When Is It Permissible to Rescue a Dog in Peril?
When Is It Permissible to Rescue a Dog in Peril?
In an aborted Wisconsin case, animal rights activists sought to defend their decision to break the law.
THE TRIAL WAS SUPPOSED TO take place this week. The three animal rights activists and dozens of their supporters had booked their plane tickets. One of the defendants, Paul Darwin Picklesimer of Berkeley, California, was packing up his things for long-term safekeeping in case he didn’t come back. “I hope I won’t go to actual prison,” Picklesimer told me, “but I’m willing to accept what comes.”
Picklesimer and his two co-defendants, Wayne Hsiung, of Berkeley, and Eva Hamer, who lives in Portland, Oregon, were charged with one count each of felony burglary and felony theft for having broken into Ridglan Farms, a dog-breeding and research facility in rural Dane County, Wisconsin, and leaving with three of its more than 3,000 beagles, in 2017. They faced a maximum penalty of sixteen years in prison and $35,000 in fines.
Jury selection was set for Monday, March 18, with the trial supposed to take all week. More than a hundred animal rights activists from around the country were expected to attend. The defendants intended to use the trial to argue that what they did was justified, indeed morally necessary. They never got the chance.
Late in the day before a final pretrial hearing on March 8, the Dane County DA’s office filed a motion to dismiss all charges against the activists. Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Keyes explained in a filing that the prosecutors had been urged by “the victims in this case,” meaning the proprietors of Ridglan Farms, to drop the charges. These victims were said to have “indicated they had concerns for their physical safety, as well as for their business, if the case proceeded to trial.”
The activists, from a California-based group called Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), had hoped to show video, taken during the April 2017 break-in at Ridglan Farms, of row upon row of dogs in cages, stacked two high, some barking incessantly, some spinning in circles. According to a DxE report released shortly afterward, “The harsh fluorescent light appeared to be continuous. There were no soft beds, no toys, no access to sunlight, no human companionship.”
Picklesimer’s attorney, Chris Carraway, told me he hoped jurors would imagine themselves in this situation and “feel the need to do the same thing.” He filed a motion arguing that the defendants “found themselves face to face with dogs that were needlessly suffering” and accordingly “acted upon their compassion and conscience.” Hsiung filed a separate motion seeking to present a religious freedom defense based on his “deeply-held Buddhist beliefs and practices.”
Carraway is a staff attorney with the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, an initiative of the Sturm College of Law at the private University of Denver. He compares those who engage in the “open rescue” of animals to someone who breaks a car window to free a dog from a sweltering car—something it is legal in many states for concerned passersby to do. “That same logic applies when you come across, you know, a baby chicken that is dying on the floor of the factory farm due to neglect or terrorized and mentally tortured dogs stacked in cages inside a place like Ridglan Farms,” he told me.
As Carraway sees it, the urge to intervene in such situations “really shows us the best part of ourselves”—our desire “to stop and alleviate suffering wherever we see it.”
THE WISCONSIN CASE IS ONE OF SEVERAL nationally in which DxE activists have sought to test such arguments. In October 2022, a jury in Utah acquitted Picklesimer and Hsiung of felony burglary and theft charges for entering a factory farm owned by Smithfield, the nation’s largest pork producer, and leaving with two piglets. The verdict came as a major surprise: Not only did the jury hail from an ag-friendly rural county, but the judge in the case didn’t allow them to hear or consider any testimony from the activists about why they had gone to the farm. Apparently, just seeing the conditions was enough.
Hsiung told the New York Times that the verdict will force large companies that mistreat animals to realize that “the public will hold them accountable, even in places like Southern Utah.”
Baywatch star Alexandra Paul had a similar reaction after she and a co-defendant were found not guilty of misdemeanor theft charges for stealing two chickens from a truck outside a poultry farm in March 2023. In a statement, Paul said it was possible to shape history “by using our privileges to confront unjust industries that exploit animals.”
The activists have also encountered setbacks. In November, after six days of deliberation, a California jury convicted Hsiung on several counts for “rescuing” dozens of chickens and ducks from two California farms. He was sentenced to two years of probation and 90 days in jail. Hsiung remains free while his case is being appealed, in part because the judge refused to allow him to present evidence of animal cruelty at the farms, and in part because he was barred from mounting a “necessity” defense (claiming he acted out of necessity to protect the animals from harm, which is legal in California in some circumstances).
On March 7, the same day she asked for the case to be dismissed, Dane County prosecutor Keyes filed a blistering response to Carraway’s motion to present affirmative defenses, including a similar “necessity” argument to the one Hsiung was barred from making in his trial. Keyes referred to these defenses as “lunacy” and “foolishness” and bemoaned what she called “disturbing attempts by the defendant to convert this criminal proceeding into an illegal and shameful publicity event.”
At the repurposed pretrial hearing the next day, Carraway, representing Picklesimer, and Hsiung, representing himself, both argued against dismissal of the charges. (Hamer took no position on the dismissal, but her Madison-based attorney noted for the record that the three defendants had rung up nearly $100,000 in expenses in preparation for a trial that was canceled ten days before it was set to start.)
Had the case against the DxE activists gone to trial, Carraway argued, the jury and public would have seen that what is happening inside Ridglan Farms constitutes “unlawful animal cruelty.” He said dismissing the charges would allow the facility to “continue to harm animals and violate the law.” It is in line with the Dane County District Attorney’s Office’s past record of “turning a blind eye” to credible allegations of animal cruelty, he said, alleging two recent examples.
Ridglan Farms did not respond to my requests for comment. But in a “Victim Impact Statement” submitted to the court in December 2021, it cited security threats “due to the attention brought to us by these three DxE members’ actions,” saying they’ve made “untrue, damaging statements [about Ridglan] to raise money for their campaign.”
Hsiung told Dane County Judge Mario White that being charged with felony offenses caused him “enormous expense in time and emotional toil.” He said dismissing the charges just before trial left some “incredibly important legal and moral issues” unaddressed, including whether “people have the freedom of conscience to help animals when they’re suffering.” He added: “We did what we did because the government is not acting to protect the most vulnerable beings on this planet. And that has to change.”
Keyes, in turn, said the dismissal was being requested due to “the death threats and the coming after the business which the victims have now started enduring.” She told the court these threats had been “ramping up” as the trial approached.
Judge White acknowledged he had some authority to “either grant or deny” the motion but said he was obligated under the state constitution to “take into consideration the wishes of the victims” and dismissed the case. As the prosecution asked, he did so without prejudice, meaning the charges could be refiled at a future date.
Although the judge’s dismissal of the case appeared to be motivated by the claim that Ridglan Farms had experienced death threats in connection with this upcoming trial, no evidence that anyone at the company had received such threats was presented. Carraway told me after the dismissal he found the idea implausible: “The defendants here are committed to nonviolence.” I asked Ismael Ozanne, the elected district attorney of Dane County, what evidence his office had of death threats before stating in court that they had occurred.
Ozanne, in an email, replied: “I was told by the victims in the presence of their attorney that they had received the threats. I have no reason at this point to doubt the statements made at that meeting. I believe the Sheriff’s Office will be looking into those matters.”
I asked the sheriff’s office about the status of its investigation into death threats received by Ridglan Farms. Office spokesperson Elise Schaffer told me, on March 13, that “we are looking into some recent threats” but did not clarify if they were death threats, as the DA’s office stated.
Hsiung told me the dismissal affirmed something he and his co-defendants “always knew to be true,” namely: “If a jury of our peers heard testimony and saw the videos from inside Ridglan Farms, they would revolt against the notion that we’re the ones who have committed crimes, rather than the company.”
RIDGLAN FARMS IS LOCATED on a remote country road in the town of Blue Mounds, about 30 miles from Madison. The facility has no identifying signage, although the sound of many dogs barking can be heard from the road. Founded in 1966, the business sells “purpose bred” beagles to researchers across the country. (Beagles are researchers’ dogs of choice because of their gentle and trusting nature.) It has “a full-time staff veterinarian/facility manager” and about two dozen employees.
As of last December, the Ridglan Farms breeding operation had 3,110 dogs, about half adults and half puppies. A recent annual report for the facility recorded 759 dogs being used for on-site research, nearly all in experiments that involve “no pain, distress, or use of pain-relieving drugs.”
But in a mocked-up criminal complaint activists presented to the Dane County DA’s office on Monday, Hsiung claimed former employees have reported that dogs at the facility were subjected to an experiment in which they were “forcibly restrained and had glands cut out of their eye without any painkillers or veterinary supervision,” among other “surgical mutilations.”
Moreover, there seems little doubt that dogs from the facility have, once sold, been subjected to distressful experiments. In the early 1970s, 54 beagles from Ridglan Farms were made to ingest different brands of laundry detergent for a study called “Effects of the Ingestion of Various Commercial Detergent Products by Beagle Dogs and Pigs.” The study abstract reports that Electrosol was the most lethal detergent to the dogs, followed by the Sears brand.
More recently, in 2015, 36 dogs from Ridglan (half male, half female, all five to six months old) were subjected to what the study said was “13 weeks of dosing” to gauge the effects of taking amounts of a new artificial sweetener; one “high-dose female” had to be “euthanized in extremis” after 17 days. In 2016, a nine-year-old “retired female breeder beagle” from Ridglan Farms was used to “model” a rotator cuff injury over a period of ten weeks. In 2019, ten beagles from Ridglan were induced to have an hour-long stroke, which led to “high mortality.” The dogs in all these studies were eventually euthanized, as is common in animal research.
According to a USDA inspection report from December, “Some of the weaned puppies and preweaning-aged puppies in 11 enclosures were observed to have feet or legs pass through the smooth-coated mesh floors when they walked.” This same problem had been flagged by Wisconsin regulators in a 2016 inspection report, which also found that “a number of adult dogs in the facility were displaying prominent stereotypical behaviors,” including “circling, pacing, and wall bouncing.”
The “rescue” at Ridglan farms took place in the early morning hours of April 17, 2017. The three beagles were given names instead of numbers, and filmed afterward romping together on grass, something unknown to them at Ridglan Farms. One of the dogs, Julie, is blind. The other two are Anna and Lucy. All are still alive.
IN MAY 2018, THE INTERCEPT RAN an article by Glenn Greenwald on the break-in at Ridglan Farms under the headline “Born to Suffer.” Rebekah Robinson, a Madison resident, was “appalled” to learn from the article that this facility operated so near to where she lived. She joined with others to form Dane4Dogs, which set out to pass a ballot initiative that would label the Ridglan facility a “public nuisance”—a primarily symbolic vote that could nonetheless make larger-scale civic interventions against such facilities possible.
The facility’s owners opposed the measure. “They flew in experts from Washington, D.C., to provide informational sessions and they spent a lot of money,” Robinson recalls. The effort failed, garnering just over 40 percent of the vote. Since then, a number of Wisconsin communities, including two in Dane County, have passed bans on dog and cat research and breeding facilities. No actual facilities have been shut down as a result.
Dane4Dogs has remained active. Recently, they produced a report claiming that more dogs are annually bred for research in Dane County by Ridglan Farms and another local researcher known as Labcorp than are adopted out by the Dane County Humane Society and all other local shelters and rescues combined.
Robinson is heartened by the successful votes on the bans, and by the closure of a beagle-breeding operation in Virginia following citations from regulators in 2022: “There is precedence for shutting down these facilities, and I’m hopeful Wisconsin will act, too.” Now a resident of Oakland, California, Robinson returned to Madison to attend events this week that are happening in lieu of the now-cancelled trial.
On Monday, about three dozen activists led by Hsiung showed up at the Dane County District Attorney’s Office to demand that Ridglan Farms be prosecuted for animal cruelty. They presented Hsiung’s “criminal complaint” as well as reports from a veterinarian and a former federal prosecutor alleging that conditions at the facility constituted violations of the state’s animal cruelty laws. Hsiung spoke with an investigator from the office, Ryan Greeno, who promised that an attorney would review the materials and respond.
“This is pretty thorough,” Greeno told Hsiung in reference to the submitted materials, when asked whether anything else was needed. “Obviously, you have a lot of support. I appreciate all of that.” Hsiung afterward called it “the most substantive conversation we’ve had” about Ridglan Farms with anyone from law enforcement. (Earlier, Greeno had been listed as a witness for the prosecution in the case set for trial.)
Robinson calls these events “an opportunity to shine a light on what is happening at Ridglan Farms but, more broadly, to shine a light on the fact that dog experimentation is still legal, which most people don’t realize. I think America, in general, is a dog-loving nation. And I believe that when we raise awareness of the issue, action will follow.”
This is not an issue that needs to divide us along political lines. It may even be one that can unite people who otherwise don’t agree on anything. The day will come when dogs are no longer used in often invasive, painful, and fatal research, robbing them of ordinary doggie lives. For the dogs, that day cannot come soon enough.
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