After fighting various versions of snake snakes and collecting bits of information related to it from here and there, I was finally able to use it =)
For a list of available signatures and their maven coordinates, see http://mojo.codehaus.org/signatures/ . There is no need to declare a dependency on a signature.
The following example shows the correct setting for the manual (check mvn clean compile animal-sniffer: check) against Java 1.5:
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>animal-sniffer-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.6</version>
<configuration>
<signature>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo.signature</groupId>
<artifactId>java15</artifactId>
<version>1.0</version>
</signature>
</configuration>
</plugin>
, , - :
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>animal-sniffer-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.6</version>
<configuration>
<signature>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo.signature</groupId>
<artifactId>java15</artifactId>
<version>1.0</version>
</signature>
</configuration>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>animal-sniffer</id>
<phase>verify</phase>
<goals>
<goal>check</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>