On a country road in Dane County, Wisconsin, about thirty miles outside Madison, is a place called Ridglan Farms. The dog breeding and research facility has been in business since 1966—the same year the federal Animal Welfare Act was passed to regulate the use of animals in research. It is currently the nation’s second-largest beagle breeder, housing roughly 2,000 “purpose bred” beagles for use in scientific and medical research.
The dogs live in tiny cages, sometimes stacked two high, in windowless buildings. They never see grass or sun; they never are allowed to run and play. The sound from within the buildings is of dogs barking, a seemingly constant cacophony of distress.
In 2022, a comparable breeding facility in Virginia called Enviro was forced to relinquish its 4,000 beagles due to repeated violations of the Animal Welfare Act; the dogs were put up for adoption. Animal rights activists have been trying to leverage a similar outcome at Ridglan Farms, which has been flagged in recent years for multiple violations of state animal welfare laws.
“We have been asking our political officials to help these dogs for almost ten years,” said Rebekah Robinson, president of Dane4Dogs, one of the groups that has worked to secure the release of beagles from Ridglan Farms. “We have bought billboards. We have had yard signs. We have done protests. We have done vigils. We have done email campaigns and phone call campaigns asking our elected officials to help the dogs at Ridglan Farms. And thus far, they have not, despite overwhelming evidence of animal cruelty happening there.”
But now it seems that activists have succeeded, at least in part. They have secured the release of about three-quarters of Ridglan’s beagles, with perhaps more to come.
On April 18, an estimated 1,000 activists converged on the facility, with the stated intent of physically snatching as many dogs as possible. A similar action on March 15 led to the successful removal of twenty-two beagles. About two dozen activists were arrested at that earlier action, four of whom have since been charged with felony burglary.
Afterward, in preparation for what Ridglan knew would be the next attack, it erected new barriers, including an illegal manure moat, to keep protesters at bay. And while the activists attempted to maintain an element of surprise by carrying out the April 18 action a day ahead of the publicly announced date, officers from at least seventeen different law enforcement agencies, along with private security guards hired by Ridglan, managed to be on hand. They responded with overwhelming force, including tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and two discharges of Stinger Ball Grenades—devices that project rubber fragments and a chemical agent in a fifty-foot radius.
“We saw dozens of black clad, armed law enforcement, many of them wearing gas masks and riot gear, standing inside the fence chatting and laughing as they hurled tear gas canisters and sprayed pepper spray at us,” activist Daniel Zellman said at a press conference on April 20. He recalled standing with a group of others—“We weren’t attempting to enter the facility. We weren’t attempting to breach the fence”—when “somebody came up behind me and sprayed me in the eye, point blank.”
Zellman also purportedly witnessed “the guards, the police, I’m not sure who it was,” remove the goggles on a woman who was lying on the ground “in order to be able to spray her eyes with pepper spray.” He described the response as “totally disproportionate, completely inappropriate, and in some cases,” he said, it “seemed to border on sadistic.”
Officers “kicked and beat” another activist, identified as Nicholas Dickman, leaving him with a bloody mouth and missing teeth, according to a report in The New York Times. (The event also garnered coverage from CNN, CBS, USA Today, and The Guardian, among others.)
Here’s how Robinson described what happened to her on April 18. “I was barely out of the car before I saw officers sprinting toward me,” she said. “I took off because I was scared, and they . . . tackled me. A 200-pound man in tactical gear tackled me to the ground, threw my arms behind me, and zip-tied me, and I was left zip-tied for six hours. It was absolutely inhumane. They took us behind the barn, where I could hear the dogs screaming for help. As soon as I walked back there, I started crying because I could hear them, and I felt so helpless in my zip-ties that I couldn’t do anything to help those dogs.”
Event organizer Wayne Hsiung, an attorney, was arrested soon after he arrived at the facility on April 20, and held in jail for three days. Twenty-eight others were also arrested but quickly released, with charges pending. No dogs were removed.
On April 23, activists filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Ridglan Farms and Dane County officials, alleging that their Constitutional rights had been violated by the use of excessive force against them. “Ridglan Farms’ business depends on the suffering of innocent beagles bred and sold for painful experiments,” the lawsuit reads. “It is therefore no surprise that Ridglan did not hesitate to inflict the same pain and suffering on peaceful rescuers.”
But in a recent statement, Ridglan insisted that the blame for any injuries rested squarely on Hsiung, who “decided to encourage lawlessness and vigilantism because he did not personally agree with the results of the legal process.”
Animal rights activists including Hsiung insist they are not breaking the law but taking action to prevent a crime—that of animal abuse. They say breaking into Ridglan Farms to free the beagles is like breaking a car window to keep a trapped dog from dying in the heat.
In April 2017, Hsiung and two other activists entered the facility at night and left with three beagles. They later publicly revealed their roles in this “open rescue,” and were charged with multiple felonies for which each faced a maximum sentence of sixteen years in prison.
Direct Action Everywhere
An overhead view of the Ridglan Farms facility.
But in March 2024, ten days before a trial was set to begin, the charges were dismissed at the request of Ridglan Farms, which reported receiving threats from animal rights activists. Hsiung, who had been hoping to use the trial to call attention to the conditions at Ridglan Farms, opposed the dismissal, to no avail.
That same month, the activists renewed their efforts to get Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne to pursue criminal charges against Ridglan, on the basis of recurring problems flagged by state investigators. When Ozanne did not act, the activists petitioned the courts to appoint a special prosecutor, as Wisconsin law allows.
In October 2024, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Rhonda Lanford held an all-day hearing in which she heard testimony from veterinary professionals and former Ridglan employees. They described how Ridglan routinely performed a surgical procedure known as cherry eye removal, in which a portion of a dog’s prolapsed eye glands are cut away.
Former employee Scott Gilbertson explained how he would hold the animals tightly as non-veterinary staff used scissors to perform the procedure without anesthesia or post-surgery pain relief. In the past, Ridglan had also allowed procedures which cut dogs’ vocal cords to make them bark less loudly; these procedures were also performed without any anesthetic or other pain medications. Other identified problems included the lack of proper waste removal, poor ventilation, and the continual sound of intense barking heard coming from inside the facility. (Ridglan Farms declares on its website that “no credible evidence of animal abuse, cruelty, mistreatment, or neglect at Ridglan Farms has ever been presented or substantiated.”)
In January 2025, Lanford found probable cause to believe that Ridglan “has committed multiple criminal violations” of state animal cruelty laws and agreed to appoint a special prosecutor to look into the possible charges of criminal animal cruelty.
The prosecutor, La Crosse County District Attorney Tim Gruenke, conducted an eight-month investigation, after which he entered an agreement with the company not to bring charges in exchange for Ridglan surrendering its dog breeding license by July 1, 2026. But the facility will be allowed to keep around 150 dogs used in its own research and the fate of the remaining dogs remains uncertain. They could still be sold for use in sometimes painful and often fatal research.
The activists want the dogs made available for adoption. They say they will have no problem finding the requisite number of potential owners willing to deal with the severe physical and psychological problems the released beagles will likely have.
Pressure to shutter Ridglan and release its dogs has also been brought to bear by members of Congress. During a House Appropriations Committee hearing on April 16, Democratic Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin raised the issue with U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “In my district, we have something called Ridglan Farms. That’s a beagle breeder for research,” Pocan stated. “They’ve had [hundreds of] code violations, including very serious harm to the health of dogs.” Yet despite this sorry record, Pocan said, Kennedy’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) is still giving money to researchers “using beagles from this highly questionable farm.”
Kennedy, a known lover of animals, living and dead, appeared even more thunderstruck than usual. “I believe you, but I have a hard time believing that,” he said, adding that this is a matter he intended to look into. “What you’re describing should not be happening.” Kennedy claimed the Trump Administration has “done more than any other administration in history to end animal testing,” adding “we’ve ended most of it.”
But in fact, White Coat Waste, a group that courts conservatives who oppose the use of animals in research, has repeatedly informed the NIH that beagles from Ridglan Farms continue to be used in “maximum pain” experiments. These include an NIH-funded University of Missouri study in which dogs’ fur is shaved and containers of diseased ticks are applied to their bare skin in order to infect them with deadly illnesses. That study, the group says, recently received $1.2 million in additional NIH funding, allowing the experiments to continue through 2029.
In response to queries from animal rights advocates, NIH Deputy Director Nicole Kleinstreuer has defended such expenditures, saying there are “areas where research using canine models continues to be necessary.”
Pocan, who lives about seven miles from Ridglan Farms, has vowed to keep pressing the issue. “To RFK Jr.’s credit, he’s personally spoken out against [the use of animals in research], but talk is cheap, right?” Pocan told the Wisconsin State Journal. “We’re going to work with the secretary to get that information to him so that they live up to his word. And I think he’s sincere in his word on trying to do that.”
Matt Handverger, a spokesperson for Pocan, says there has been no further word from RFK Jr. But on Wednesday, April 29, Pocan got the House Appropriations Committee to pass an amendment to a federal agriculture funding bill targeting Ridglan Farms.
Meanwhile, Congressmember Nick Langworthy, Republican of New York, has just sent a letter to Kennedy and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya asking them to detail all NIH projects using Ridglan beagles, suspend funding for those projects, and provide a timeline for “phasing out all federal support for invasive research” that uses dogs and cats.
“I write to commend your leadership and continued efforts to reduce and ultimately eliminate unnecessary animal testing within federally funded research,” Langworthy writes. “At the same time, I urge you to take further action by ending any [NIH] funding streams that support research involving dogs sourced from Ridglan Farms, the large-scale beagle breeding and research facility in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin.” He noted that the facility “has been the subject of sustained public concern and protest.”
On Wednesday, April 29, it was announced that two animal rights groups—Big Dog Ranch Rescue and the Center for a Humane Economy—have reached an agreement to purchase 1,500 beagles from Ridglan Farms. Efforts will continue to secure the release of the remaining dogs.
“This is a testament to the determination and perseverance of activists in Wisconsin and around the country who never gave up on the dogs,” said the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, which has represented Hsiung and others. “This is their achievement. Every single one of the Ridglan dogs deserves a loving forever home just as much as those we already welcome into our families.” Anyone interested in adopting one of the soon-to-be-freed beagles can fill out an application at bdrr.org/adopt.
At a press conference on Thursday, Wayne Pacelle of the Center for a Humane Economy also hailed the deal, but called for more action on the part of the federal government. “We cannot rescue our way out of these problems,” he said. “We need front-end solutions in order to protect these animals.” He called for “an NIH funding ban on experiments that involve the use of dogs and primates.”
Lauree Simmons of Big Dog Ranch Rescue, meanwhile, had this to say: “Today is an important step forward, because it is part of a larger shift in how we protect the animals and how we approach science and how we take responsibility for doing things more humanely and better.”