On April 18, hundreds of activists descended upon Ridglan Farms in Wisconsin. Ridglan has long been notorious among animal rights groups for the horrific conditions in which it keeps thousands of beagles, which Ridglan breeds into the world to sell to corporations and research facilities engaged in gruesome and often fatal government-funded experiments. These activists have been working to shut down Ridglan and rescue these dogs for almost a full decade. (An investigative article I wrote back in 2018, titled "Bred to Suffer," documents these industrialized horrors and was largely enabled by their heroic work.)

Despite how dark and grim all of this is, their effort had not just a happy ending but also a rather inspirational one. Dramatic footage of these activists being violently attacked by police as well as private security hired by Ridglan went viral, and brought widespread attention to the systematized abuses of dogs by Ridglan. That, in turn, engendered one of the most trans-ideological and bipartisan coalitions – composed of political officials, media figures, and ordinary citizens from every political camp – uniting to demand that Ridglan be shut down and the beagles released. I wrote in detail about this remarkable public reaction last week.