Currently animal-sniffer:check is theoretically run during the release process, though in fact it fails when you try it, pending http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MANIMALSNIFFER-29 being released.
Need to use the 1.9 plugin when available, and make this goal be run as part of dev builds by default, perhaps skipping just when -DskipTests was passed.
See also @kohsuke’s e2bfcb3 & 7ef347b.