I was released from Dane County jail this week where I was held for two nights for my participation in Sunday’s mass rescue at Ridglan Farms in Wisconsin. I wrote post in jail and posted it on my Substack shortly after. 

It is freezing in the rain, with bits of hail coming down on me. I am surrounded by police, accompanied by over twenty activists at Ridglan Farms, a notorious dog testing and breeding facility. The police tell us if we leave the facility, they won’t arrest us. We are not sure what to do.

Two days ago, I joined nearly a hundred activists in walking into the second largest dog breeding and research facility in the United States. We walked onto the property in broad daylight to rescue the animals inside. Ridglan Farms has been a site of public controversy for years for confining thousands of beagles for cruel experiments, including force feeding them commercial laundry detergent and surgically ripping out their eye glands without anesthesia. The abuses are so bad that a local court ordered them to be prosecuted for felony animal abuse.

Under immense public pressure, the district attorney cut a deal with Ridglan: avoid prosecution if you relinquish your license to sell dogs for research. Ridglan said yes. But the deal still allowed the company to conduct research on animals and did nothing to protect the roughly two thousand dogs still trapped at the facility who could be euthanized or simply sold off for further experimentation.

In response, hundreds of people, including nearly every animal rescue and humane society in Wisconsin, signed an open letter to District Attorney Ismael Ozanne asking him to protect the dogs currently trapped at Ridglan.

The district attorney refused to act. So we did.

Around 8:30am on Sunday morning, our convoy of six passenger vans pulled up to Ridglan Farms. About a hundred of us entered the facility, using angle grinders and crowbars to cut through fencing and enter buildings that held beagles for research. There were too many of us for Ridglan employees to stop, and even as police arrived, we were able to remove twenty-two beagles who were successfully loaded into vans and taken to safety.

Under normal conditions, I would be deeply uncomfortable with our actions. I tend to be a rule-follower by nature. I was a Boy Scout growing up and played guitar for years in my church choir. In the weeks leading up to the rescue, I feared how it would look for us to use sledgehammers and crowbars to break into a building, even if it was necessary to help those inside. But as I sit now after my second night in jail, I know that what we did was not just morally right, but legally right.

Pursuant to state and federal law, it is permissible to take otherwise unlawful actions under the “necessity doctrine” to prevent a greater evil or significant bodily harm to someone else. The question now before the courts, in the case of myself and dozens of other activists who took nonviolent action to protect dogs who were victims of felony abuse, is whether animals are “someone,” or merely “something.”

That question is at the heart of why we are here. For far too long, our legal system has treated animals as mere things to use and abuse. They are confined by the millions across the country in tiny metal cages too small to stand up or turn around. They are packed into trucks and cargo ships huddling in their own feces to be torn apart at slaughterhouses. And in the case of the Ridglan dogs, they are injected with rabies and forced to live their entire lives in a two-by-four foot wire cage.

That has to stop. That is why we are here: to directly rescue animals from harm, even if that means going to jail. If we can nonviolently draw attention to corporate animal abuse, we can challenge the treatment of animals as property under the law and drive a broader conversation about whether animals are simple objects or rather sentient creatures worthy of dignity and respect.

This is a difficult fight. But for the thousands of Ridglan dogs, and the countless other animals trapped in cages around the world, it is a fight worth having.

Before my arrest, I was about to give up. After the initial dogs were rescued, over twenty of us walked back onto the property to gather more dogs. We were stopped by police as we attempted to re-enter one of the breeding buildings and were detained for over an hour. They told us if we didn’t leave, we would be arrested. I felt our group’s morale waning as we stood there, shivering under ice and rain, deciding what to do.

Then we heard the cries of dogs crying and wailing through an open window only feet away from where we stood. We decided then that we weren’t leaving — not without the dogs. I told my fellow activists, as well as the officers who detained us, “We wouldn’t want someone to give up on us. So we’re not going to give up on them.”

The officers looked away in seeming acknowledgement of their defeat. Shortly after, a dozen more police officers arrived and moved towards us with zip ties. They tied our hands behind our backs, put us into squad cars, and booked over twenty of us into Dane County jail where Wayne, Alexandra, Aditya, Raquel, and myself remain locked up on criminal charges awaiting a court hearing and possible felony trial.

We are eager to be a voice for animals in a court of law where their voices have been too long denied. I am confident that even if we continue to be trapped in a cage, that our actions will inspire a broader conversation that will help every animal be freed from theirs.

The Ridglan dogs are worth it.

I have been released from jail and am anticipating possible filing of criminal charges against myself and my fellow arrestees. The story of the mass rescue of beagles from Ridglan Farms has only begun. For more, follow me on Instagram as well as Wayne Hsiung, my co-arrestee and lead organizer of the Ridglan beagle rescue, on Substack and social media (Instagram and Facebook.

What’s Next (updated)

• We are RETURNING to Ridglan for a mass final rescue around April 12. Sign up here to learn more!
• I’ll be speaking next Thursday evening at Mox, an Effective Altruist co-working space in San Francisco, with attorney and fellow Ridglan arrestee Abie Brauner. Come through and bring your  dog-loving (or even animal ethics-skeptical) friends!