The medium is the message, & many other thoughts on the mass rescue of beagles from Ridglan Farms
I was there. You know I couldn’t not write about this!
You’ve already seen the images — the frightened, disoriented beagles, the solemn rescuers in Apollo-like biosuits, the lashing rain, the flustered police officers and the raging silver pickup truck — as if an action movie set had spontaneously assembled itself in this tiny rural village outside Madison, Wisconsin.
By a stroke of serendipity (also known as having an academic spouse), I happen to live in Madison. And so, last weekend, I had a front-row seat to one of the most viral, rousing events in the animal rights movement in several years. On the morning of March 15, I watched dozens of activists storm Ridglan Farms, the beleaguered dog factory farm that breeds beagles for biomedical experiments across the U.S. Within 20 minutes, the activists had breached Ridglan’s chain-link perimeter and tightly sealed sheds, lifted 30 beagles out of wire cages, and, bearing white flowers, marched the dogs down the muddy hill in front of the property. Outside, more rescuers waiting in a small armada of getaway vans loaded up the beagles and fled. Twenty-two dogs made it to a way station from which they’ll be adopted and rehomed; the remaining eight were recaptured by police and returned to Ridglan.
Many readers know me for my writing on actions like these, but this was a sight unlike anything I’d experienced before, easily one of the most intense and dislocating experiences of my life. I didn’t anticipate how hard it would be for me to return to my everyday life and responsibilities. It was also a unique experience for me in another way: Madison’s animal rights community is small and close-knit, and I have personal ties to some of the activists who planned and participated in the rescue. I’m not, to be clear, one of these activists myself, but it would nevertheless be tricky for me to cover this action in a journalistic capacity. I’m approaching this debut Substack piece with the same assiduous attention to accuracy as I do in any other published story, but please consider it more of a personal reflection than a story with the weight and editorial standards of a news outlet behind it.
This rescue had been a culmination of nearly a decade of activism that “transformed a little-known breeder into one of the most controversial and contested animal facilities in the country,” as Justin Marceau, a law professor at the University of Denver whose Animal Activist Legal Defense Project plans to represent activists facing criminal charges from the action, put it to me. Ridglan is one of America’s largest remaining suppliers of dogs to labs where they are (depending on the study) confined in cages or pens, operated on, force-fed toxic doses of drugs and pesticides, and killed. As company co-owner Jim Burns himself put it in a 2015 interview with Isthmus (support your local alt weekly!): “What we do isn’t accepted by the general public as a positive thing.”
By 2025, the company had entered an agreement with the state of Wisconsin to end its dog sales by July of this year in order to avoid criminal prosecution for animal cruelty — a remarkable coup for the campaign against Ridglan that was directly and exclusively the result of animal advocates’ efforts. But that deal put Ridglan under no obligation to spare the lives of the approximately 2,000 beagles still there right now, and last month, a judge dismissed a lawsuit seeking those dogs’ release. Having reached the end of the road of legal options to free these animals, a coalition of activists, organized by movement leader Wayne Hsiung, planned last weekend’s action as an “open rescue” — a tactic I’ve written about a million times before, in which animals are removed from factory farms and other places of exploitation in defiance of whatever legal consequences might follow.
Last Sunday, I got to the scene in time to see a mass of uniformed activists racing up the hill toward Ridglan’s compound. For those of us watching from public property, it was impossible to see what was going on inside, so for what felt like a long time, we waited. Police arrived. This was a challenging theater for an animal heist on any day, and all the more so on that day. The temperature was around freezing. At some point, it started to rain, and later to hail. I walked back and forth in the road, futilely trying to get cops to answer my questions and talking to activists — by turns focused, frenetic and giddy — who were setting up dog crates in the backs of rented cargo vans. I saw a pickup truck on Ridglan’s property aggressively racing uphill in reverse and wondered why it was doing that.
Nobody knew whether any beagles would come out that day, and I did not really believe they would. Then the white-suited activists re-emerged along the horizon, each cradling a vulnerable, bewildered yet improbably trusting animal. I became fixated on the sight of the dogs’ tricolored fur drenched with freezing rain, and wondered, as I had many times before, what the world looks like from the perspective of an animal who has never seen anything beyond the walls of her cage. Suddenly, I was filming as police seized a crated beagle from a rescue van, and, over the furious objections of activists, pulled the terrified dog out of the crate and into a sheriff’s cruiser.
I was astonished by how quickly the morning kept splitting into new, overlapping dramas. A few feet from me, a local activist was sitting in the driver’s seat of a rescue van whose tires had been slashed by someone thought to be a relative of a Ridglan owner. Later, I would learn about everything that had happened inside Ridglan’s facility and beyond it: how the rescuers couldn’t break open the doors and had to dive in through a small window, how the silver pickup had been doing donuts around them and could easily have killed someone, how hard it had been to carry the heavy dogs through the hills and rain, how another activist had been driving five dogs away when he was stopped by police, arrested, and jailed.
In my work, I spend a lot of time thinking about the world as a set of tradeoffs. Every choice we make to spend our time and resources on something is a choice not to spend them on something else, which is just as true of how we organize the economy as it is of the strategic decisions made by animal activists. For basically its entire existence, the animal rights movement has been like a great dialectic between two poles — radical tactics vs. moderate ones, saving the lives of a small number of animals vs. somewhat improving the lives of millions more living on factory farms (we are remarkably fractious and intellectually diverse for a tiny movement that no one likes). These debates can feel tedious, but they are morally important, and the mass rescue in Wisconsin can help clarify our thinking about them.
Here are, in no particular order, some of my thoughts on those questions, and on the Ridglan action and the philosophy of direct action more generally.
I don’t make these kinds of superlative statements lightly, but I think this was obviously one of the most significant and far-reaching open rescues to date. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s TikTok post alone, with a simple montage of the rescue, has drawn 26 million views and counting. Dogs are an interesting wedge for animal liberationists because they can draw many people’s attention to the reality that even the animals beloved by humanity are exploited commodities with no rights — the core problem in our relationship with all nonhuman animals. Whether that can raise consciousness around the exploitation of animals for food, I really don’t know, but I think this action undoubtedly increases the odds that the remaining 2,000 beagles in Ridglan’s custody are released.
The medium is the message, as the great Marshall McLuhan put it. The forms that communication takes matter even more than the content it carries because form changes how people think, feel, and pay attention. Different tactics tell very different stories about the world that activists want to create. The message, in this case, was that these dogs have intrinsically valuable lives worth living and worth sacrificing for. That humans can at any moment stop looking away from our atrocities against other animals and choose to intervene (an obviously different message than the one sent by haggling with corporations over a few inches of extra cage space — not that that isn’t also indispensable work). Lincoln Quirk, who went to jail for his participation in the Ridglan rescue, made a similar point in a Substack piece: “I wanted to show that there are things that any person can do, namely show up for stuff that’s annoying, unpleasant or even scary.”
Tactics also shape the minds of the people who participate in them. I loved Matt Beard’s recent piece, “Your work will change you whether you like it or not.” To borrow one of his images:
Beard is talking about employment, but the point generalizes. Whatever work we do works on us in return. If you think it is unacceptable for animals to be bred on factory farms for biomedical research, there’s a strong case for following that instinct through to its literal expression and seeing where it takes you.
Bearing witness is a powerful thing. Hannah Arendt wrote that concentration camps were meant not just to kill people but also to make witnessing impossible by destroying the conditions under which their suffering could acquire meaning, memory, or testimony. I think this is also a good characterization of what happens to billions of animals hidden and exploited for human ends. And the act of coming together to bear witness, to paraphrase something my friend Elias Isquith remarked about neighborhood ICE watches in Minneapolis, can also act as the basis for forming a political community.
For readers not already familiar with animal rights activism, it bears mentioning that although these actions can appear chaotic and freewheeling (and their success often does come down to improvised, in-the-moment decisions), they depend on an enormous amount of detailed planning and organizing.
And for those who might wonder whether invasive animal research isn’t just a lamentable necessity of modern life, I’d recommend the perspectives in these pieces and books (ask me for others!).
Ridglan points to a new model for open rescue, a point that was made in activist Aidan Kankyoku’s piece about the action. The rescue derived its power from its relationship to a sustained campaign against Ridglan that had been so successful that a judge found probable cause to believe the company had violated state animal cruelty law. My sense is that Ridglan is very unpopular in Madison, and many of the rescuers last week reported receiving expressions of support from Trader Joe’s workers, Uber drivers, jail staff, and even some police. Hsiung is now calling for another, much larger open rescue at Ridglan next month, escalating pressure on authorities to find other means to release the animals.
This represents an interesting shift in the aesthetics of open rescue. Previous actions had been organized to avoid the appearance of breaking and entering or property destruction, but this one quite openly celebrated the use of crowbars and angle grinders. The activists were asserting a claim to legitimacy. Judging from the public’s reaction on social media, it doesn’t seem like this bothered bien-pensants too much, though I wouldn’t assume this generalizes to other actions.
Despite having had ample advance warning — activists had openly declared their intent to break beagles out of Ridglan that weekend — law enforcement failed to produce an effective response. Rescuers drove beagles off the property in full view of the cops, most of whom manifestly did not want to be there. Sort of remarkably, Hsiung, along with other action leaders, Dean Wyrzykowski, Alexandra Paul, Aditya Aswani, and Raquel Shoemaker, were released from jail last week without formal criminal charges from the district attorney.
Two years ago, prosecutors had already dropped charges against Hsiung (along with Eva Hamer and Paul Picklesimer) for basically the same thing — removing three beagles from Ridglan in 2017. Filing charges now risks creating a courtroom battle that the state doesn’t want; not filing them might only encourage the activists to come back for more dogs. “There’s no winning for the prosecutor,” Marceau told me.
Many of these activists (nearly 30 were arrested, and most released the same day) draw force simply from being normal members of their communities. On the Friday night before the rescue, I chatted with Jennifer Tourkin, an affable Denver mom and preschool teacher who’d never done something like this before; 36 hours later, she was walking out of Ridglan with a beagle, and later walking out of jail. Just as activists are personally transformed by these experiences, their moral courage forces the people around them to wonder what more they could be doing, too.
Some of the activists released from jail. Credit: Coalition to Save the Ridglan Dogs
These actions can be really dangerous. Had someone been hurt by the driver of that pickup (who had also been walking around brandishing a knife), we’d be talking about this event very differently right now. Risk-taking is a necessary part of social change, but it can also be, and certainly is in this case, like playing with fire. It’s not up to me to say which risks are worth their costs, but I think organizers have to be exceptionally judicious and transparent about what they’re leading people into.
The mere act of removing a dog from Ridglan and walking her into the light of day felt like it alchemically transformed her status from a research object into a subject with her own moral standing1. It’s unthinkable at this point to imagine law enforcement trying to hunt down and retrieve the beagles that have been placed into loving homes. This is not to romanticize the dogs’ new lives, because life as a companion animal in many ways is not ideal even in the best of circumstances, as my colleague Kenny Torrella has written.
Journalism is crumbling all around us and it sucks! The rescue attracted lots of local and regional coverage, but it merited a ton more, and there were very few journalists on site relative to the significance of this event. I think this would have gotten more national media attention even a couple of years ago.
I must have anticipated that the rest of my life would revolve around animal rights debates when as a kid I internalized the very cliché Talmudic idea that saving someone’s life is tantamount to saving the entire world. I extrapolate this to mean that every sentient creature has an infinite depth of conscious experience, and it’s not so straightforward to sum up, as some schools of moral thought today attempt to do, the pleasure and suffering of multiple individuals. (The philosopher John Taurek gave this concept its modern expression when he notoriously argued that it’s not any better or worse to save five lives than it is to save one life.)
In reality, of course I believe that numbers matter, that all else equal it’s better to help many than it is to help a few, and that perhaps the animal movement’s most important task at the moment is to look for ways to incrementally mitigate the suffering of billions of animals raised for food. I also think it is uniquely and irreducibly good to save a life, and it’s hard to argue against an action that, with a few months of planning, saved 22 lives and fired up a bunch of new people about animal advocacy.
Reflecting on his role in the mass rescue at Ridglan, Aidan Kankyoku wrote: “I felt so certain that I had given my life purpose, that I was paying back my debt for being born on this Earth.” This is a nice point, though I wouldn’t exactly co-sign it — I don’t think any of us owes a debt for being alive. Life is a gift each of us is given unconditionally. But I do think we have a responsibility to share our gifts, to the degree we each can, and help others become more free.
Update: The correct number of dogs taken out of Ridglan is 30 (not 31), eight of whom were seized by police and 22 of whom made it out permanently. I regret the error!
Or, and I’m so sorry to say this, you could call it a matter of ontology.
so grateful to you for bearing witnessing and sharing your first person account 💚
The power of beautiful writing never fails to amaze me. Thank you for sharing your gift with us and for all oppressed beings, Marina.