(Beth Clifton collage)
Winner Susan Crawford comes from the county bench bringing Ridglan to justice. Loser Schimel has no evident history of standing up against animal use industries.
BLUE MOUNDS, Wisconsin––Three thousand beagles at the Ridglan Farms biomedical research breeding facility 30 miles west of Madison, Wisconsin, may be among the ultimate winners of the expensively contested April 1, 2025 election of Dane County circuit judge Susan Crawford, to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Crawford defeated Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County circuit judge and former Republican state attorney general who was heavily backed by billionaire Elon Musk and by U.S. president Donald Trump.
Musk, incidentally, himself funds animal experiments.
(See What do Trump & Musk budget cuts mean for laboratory animal use?)
(Beth Clifton collage)
Crawford win keeps 4-3 liberal edge––but that is not all
“Crawford’s victory means liberals will maintain a 4-3 advantage on the court for at least another year heading into a term when it could decide cases about abortion rights, unions, and collective bargaining rights, and congressional maps and redistricting,” explained Adam Edelman for NBC News.
But Crawford’s win may mean more than that for the Ridglan beagles, if and when current legal action involving Ridglan Farms animal care reaches the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Another Dane County judge, Rhonda Lanford, in February 2025 assigned La Crosse County district attorney Tim Gruenke to investigate whether criminal charges should be brought against Ridglan Farms.
(Beth Clifton collage)
200 dogs per staff person
“According to court documents, Ridglan Farms is accused of mistreating the beagles and keeping them in inhumane, unsanitary conditions,” reported Natalie Sopyla for Wisconsin Spectrum News 1, in Milwaukee.
That might be something of an understatement. Opened in 1966, Ridglan Farms looks after the 3,000 beagles on its premises with a staff of just 16 people, a ratio of nearly 200 dogs per person.
Responding to petitions from the local organizations Dane4Dogs and Alliance for Animals, along with California attorney and Simple Heart blogger Wayne Hsiung, Judge Lanford on January 9, 2025 ordered the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate their allegations against Ridglan Farms, one of two remaining U.S. breeders of beagles for biomedical research.
(Photo taken by a Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade & Consumer Protection inspector at Ridglan Farms)
Ridglan claimed exemption from state cruelty law
The Dane County Sheriff’s Office contended, as local and state agencies have for decades, including throughout the Schimel term as Wisconsin attorney general, that because the Ridglan beagle breeding kennel is a federally licensed research facility, it is exempt from Wisconsin animal cruelty laws.
Judge Lanford was not having any of that.
(See Judge orders special prosecutor to probe beagle breeder Ridglan Farms.)
The Tim Gruenke findings have yet to be released.
But, reported Bryan Polcyn of FOX6 News in Milwaukee on March 18, 2025, “Last week, the Wisconsin veterinary examining board voted to place restrictions on [Ridglan] surgical procedures while it considers a possible license suspension for Richard Van Domelen, Ridglan’s lead veterinarian.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Enter Wayne Hsiung
“In 2017,” Polcyn recalled, “animal rights activists working for Direct Action Everywhere entered the facility in the middle of the night on a mission to draw attention to what was happening inside. Videos they recorded shows rows upon rows of stacked metal cages filled with 1-2 beagles each inside a long, windowless metal shed. The activists removed three beagles from their cages and left, then published the evidence of what they’d done.
“One of the activists – former Northwestern University law professor Wayne Hsiung – called the operation an ‘open rescue.’”
Said Hsiung, “If the only way we can get any attention on what’s happening inside Ridglan Farms is for them to prosecute us, then we have to do that.”
Wayne Hsiung at Ridglan Farms.
(Direct Action Everywhere photo)
Courtroom reversal
Continued Polcyn, “In 2021, four years after the activists removed the dogs, the Dane County district attorney filed criminal charges against Hsiung and two others for burglary and theft.
“The case was set for trial on March 22, 2024. But just two weeks before it started, Ridglan Farms asked the district attorney to drop the charges.
“Hsiung and his colleagues objected to the charges being dismissed. On April 15, 2024, he and a group called Dane4Dogs turned the tables. They filed a petition for the appointment of a special prosecutor to charge Ridglan Farms with mistreatment of animals,” the petition Judge Lanford ultimately granted.
“In October 2024,” Polcyn recounted, “former employees of Ridglan testified to participating in painful and bloody surgical procedures to remove dogs’ swollen eye glands. They had no veterinary license and testified that they used no anesthesia, but conducted the procedures at the direction of Dr. Van Domelen.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Potential repercussions for other labs
Polcyn noted that that Ridglan case could have repercussions going much farther.
“According to the USDA,” Polcyn explained, “more than 28,000 animals are housed in laboratories across Wisconsin. That does not include mice, rats, and fish, whom USDA does not track.”
By far the most animals used in Wisconsin for biomedical research and testing, more than 75%, Polcyn said, “are housed at Labcorp, a private drug development laboratory in Madison.”
Blogged Hsiung on March 25, 2025, “One year ago, I was facing 16 years in prison for rescuing a blind beagle puppy from Ridglan Farms. Today, we are on the brink of bringing felony charges against Ridglan, and rescuing thousands of beagles from a lifetime in a 2’ x 4’ cage.”
(Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade & Consumer Protection photo)
“The power of scalable change”
But Hsiung focused on how the Ridglan case “shows the power of scalable change — a mechanism that can transform seemingly small actions, such as rescuing a beagle, into systemic impacts, e.g., ending all experiments on dogs.
Scalable change, Hsiung explained, requires two factors.
The first, Hsiung said, “ is the existence of feedback loops. When change on Day 1 feeds into more change on Day 2, that creates a feedback loop.
“Most forms of institutional change exhibit feedback loops,” Hsiung observed. “Feedback loops are particularly relevant in efforts at legal change. Indeed, in some cases, a victory in court on Day 1 requires a victory on Day 2,” because judges usually follow precedent.
Wayne Hsiung with Julie the blind beagle rescued from Ridglan Farms.
“Exponential growth”
“The second factor in scalable change,” Hsiung said, “is exponential growth,” meaning that “each additional unit of effort leads to more than a unit of change.
“Processes that exhibit exponential growth can start small but soon become massive,” Hsung offered, paralleling the argument for seeking “stepwise, incremental change” advanced by Henry Spira (1927-1998), whose success in ending sex experiments on cats at the American Museum of Natural History in 1976 is generally regarded as the beginning of modern animal rights activism.
(See Henry Spira, 71, founder of the animal rights movement.)
“It is crucial for advocates to understand if they are part of an engine for scalable change,” Hsiung emphasized. “When problems are as large as animal exploitation – involving tens of billions of victims spread across the globe – the size of the solution has to meet the size of the problem. Anything smaller than scalable change misses out on the largest opportunities for impact.
(Wayne Hsiung photo)
“Countervailing influence”
“Just as important, however, is that scalable change solves one of the fundamental bottlenecks in social movements: countervailing influence,” Hsiung pointed out.
“For every incremental effort we make, there is a reaction by the system that threatens to reverse progress. For example, we may persuade one person to become vegan, only to see two other vegans revert to their former lifestyles. Scalable change can solve this problem by creating momentum that overwhelms countervailing influence.
“But that brings us to the most important question: how do we know if we’re working with scalable change? The Ridglan case offers some insights,” Hsiung suggested.
“The first is that true scalable change must answer the Day 2 problem. How are our successes on Day 1 feeding into our successes on Day 2?
Wayne Hsiung arrest by Sonoma County Sheriff’s office at Sunrise Farms protest.
(Facebook and Instagram screenshot from video)
“Always ask what happens on Day 2”
“In the Ridglan case,” Hsiung recounted, “the initial rescue and prosecution led to massive attention, including a number of viral videos.
“That attention inspired action including protests, marches, and – crucially – a petition for a special prosecutor joined by two local groups, Dane4Dogs and Alliance for Animals.
“That action, in turn, inspired a new round of attention, from prestigious scientific journals to an avalanche of local media outlets.
“So, if we are working on a campaign,” Hsiung recommended, “we should always ask: what happens on Day 2 after we win on Day 1? And what happens on Day 10? Day 1,000? All the way to your final goal. If we don’t have any answer to these questions, we are not working with scalable change.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Momentum
“The second lesson from the Ridglan case,” Hsiung pronounced, “is that momentum is far more important than early success because momentum is a sign of exponential growth.
“We only rescued three dogs from Ridglan, and early progress was hard. But we thought every small sign of progress would make future efforts dramatically more effective.
“And that is exactly what happened. From politicians to Ridglan customers, each incremental victory made the next one easier.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Hard campaigns that have rapid momentum”
“Too often,” Hsiung wrote, “activists ignore momentum and focus only on early success. The reality is that, in most opportunities for scalable change, early success is a red herring. It suggests you are doing work that targets low-hanging fruit, but probably does not have the momentum to scale.
Merritt & Beth Clifton visit friends in jail. (Beth Clifton collage)
“What you want is not early success,” Hsiung said, contradicting conventional activist belief, “but hard campaigns that have rapid momentum, building a high-energy activist base for your campaigns.
“We knew, if we were able to make some legal progress, that progress would inspire the momentum to scale.”
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