The Government Cover-Up of the Torture of 60,000 Dogs

The smell was unclear at first. Smoky, with the hint of something rotten. But once the whistleblower at Ridglan Farms, a beagle research and production facility in Dane County, Wisconsin, realized the source of the odor, horror must have crept through her mind. The facility was killing so many dogs – as many as 600 in a single year, sometimes simply to balance out the sex ratio of its beagle colony of 4,000 dogs – that it was struggling to find ways to dispose of the bodies. It apparently settled on a primitive strategy: burning the dogs in massive piles. 

On July 10, I’ll be in court in an effort to save the Ridglan dogs. I break it down in our latest YouTube episode below.

The whistleblower filed a complaint in 2006 about the mass killing and burning of dogs at Ridglan Farms. And when the government inspected the facility, it confirmed key details of the whistleblower’s account, including dirty and potentially dangerous conditions inside the sheds. But the record shows that the government took no action against Ridglan Farms. Indeed, the existence of burning dogs only came to light years later, due to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests made by the American Anti-Vivisection Society. To the government, a mass of dead, burning animals was just business as usual. And business as usual meant covering up the industry’s crimes. 

When I first read about the 2006 whistleblower at Ridglan Farms, I had so many questions. What was her motivation? What happened to her after she filed the complaint? Where is she today? But these questions, like so many others about the vivisection industry, are shrouded in mystery. Because, little known to most Americans, our government has a long history of covering up the abuse of animals in labs, including 60,000 dogs. 

Most famously, in 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci denied that he or the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were involved in a disturbing experiment in which beagle puppies were swarmed with hungry sandflies. However, it was recently revealed by the Washington Post that Fauci and the NIH lied about their involvement – and that they removed the sandfly experiment from the NIH’s public grants database to prevent reporters and the public from discovering the lie. 

The NIH’s deception in 2021, however, was only the most recent example of the government cover-up of animal cruelty in labs. In 2017, months before I entered Ridglan Farms, the USDA abruptly purged its entire database of thousands of public inspection records, citing the “privacy rights of individuals with whom we come in contact.” This made no sense. Inspection reports are funded by taxpayers and required under federal law to be public. Any private information is redacted from the records. But the USDA proceeded with the purge despite its bizarre rationale. Unsurprisingly, with no public transparency, enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act plummeted in 2018, dropping from $3.8 million in civil penalties in 2016 to merely $163,000 through October of 2018.¹

This is why I and a team of activists entered Ridglan Farms in April of 2017. We knew that the industry and government were colluding to cover up the torture of thousands of dogs. And we knew that the only way to expose this torture was to do a real inspection at Ridglan Farms. And torture is exactly what we found, as I’ve described in prior newsletters. Animals were going psychotic in small cages, afflicted with painful foot injuries from a lifetime on metal wire, and suffering by the thousands in ammonia-choked industrial sheds. We openly rescued three injured beagles because, with the government asleep at the wheel, we had no other choice. 

But even after we achieved national media attention with our open rescue – including a deeply-investigated report by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald – the government did not even bother to respond to our complaints about animal cruelty; instead, in 2021, it charged me and my team members with crimes. The charges were only dropped in March 2024 after the industry realized that putting us in prison would hinder, rather than help, their efforts to cover up the abuse of dogs.

And that cover-up continues. In the years since I first stepped into Ridglan, even more disturbing evidence of abuse has been uncovered. This includes previously undisclosed records, which we obtained through FOIA requests, showing that government inspectors on four separate occasions from 2016-2023 found abuses virtually identical to the ones we saw in our open rescue from 2017, including dogs exhibiting “abnormal, stereotypical behaviors” such as “circling, pacing, and wall bouncing.”

It includes documents showing disturbing and unnecessary experiments being performed at Ridglan, including the injection of dozens of dogs with rabies at the behest of pharmaceutical giant Merck in 2018. 

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But most chilling is the testimony of two new whistleblowers from inside the company, who have come forward with evidence of surgical mutilation of dogs without anesthesia; fights breaking out between animals that left some dogs ripped to pieces in their pens; and a sick puppy thrown into a freezer bag to suffocate to death. 

All of these abuses have been reported to the authorities. And, once again, all of these abuses have been ignored. In the face of complaints we filed in 2018, 2022, 2023, and 2024, the District Attorney’s office in Dane County has failed to provide a response. 

Until now. 

On March 20, we filed a petition with the Dane County Circuit Court to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and charge Ridglan Farms, as a corporation, with serious crimes. And, for the first time since I stepped foot in Dane County in 2017, the District Attorney’s office finally responded. Indeed, the head District Attorney himself, Izamel Ozanne, showed up in court for a hearing regarding the special prosecutor petition on April 18. But despite the public support for the petition – our side of the courtroom was crowded to the point that we ran out of seats – Ozanne chose to sit on the mostly-empty side of the courtroom with Ridglan’s attorneys. He chose to stand for dog torture rather than dog rescue. 

When I asked if he would talk to me after the hearing, he curtly responded, “No” and walked away. Then he saw a journalist standing next to us scribbling on a pad. He turned back towards me and said, “I’ll meet you in my office in 10 minutes.” I am not entitled, at this point, to share all the contents of that conversation. But I will say this: nothing that he said convinced me that Dane County’s practices would change. What that means is that the Dane County District Attorney’s cover-up of animal cruelty will continue. 

But that is not the end of the story because outside of the District Attorney’s office there are signs of change. The judge in the special prosecutor proceeding, Judge Rhonda Lanford, has made a number of high-integrity decisions upholding the rule of law, including barring Ridglan from intervening in an effort to halt the proceeding. Ridglan, increasingly pressured by the case, filed an emergency lawsuit against the judge, seeking to have the entire proceeding sealed and held in secret. (You can read our response to that lawsuit here.) I am increasingly confident that Judge Lanford will do the right thing and follow the law.

And she will not be alone. Across the country, in a very similar case, a federal judge in Virginia ruled against a beagle research and production company, Envigo, and issued a record $35 million fine. You can hear more about how this happened in my recent YouTube/podcast episode with PETA’s Alka Chandna. 

Perhaps the most important sign of change, however, is that the whistleblowers in 2024 will have support – and faith that the legal system will do the right thing. On July 10, they plan to testify in open court to support our petition to have a special prosecutor appointed. If we prevail, it may be the end of not just Ridglan, but all experiments on dogs. That is a night and day difference between what happened for a lonely whistleblower in 2006. 

We may never know what happened to the whistleblower who reported burning dogs back then. But if she’s out there, I’d have this to say to her, “Thank you.” The government may have covered up your complaint. But no lie can live forever. And because you spoke the truth, and inspired others (including me) to do the same, thousands of dogs may be saved. 

What’s up this week

• On July 10, we will be presenting evidence of crimes committed by Ridglan Farms in a Dane County court — and we will need your help. If you’re following this newsletter, you already know a lot of the story. But we will be putting out some calls to action next week, to encourage some of the most powerful people in Wisconsin to support our effort to protect the Ridglan dogs. Stay tuned for more.

• If you’re near Chicago, and interested in joining an Open Rescue Experience (ORE) in late summer, let us know by filling out this form! The ORE is probably the best and most engaging training I’ve ever organized, and we’re going to be taking it on the road for the rest of 2024. The goal is to recruit and develop leaders for open rescue — not just in frontlines work, but in all the various areas that we need leadership in order to save animals from violent places. If we get 6 more people to sign up for the proposed Chicago training, we will very likely organize it!

• I’m still behind on writing; apologies! It’s been one of the themes of my life that the urgent keeps replacing the important. Making public commitments is a way to overcome this obstacle, and I’ve done so in the past in regard to my writing. But the commitments I’ve made have been non-specific. So here is what I am going to commit to, specifically. We will release a newsletter to accompany each YouTube episode/podcast on Tuesdays and Fridays. Coming up next Tuesday will be our call to action for the Ridglan hearing on July 10.

That’s all for this edition. Stay tuned for more.