Activists tried to free 2,000 dogs from a Wisconsin research lab. Then came the tear gas.
· Vox
It’s exceptionally rare that the tiny, perpetually marginal, and politically outmatched animal rights movement manages to capture national attention. A lack of attention is that movement’s core problem and central organizing conundrum. How can it convince the public to make space in their minds for something they’d really, really prefer not to: the industrialized torture of animals by the billions for food, research, and other human ends?
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One coalition of grassroots activists has offered one possible answer. It has recently mounted one of the most audacious and most news-making animal rights campaigns in recent memory, and, in the process, turned an obscure breeder of beagles for biomedical experimentation into an issue of national political significance.
On March 15, dozens of activists stormed Ridglan Farms, a dog facility outside Madison, Wisconsin, that raises beagles for research labs across the country and has been accused by state regulators of hundreds of animal welfare violations. The activists entered one of the company’s buildings and extracted 30 of the dogs held in cages there (who are, under the law, Ridglan’s property). Twenty-two beagles were driven off the site and have since been placed in homes, while eight were seized from activists by police and believed to be returned to Ridglan.
That event produced an arresting set of images seen by tens of millions of Americans in the news and on social media, and it reached the agenda of political leaders all the way up to Congress and the Trump administration. So, the group, a loose assemblage known as the Coalition to Save the Ridglan Dogs, sought to raise the stakes even higher: They would rapidly recruit and train hundreds of new volunteers and return to Ridglan within a few weeks to remove all of the nearly 2,000 beagles believed to still be confined there.
This next rescue attempt, on April 18, unfolded much differently, when more than 1,000 activists arriving at the facility were caught off guard by a major show of force from law enforcement. The police, primarily the Dane County Sheriff with help from other law enforcement agencies, tackled activists and deployed rubber bullets; pepper spray; tear gas; and, the sheriff’s office confirmed to me, stinger grenades, which are less-lethal grenades that release rubber pellets and are often used for riot control.
One woman had her nose broken. A 67-year-old Navy veteran was pinned to the ground, covered with tear gas, and struggled to breathe as an officer pressed a knee into his back. Another man trying to go through a hole in Ridglan’s fence was knocked unconscious by police and had a tooth knocked out. Police removed a woman’s protective goggles to douse her in the face with pepper spray. Numerous people ended up in the emergency room. Reporting from the scene, I found myself, for a minute or two, also choked by the tear gas.
Police force of this magnitude may be grimly familiar to human rights movements from Black Lives Matter to the recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but it is unprecedented in US animal rights activism. The day was a devastating defeat for the activists, who couldn’t come close to breaching Ridglan’s buildings this time — and no beagles were rescued.
But might there be a success hidden in this apparent failure? The activists now hope that the images of police repression that have turned the attempted rescue into national news can be leveraged into greater public support and momentum for their cause.
“We’ve created a new narrative that the animal rights movement has never had, which is that we’re getting the shit beat out of us by police, and we’re getting thousands of ordinary people to show up and get involved,” Abie Brauner, a lawyer and organizer in the action, told me. Scott Wagner, the Navy veteran who was tackled by police and who is still on crutches today after his leg was injured in his encounter with police, told me that “the PR does nothing but benefit the animal movement.”
Many casual observers will encounter Ridglan as an isolated story — one controversial facility subjecting dogs to lives of confinement and experimentation that would make dog-loving Americans recoil in horror — but it’s also part of a much grander strategy. “Ridglan is like a stand-in for all industrialized animal abuse,” Justin Marceau, a law professor at the University of Denver and head of its Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, told me.
The ultimate prize for the animal rights movement is to persuade people to connect the suffering of beagles to that of the many more animals raised for food on factory farms, whose exploitation is made possible by the same legal structure that treats animals as property with few limits on what can be done to them. It is a goal that’s always eluded the animal movement: Can the public’s empathy stretch beyond the animals we’ve chosen to love to reach cows, pigs, and chickens?
Why Ridglan, and why open rescue?
The recent actions at Ridglan represented the largest-ever iteration of a tactic developed by animal rights activists over the last decade, known as “open rescue.” Activists walk into factory farms, slaughterhouses, and other places of animal exploitation, remove animals, and then bring their stories to the media. When they face criminal charges for entering private property and taking animals, they then try to persuade juries that they were right to rescue animals from suffering. Their aim is not to liberate every exploited animal one by one, but, rather, to put a spotlight on the victims of factory farming, build a mass movement for animal rights, and create legal precedent in support of viewing animals as moral subjects rather than as mere property.
Open rescue, primarily associated with the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), has mostly focused on animals raised for food on factory farms — newborn piglets, goats, turkeys, chickens raised for meat and eggs. It has notched jury acquittals and other courtroom victories for activists defending themselves against criminal charges. And it has given rise to a vibrant school of legal and philosophical thought on activists’ right to rescue animals — and animals’ rights to be rescued — from suffering and confinement.
Ridglan was first targeted by DxE in 2017, when a group of activists entered the facility, removed three beagles, and filmed the conditions there: dogs living beneath fluorescent lights in stacked cages above pools of their own waste, pacing from boredom. Three activists — Eva Hamer, Paul Picklesimer, and attorney and DxE co-founder Wayne Hsiung — were later charged with burglary and theft and were set to face trial in 2024. But in a surprising reversal, all of the charges against them were dropped, after which the activists persuaded a judge to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Ridglan for animal cruelty — a testament to the movement’s legal sophistication. As I covered in a previous Vox story, at a 2024 evidentiary hearing for that case:
Former Ridglan employees said they’d performed crude surgeries on beagles without pain relief, including removing prolapsed eye glands and cutting out their vocal cords, a measure meant to reduce noise from the densely packed barking dogs. “It still haunts me every day,” testified Matthew Reich, who worked at Ridglan from 2006 to 2010.
Last year, Ridglan was cited by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) for 311 violations of state animal welfare regulations, including failing to handle dogs “in a humane manner that does not cause physical harm or unnecessary injury.” Between 2022 and 2025, the citations allege, Ridglan performed improper surgeries on hundreds of dogs without adequate pain relief; the company has disputed the allegations. By October 2025, Ridglan agreed to stop selling dogs by July of this year to avoid prosecution for criminal animal cruelty.
But that deal did not require Ridglan to surrender its remaining dogs. So, Hsiung, a longtime animal movement leader, incensed by the state’s refusal to seize dogs from a facility that it had probable cause to think had violated Wisconsin’s animal cruelty laws, organized last month’s open rescue at Ridglan. It also allowed him to do something else: to connect the radical spirit of direct action and open rescue to a species that Americans already love and, thereby recruit many new activists from beyond the limited group of true believers that normally turn out at animal rights events.
At the March action that followed, law enforcement’s response had been halfhearted and maladroit, all but allowing activists to drive off with vanloads of dogs. Videos of rescuers carrying vulnerable beagles out of Ridglan spread across TikTok and Instagram with a moral clarity that cast the activists not as trespassers but as liberators, helping the group recruit an unprecedented number of people ready to return and break out the rest of the dogs.
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After the success of that rescue, US Rep. Mark Pocan, whose congressional district includes Ridglan, rebuffed the company’s request for assistance in countering the activists’ planned April action in a widely shared letter and urged the company to rehome its remaining beagles. “The documented treatment of beagles on your property is alarming,” he wrote. Earlier this month, Pocan also questioned US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the federal government’s funding of experiments on beagles purchased from Ridglan. That research “should not be happening,” Kennedy said at a House Appropriations Committee hearing.
A foiled rescue attempt
I’ve covered the open rescue movement many times and know it intimately; I also happen to live in Madison and, by way of disclosure, I personally know some of the people in the city who have been involved in the campaign against Ridglan over the last decade, though I did not rely on those relationships to cover this story. In preparation for this piece, I conducted interviews with organizers, observed planning meetings, and had countless conversations with participants in the days before and after the attempted rescue. Over the last week and a half, I got a deep look into how this month’s action was planned and rehearsed and, ultimately, how it unraveled.
The first group of would-be beagle rescuers arrived on the morning of April 18 intending to cut through Ridglan’s fence and other barriers it had set up to thwart the activists — including a moat filled with manure. They came outfitted with boltcutters, sledgehammers, saws, Halligan bars — which are used by firefighters to pry open doors — and other tools, similar to what they had brought to the March rescue. But this time, their tools were quickly confiscated by police, who stood behind Ridglan’s chain-link perimeter repelling anyone who tried to enter, as if defending a fortress.
Activists standing outside the fence pleaded with law enforcement to put down their pepper spray and tear gas, maintained that they were nonviolent, that they were only here to help dogs. “There’s no need for weapons; none of us have weapons,” one activist entreated officers over a megaphone.
As the thousand-plus activists grew increasingly hopeless that they’d be able to save any beagles from the facility that day, they wandered around the large grassy area at the front of the property in search of anything useful to do. They helped clear noxious chemicals from each other’s eyes and tried to appeal to officers’ consciences, invoking dogs’ loyalty and guileless affection. A man thundered to a row of Wisconsin State Patrol officers dressed in riot gear: “These dogs will love you more than your best friend loves you!”
Open rescue is rooted in the philosophy of nonviolence, but the presence of scary-looking tools intended to breach Ridglan’s property might undermine those optics in the eyes of the general public. The sheriff’s office prominently highlighted the implements as “burglary tools” in a press release. “I want to be very clear: This is not a peaceful protest,” Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said in a statement while the event was unfolding. Barrett also asserted that activists had been trying to assault law enforcement. When I reached out to the sheriff’s office for evidence for that claim, public information and education officer Elise Schaffer pointed me to a folder of footage. In one of the clips, an SUV is visible hitting and driving through one of Ridglan’s gates, and in another an activist appears to grab a police baton and run off, though none of the footage involves what I’d characterize as assaulting an officer.
“I get it; the police see the dogs as property, so if they pepper spray me while I’m running at the fence with a saw, I can’t be too upset,” activist Mark Schellhase acknowledged to me a few days after the open rescue attempt. But, he said, “their violence extended far beyond people trying to get inside the facility.” Police could be seen in footage forcefully pushing people who were standing on public property, far away from Ridglan’s fence.
Brauner emphasized to me the distinction between destroying property for its own sake and damaging it for the purpose of saving the animals, comparing it to smashing a car window to free a dog overheating inside. “Our goal was not to cause property destruction. In fact, we wanted to minimize that as much as possible,” Brauner said, and “only do it to the extent that it’s necessary to save the dogs.” In past open rescues, gaining entry into factory farms has been relatively easy — activists are often able to simply walk inside. But this time, in large part because the group had openly declared its intent to take out dogs, Ridglan took extraordinary steps to lock down its facilities and create additional physical obstacles.
According to activist documentation, 28 people were arrested that day, four of whom — Hsiung, along with Aditya Aswani, Dean Wyrzykowski, and Melany Brieno — have been charged with conspiracy to commit burglary, which can carry more than a decade each in prison.
“If any break-in participants, supporters or police were injured during Saturday’s violent assault on Ridglan Farms, the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of Wayne Hsiung and other key leaders, who organized and led hundreds in the coordinated attack on a federally-licensed health research facility,” Ridglan wrote to me in a statement. Referring to the Ridglan’s deal with a special prosecutor to shut down its dog sales operation, which did not require the company to surrender its remaining dogs, the statement added: “Instead of respecting the rule of law and the results of a thorough investigation which led to a binding legal agreement between the state of Wisconsin and Ridglan Farms, Mr Hsiung and his accomplices decided to encourage lawlessness and vigilantism because they did not personally agree with the results of the legal process.”
The company didn’t directly answer a question about what will be done with the dogs that still remain in its facilities, saying instead that it “will fully comply with the October 2025 settlement with the state of Wisconsin.”
Now, activists are continuing to push a variety of angles to free Ridglan’s beagles. Many of them hope law enforcement’s repression will backfire — two Dane County supervisors have called for an investigation into the police’s use of force at the event — and escalate pressure to liberate the dogs. The coalition has urged Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul to facilitate the beagles’ release, and animal rescue groups have been negotiating with the company to buy the dogs, an opportunity that Lara Trump, the day of the attempted rescue, publicly urged Ridglan to accept.
Where does that leave animal rights?
Perhaps my favorite text ever written about animal rights is political theorist Dinesh Wadiwel’s The War Against Animals, a sweepingly ambitious book that argues the human relationship with nonhuman animals is a literal state of war, in which we are the aggressors. The foiled rescue attempt on April 18 felt like a rare in-kind, proportionally appropriate response to that war. “It looks like some sort of medieval battle,” Marceau remarked, an observation echoed by others who watched the weekend unfold. But will it be effective for animal advocates, persuasive to the human public that they must ultimately win over?
It feels like animal rights is in a new era, more intimately connected to other traditions of civil disobedience.
Here is the most positive read on that day: Overwhelming police force of the kind seen at the attempted rescue tends to be used on serious protest movements with the ability to turn out massive crowds of people. Past open rescues have been met with large police presence and certainly many arrests, but brutal suppression tactics hadn’t been used on animal rights activists before, and the action’s organizers didn’t adequately prepare to face them. In that sense, the movement may have underestimated its own growing influence and power to elicit such a response from law enforcement.
Now, it feels like animal rights is in a new era, more intimately connected to other traditions of civil disobedience — a connection that had been invited by Hsiung, whose trainings for activists leading up to the actions at Ridglan emphasized their continuity with the civil rights movement and others that have been on the receiving end of police brutality. Mansi Goel, whose 99-year-old grandfather had been jailed in the movement for Indian independence from Britain, told me that the experience tapped into “something ancestral” for her, and that she hopes the violence that she and others experienced at Ridglan will precipitate greater “solidarity across all movements seeking freedom.”
The Ridglan actions might also be interpreted as a reflection of shifting intellectual and political currents in the animal rights movement. Animal advocacy has, over the last decade or so, become increasingly abstract and numbers-driven, due in part to the influence of effective altruism, which has injected needed rigor into the movement by pushing advocates to prioritize interventions that can reduce the most suffering for the most animals. Often, that has meant incremental welfare reforms for chickens, who are raised and killed for food in greater numbers than any other land animal. But within EA, there has also been a growing sense that this calculus can miss the value of harder-to-measure work, like moral confrontation and mass organizing that can lead to more durable change in the public’s view of animals. Brauner, who himself shares an ideological kinship with EA, told me that “sometimes building towards social or political movements over a long period of time can lead to vast and transformative change, which is much more effective” than narrowly focusing on marginal welfare improvements.
Of course, nothing in animal rights advocacy has yet proven particularly effective. Even its triumphs, rare moments of breaking through to a world that is totally ignorant of the scale and severity of animal exploitation, can feel transient and ultimately curdle into disappointment. The movement has not managed to change the fundamental outlook for animals in the US and the world: We exploit, maim, and kill millions more of them with every passing year.
We can’t yet know what Ridglan will mean for animal rights’ momentum — the unprecedented scale of this rescue attempt, the ferocity of law enforcement’s response, and the seriousness of the criminal charges that movement leaders now face have been variously described to me by participants as electrifying and galvanizing for the cause, and also tragic and dangerous. It has been, if nothing else, a bold and bruising experiment in broadening the movement’s tent beyond the already converted, and carrying animal rights forward into the realm of mass politics.
