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Dear Friend,
Thousands of beagles are languishing at Ridglan Farms, a breeding facility with as many as 5,000 dogs who will soon be on their way to laboratories for painful invasive testing.
The beagle breed, so trusting and compliant, is the perfect experimental subject for people who don’t give a damn about the well-being of dogs. Companies like Ridglan profit by taking advantage of the good nature of the animals. They have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
State and federal inspections and whistleblower testimony show that the Wisconsin-based company confines dogs in barren, overcrowded cages. With little to no socialization. Untreated injuries, deficient veterinary care.
A recent court ruling found probable cause that Ridglan may have committed multiple criminal violations.
The good news is, there are only two of these massive beagle breeding facilities in the nation supplying dogs to labs. The other giant, though, is Marshall BioResources in upstate New York, with more than 20,000 beagles bred for this same purpose.
It’s cruelty masquerading as science.
Testing using animals is wildly inaccurate in predicting the human reaction to drugs. It fails 95% of the time.
With the campaign culminating in 2022, we lobbied Congress that beagle testing is inhumane and inefficient and unreliable. That year, Congress approved the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 to end an 84-year-old mandate requiring animal tests for all new drug approvals. That started us down the path of eliminating this senseless cruelty, thanks to especially capable leadership from U.S. Sens. Rand Paul, M.D., R-Ky., and Cory Booker, D-N.J.
With your help, we ended an 84-year-old mandate requiring animal tests for all new drug approvals.
And when Dr. Marty Makary became FDA commissioner in April, his very first major act — enabled by our reform — was the release of a landmark Roadmap to Reducing Animal Testing in Preclinical Safety Studies. This roadmap provides the blueprint for replacing animal tests with modern, human-relevant science. The bold plan seeks to make animal testing the exception, not the norm, for preclinical safety studies.
Makary says his aim is to replace animal models with new alternative methods (NAMs) like computational modeling, specialized engineered tissues, and human-specific systems.
The question remains, after Makary’s announcement, why are we still battling with Ridglan Farms and its house of horror for beagles?
Our nation should have learned from the horror show at Envigo in Virginia — a massive beagle-breeding operation where thousands of dogs were kept in squalid cages, denied care, and bred only to suffer in laboratories. Ridglan Farms is just one more cog in a broken system of inhumane, unreliable drug testing.
We must charge ahead, embracing 21st-century science: organs-on-a-chip, organoids, spheroids, artificial intelligence, and other advanced human-based platforms that can help scientists develop cures and treatments faster, safer, and more effectively.
These methods can spare animals and deliver results that patients can trust.
Your support is critical to keep the pressure on, to enforce the FDA roadmap, and to close the beagle mills that feed the pipeline of animal cruelty. Together, we can ensure that no contract labs, pharma companies, or university labs have any interest in buying the tormented beagles coming from Ridglan or Marshall BioResources.
We want these companies to be known in the history books as infamous examples of the way things used to be done, before we embraced moral purpose and sound science.
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