocabularies), …$getIRSearchFilters (animal categories, citation section codes).

Things the next person would otherwise rediscover the hard way

There is no documented REST API for this data and no key. The Public Search Tool is a Salesforce Lightning community; its search runs over the Aura endpoint. The Apex class and methods were captured by driving one real search in a headless Chrome under CDP and reading the request off the wire — blind guessing at Apex class names does not work, because a wrong class and a wrong method return the byte-identical No apex action available for X.y.

• "Guest user access is not allowed" is not a policy block. A malformed or missing aura.context returns that message with descriptor aura:invalidSession, which reads as a hard refusal of anonymous callers. It is not — the endpoint serves guests. Measured 2026-09-05, aura.context needs nothing beyond {"mode":"PROD","app":"siteforce:communityApp"}.
• fwuid does not matter. A bogus fwuid, and an omitted one, both return SUCCESS. This pack therefore does not scrape a framework version off the page and cannot break when Salesforce rolls it.
• index is a page number, not a row offset, and the upstream caps the underlying SOQL offset at 2,000 rows: page * page_size <= 2000. Past that it throws Maximum SOQL offset allowed for apiName EFLLicense__c is 2000. totalCount is still the true unpaged count (4,986 Class A breeder licences in Missouri alone), so narrow rather than page.
• irFilterCriteria keys are SINGULAR. animalCategory and sectionCode each take one Salesforce id. The plural animalCategories: [id] is silently ignored and returns the unfiltered count with a 200 — a silent wrong answer, not an error.
• No date filter exists on the inspection search. inspectionDateFrom, fromDate and startDate are all ignored. Filter caller-side on inspection_date.
• A licence record is not a business. One person appears once per certificate, and most rows in any state are Cancelled historical licences. status: "active" is the argument that matters for "who is licensed today".
• sObjectType selects the register: EFLLicense__c (Class A/B/C licensees) vs EFLRegistration__c (registrants — research facilities, carriers, intermediate handlers).

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "aphis-animal-care": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/aphis-animal-care/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/aphis-animal-care/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1861+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/aphis_licensee_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"state":"Missouri","license_type":"BREEDER","status":"active","limit":5}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/aphis_licensee_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-aphis-animal-care is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/aphis-animal-care/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "aphis-animal-care": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-aphis-animal-care"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Aphis Animal Care data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT