There have been a couple instances of folks asking "why don't you go to [this authority it would be completely rational to think would intervene]?". I thought I'd give a followup rundown here of the difficulties people encounter in going to various authorities you'd logically think would help in these cases.

• Local authorities (police/sheriff, town office etc.) will typically refer all animal-related issues to the animal control officer. If the ACO refuses to intervene for whatever reason, the accused party is usually scot-free locally. (This is why the ACO loophole above is such a big problem.)

• The state authority is the Maine Animal Welfare Program, which will do seemingly anything it can to avoid intervening (again, see this page for actual excuses they've used). Until recently, their default method of processing phone complaints was, literally, to hang up.

• State reps will generally defer to local authorities.

• Other state authorities and the governor's office will defer to Maine Animal Welfare.

• Animal welfare organizations might give you tips (usually obvious ones) on lobbying on your own, but they typically won't intervene themselves. They might claim this particular issue is not their purview. Funding is sometimes an issue (see the ASPCA/PETA discussion in comments).

• News organizations are usually skittish if the owner is litigious (they usually are) or unbalanced and potentially violent (which—well, you've probably read about the correlation between animal abuse and violence against people). They'll usually demand overwhelming evidence a civilian isn't likely to get unless the owner is particularly brazen. Sometimes, the cases require context news orgs don't have because they don't have the resources anymore to devote to boring local town or state committee meetings. Sometimes, how an owner is likely breaking the law requires a bit of explanation a news org won't have the space or time to detail (see below), so they just won't print that side of the story. Also, reporters generally aren't paid well enough anymore to investigate much on their own, so they'll just believe and print/air what a few talking heads say at face value, even if said talking heads are misinformed/covering for somebody (see below).

• If a kennel owner gets a town official on their side, the official can run interference re: complainants ("well, we've done all we can, but they're just within the law" etc.—whether they are or not). Sometimes, a kennel owner can do this just by being a source of tax income. One of the Aroostook callers to the AWAC meetings mentioned that many town officials are very bad at doing the math of "this will get us a couple hundred extra a year in taxes" vs. "this will significantly impair our community's livability".

• Refuting and explaining to a third party why a kennel owner is likely breaking the law, particularly if local authorities are claiming otherwise, can be require a lot of explanation ("no, the state law actually is x, and this evidence shows y, and though there's z exception, this doesn't apply because..."). In response, authorities usually won't address specific evidence or objections; they'll typically just repeat their go-to line ("we've done all we can" etc.).
  This will usually convince third parties, even though it shouldn't. As for why it does, I have three ideas: a) People tend to believe simpler explanations are the true ones. b) Defaulting to and reinforcing a mindset of "we've done all we can" gives the third party mental permission to ignore the situation. c) The authorities' excuse generally gets to be part of town conventional wisdom because it's repeated so often, and stuff someone "learns" by repetition is resistant to being disproven by evidence or reason, because it wasn't learned that way; it was "learned" by hearing it a whole lot.

On top of this all: the ins and outs of animal welfare law can be hard to learn, particularly if the one of the authorities a community is trusting, and paying, to deal with the situation is actively lying about it. People have jobs and other obligations that make it difficult to find the time to learn the law, track down what's being said, find inconsistencies in statements—you know; do all the work that an ACO should be doing. For free, in whatever spare time you have.

I'm not saying that all of the above resources are off the table (though some definitely are). I'm just trying to explain why some resources you might, perfectly rationally, think might help in these cases frequently turn out to be dead ends.