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 question. 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?
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 tear gas.
