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Marshall BioResources, with Its 20,000 Captive Beagles, in the Spotlight

After the collapse of Envigo and then Ridglan Farms, we turn our attention to the remaining Beagle Barons and to our Cruelty-Free Medicines campaign

By Wayne Pacelle

T omorrow, I head to Albany, N.Y., to speak at a rally that starts a two-week-long protest of Marshall BioResources (MBR) that includes a 200-mile trek west to its massive animal housing complex. The largest remaining breeder and supplier of dogs to laboratories, MBR confines 20,000 or so beagles and tens of thousands of cats and ferrets for sale to laboratories.

Our demand, and that of the coalition of animal protection groups and scientists joining in this effort, is simple: get out of this business of tormenting dogs for drug screening, chemical testing, and other purposes presented as scientific pursuits.

Earlier this year, Ridglan Farms became the face of America's dog experimentation industry. After years of investigations, litigation, political pressure, and public outrage, Ridglan relinquished its license to breed and sell dogs for research on July 1, 2026. After six decades of breeding beagles for use in laboratories, the facility is now closed for good. The Center for a Humane Economy led the negotiations that freed the dogs and ultimately produced the shutdown of Ridglan.

The rescue of more than 2,100 beagles was game-changing. But from the outset, the larger goal was never simply to save one group of dogs; it was to dismantle the system that produces them and puts them at risk. The events that transpired at the company’s headquarters in Blue Mounds, Wisc., have triggered a national discussion – better yet, a reckoning related to the use of beagles for these purposes.

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MBR and Like-Minded Companies Produce Suffering, not Health and Well-Being

The United States still maintains a commercial pipeline that breeds, sells, transports, and abuses thousands of dogs for taxpayer-funded and private laboratory experiments every year.

Marshall BioResources is the dominant supplier of dogs, cats, and ferrets to labs. USDA records from 2024 indicate the company housed more than 22,000 dogs and puppies across its facilities – ten times the number of dogs once housed at Ridglan.

Charles River Laboratories, a publicly traded company, is involved not only in mass breeding but also in-house testing and experimentation. One of the world's largest contract research organizations, it sits at the center of the laboratory animal supply chain—breeding dogs and other animals, importing captive-bred and wild-caught primates, supplying laboratories with various species, and conducting tests for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and chemical companies around the world. According to analyses of USDA records, Charles River maintained roughly 9,000 dogs at its facilities in 2024.

Other major players remain active as well, including Inotiv, which acquired Envigo in 2021. Federal authorities ultimately removed approximately 4,000 beagles from Envigo's Cumberland, Virginia breeding facility after documenting extensive Animal Welfare Act violations and deplorable conditions. In 2024, Envigo pleaded guilty to federal animal welfare and environmental crimes, and Inotiv guaranteed more than $35 million in penalties and corrective actions—the largest resolution ever reached in an Animal Welfare Act case.

The Entrenched Animal Research Industrial Complex

As long as universities, contract laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, and federal agencies continue purchasing dogs for research, commercial breeders will supply them. What’s more, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) continues to fund dog experiments at universities, research hospitals, and contract laboratories across the country through grants and contracts worth millions of dollars annually.

As regulators and pharmaceutical companies increasingly adopt human-relevant methods, the economic foundation supporting large commercial dog breeding facilities is starting to fracture. In recent years, the FDA has formally embraced human-relevant non-animal methods, including organoids, organs-on-chips, computational toxicology, and AI-driven models. Much of this shift was triggered by the enactment of the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 in 2022, which removed an 84-year-old federal requirement that new medicines be tested in animals before human trials. Led by the Center and Animal Wellness Action, that reform has since prompted FDA guidance, agency investments, and broader adoption of non-animal methods across the biomedical research community.

Meanwhile, NIH itself recently announced a major investment in human-based research technologies. Many pharmaceutical companies are also investing aggressively in these approaches because animal models often fail to predict human outcomes. More than 90 percent of drugs that appear safe and effective in animal studies ultimately fail in human clinical trials.

Yet at the same time, NIH continues to fund thousands of experiments on dogs each year through grants supporting traditional animal research.

A house divided against itself in this way cannot stand.

Regulators acknowledge that modern human-based methods are more predictive of human biology. That means that financing dog experiments raises questions related not just to matters of ethics and wise spending of tax dollars, but also to sound and credible science.

A growing bipartisan coalition in Congress recognizes this disconnect and is now pursuing legislation to end federal funding for the breeding, purchase, procurement, transport, importation, and use of dogs and cats in federally funded research.

Ridglan's closure proves that change is possible. But it also exposes a larger truth: the problem was never limited to one breeding supply company. It is a far larger, interconnected commercial system sustained by taxpayer dollars, outdated scientific practices, and institutional inertia.

Until that pipeline is dismantled—from commercial breeding to federal funding - the last beagle barons will continue supplying America's laboratories.

Over these next two weeks, we’ll make the case to the American public that the MBR’s business model is archaic, inhumane, and unworthy of anyone’s business.

At the same time, we’ll be appealing to Congress to align NIH’s spending plan with 21 st -century science and morality. The animals, long at the center of drug screening protocols and other scientific pursuits, must be retired. In their place, superior methods of testing, grounded in human biology, must replace them, allowing innovative science to flourish.

When that happens, we’ll produce better palliatives and cures for diseases; we’ll have safer and less expensive drugs, and we’ll no longer leave a trail of animal victims in our research pursuits and practices.

Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action [[link removed]] and the Center for a Humane Economy [[link removed]] , is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, “ The Bond [[link removed]] ” and “ The Humane Economy [[link removed]] .”

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