The Barbarism That Came With Paperwork

I The Emptying

On Wednesday, August 12, one hundred fifty-five beagles left Ridglan Farms in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. One hundred forty-one of them were puppies, about four months old. They were loaded for Florida, to Big Dog Ranch Rescue, which since late April has taken 2,115 dogs off that property. The rescue says the buildings behind them are now empty, after some sixty years—since roughly the time Congress passed the Animal Welfare Act in 1966.

The agreement Ridglan reached with a special prosecutor last October required it to surrender its state dog breeding and seller’s license by July 1. It expressly preserved the company’s ability to breed dogs for research conducted at its own facility. The buildings emptied only after Big Dog Ranch Rescue began moving dogs off the property in late April. The agreement did not require those transfers, and the state did not carry them out.

The nation’s second-largest beagle breeding operation has ceased to exist. Not one of its officers was charged with a crime.

Fifty-one people were.

They are charged over an action on the morning of March 15, when between fifty and sixty people walked onto the Ridglan property in bad weather and carried out twenty-two beagles; eight were later recovered by deputies. Four of them—Wayne Hsiung, Aditya Aswani, Michelle Lunsky, and Dean Wyrzykowski—face the full stack: burglary as party to a crime, a Class F felony carrying twelve and a half years; theft of property valued between ten and one hundred thousand dollars, a Class G felony carrying ten; felony criminal damage to property; attempted theft. Thirty-one years apiece. Forty-seven additional defendants face burglary. Hsiung’s trial is set for January, an autumn date having already slipped. He is a lawyer, and he estimates the prosecution will cost Dane County taxpayers more than one hundred thousand dollars per defendant. Across fifty-one people that is a seven-figure bill, run up by an office that never filed a single charge against the company.

Ridglan demanded the rescuers’ punishment and denied that credible evidence of cruelty had ever been presented. It pointed to state inspections that reported no animal-care issues. Judge Lanford’s twenty-three-page probable-cause decision, the state’s proposed 311 violations, and the special prosecutor’s own findings refute that denial.

Six weeks from the largest mobilization of his career, Hsiung is focused on an apple orchard in Wayne County, New York, behind which sits a compound most neighbors do not know exists.

II YPP5

The dog Hsiung carried out of Ridglan on March 15 came through a broken window with YPP5 stamped on him. Inside a Class A dealer’s licensed facility, YPP5 was an inventory position, the equivalent of a part number. He was a unit of stock in a licensed business, inspected on schedule. Ridglan valued each dog at about two thousand dollars, which is the number that turned a rescue into a Class G felony.

Hsiung adopted him. He named him James.

“He is not a serial code,” Hsiung wrote in May. “He is James.”

Wisconsin privilege law limited Ridglan’s possessory interest under the facts the judge found: probable cause that felony cruelty was occurring inside. Hsiung’s entry and removal of James were a legally justified rescue.

The prosecution treats James as inventory and Hsiung as a thief.

III What a Judge Already Found

Under Wis. Stat. § 968.02(3), when a district attorney “refuses or is unavailable to issue a complaint,” a circuit judge may permit the filing of one after a hearing and a finding of probable cause. The district attorney receives notice and may appear. The statute preserves criminal enforcement when the district attorney declines to act.

Hsiung had contacted the Dane County District Attorney’s office about Ridglan at least seven times and delivered video and documentary evidence. The office had received close to a thousand emails urging an investigation. It filed no charge. In March 2024, Dane4Dogs and the Alliance for Animals petitioned the court under § 968.02(3).

On October 23, 2024, Judge Rhonda Lanford held a full day of evidentiary hearings. Former Ridglan employees testified. Veterinarians testified. Hsiung testified under oath, and the court took twenty-four exhibits during his testimony. The District Attorney’s office had notice. It did not appear.

On January 9, 2025, Lanford issued a twenty-three-page decision finding probable cause of felony cruelty:

“Based on [the] evidence, the Court finds probable cause that Ridglan, through its employees, committed a felony violation of the animal cruelty statutes by having caused ‘unnecessary and excessive pain or suffering’ by mutilating dogs’ eye glands and vocal flaps.”

Wisconsin’s cruelty statute, § 951.02, bars treating an animal cruelly. An intentional violation becomes a Class I felony when it “results in the mutilation, disfigurement or death of an animal.” Lanford found probable cause that Ridglan had mutilated dogs, the statutory finding that brings the felony provision into play.

Section 951.02 does not prohibit “normal and accepted veterinary practices.” Ridglan could not rely on that exception. The Wisconsin Veterinary Examining Board and the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection had both concluded that the practice fell below the standard of veterinary care in Wisconsin. A practice below the standard of care is not a normal and accepted veterinary practice.

A Wisconsin judge, on sworn testimony, found probable cause that the company was committing felonies against the dogs inside it.

The official response acknowledged the evidence without producing a criminal charge. In February 2025 the court appointed La Crosse County District Attorney Tim Gruenke as special prosecutor. That September, DATCP drafted a civil forfeiture stipulation alleging 311 violations—308 counts of mistreatment and three of failed daily health checks—and proposing a fine of $55,148.50. A meeting on September 22 failed to produce an agreement. Ridglan rejected it.

On October 28, 2025, Gruenke filed his report. He confirmed that the cherry-eye surgeries were real and that they were, on their face, chargeable as felony mistreatment: “Ridglan Farms routinely allowed non-veterinarians to conduct the surgery. They did not use general anesthesia, which resulted in pain to the animals.”

Then he declined to charge. He treated the vocal-flap allegations as time-barred because the last evidence dated to 2010. For the eye surgeries, he cited another judge’s ruling, Wisconsin’s research exemption, and uncertainty about jurors with agricultural backgrounds: “a conviction would not be certain as a jury with members from agricultural backgrounds may seem [sic] the evidence in a different light.” He also treated the open visibility of the conduct as mitigating.

Gruenke also identified the limits of his office: “I can’t shut down a business. I can’t revoke a license. I can only charge a crime.” In exchange for no prosecution, Ridglan agreed to give up its breeding and sales license by July 1, 2026—“more than I can get out of a criminal prosecution,” he wrote. He concluded: “If this is to be changed, the legislative and administrative agency process is the appropriate forum to do so—not a criminal court.”

This July, Ridglan’s veterinarian permanently surrendered his Wisconsin veterinary license. It is the only professional consequence anyone at the company has faced, and it came from the licensing board rather than the criminal law.

Four and a half months after Gruenke’s report, activists entered the building—and the criminal court opened for them.

The special prosecutor who found the company’s conduct chargeable is the same official who negotiated its non-prosecution. Steffen Seitz, of the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, said: “The district attorney, if he had spent just a fraction of the time that he has now spent investigating and charging and trying to prosecute rescuers, investigating Ridglan Farms instead, all of this could have been avoided.”

Two files. One judge’s finding on each side. Zero prosecutions on one side, fifty-one on the other. The state enforced Ridglan’s property interest while leaving its own criminal code unenforced against Ridglan. Neutral enforcement cannot explain the disparity.

IV Privilege

Wisconsin’s privilege statute made Hsiung’s conduct lawful. Section 939.45 covers the entry, the necessary force, and the removal because each charge rests on the same course of conduct.

The rescue was privileged. The forced entry was privileged. The removal was privileged. Before March 15, a circuit judge had found probable cause of felony cruelty inside Ridglan. Hsiung had exhausted the available public process. The dogs remained. He entered for the dogs, used force to reach them, and placed James in care.

Wisconsin defines privilege as legal justification. Section 939.45 begins:

“The fact that the actor’s conduct is privileged, although otherwise criminal, is a defense to prosecution for any crime based on that conduct.”

In State v. Nollie, the Wisconsin Supreme Court explained that conduct “although otherwise criminal, is legally justified when it occurs under one of several circumstances recognized by statute.” Privilege changes the legal character of the conduct itself. A prosecutor cannot restore criminality by dividing a single justified rescue into entry, damage, and removal.

The detective’s one-word answer at Hsiung’s preliminary hearing—“No”—established only Ridglan’s lack of consent. Under Wisconsin law, trespass also depends on the absence of any other legal privilege. In Antoniewicz v. Reszczynski, the Wisconsin Supreme Court defined a trespasser as a person who enters land without a privilege created by the possessor’s consent “or otherwise.” In Manor Enterprises, Inc. v. Vivid, Inc., the court of appeals explained that conduct otherwise constituting trespass is lawful when privilege arises from law because of the actor’s purpose. Consent and legal privilege are separate grounds for lawful entry.

Section 939.45 carries the same principle into the criminal code. After listing coercion, necessity, defense of persons and property, public duty, arrest, and parental discipline, it preserves a final category:

“When for any other reason the actor’s conduct is privileged by the statutory or common law of this state.”

The criminal-code drafters left that category open because some privileges arise too rarely for their precise limits to have acquired familiar names. Section 939.45(6) preserves those common-law rules for the exceptional case.

In State v. Coleman, the Wisconsin Supreme Court applied § 939.45(6) to such a case. Coleman grabbed a firearm when police forced a door and he reasonably believed armed robbers had returned. His possession violated a categorical felony statute. The court nevertheless recognized a narrow common-law privilege, surveyed decisions from other jurisdictions, and adopted a five-part test.

The court required an unlawful, present, imminent and impending threat of death or serious bodily injury, or a reasonable belief in one; a defendant who did not create the situation recklessly or negligently; no reasonable legal alternative; a direct causal relationship between the prohibited act and avoidance of the harm; and possession no longer than reasonably necessary. The privilege would arise only on the rarest occasions.

Coleman establishes the method here. Section 939.45(6) permits a court to define a narrow privilege on an extraordinary record even when no earlier Wisconsin case presents the same facts.

Nollie assigns the threshold legal questions to the judge: whether the charged crimes are amenable to privilege and whether the evidence puts the defense in issue. Hsiung has far more than the required evidence: sworn testimony, twenty-four exhibits, a twenty-three-page judicial finding of probable-cause felony cruelty, 311 violations identified in DATCP’s draft stipulation, and the special prosecutor’s written confirmation that the eye surgeries were chargeable on their face.

Once a defendant successfully raises the privilege, Wisconsin requires the State to disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury must decide whether the State has carried that burden.

Wisconsin’s restrictive necessity cases do not control this claim. Olsen and Anthuber construe § 939.47 and its requirement of pressure from natural physical forces. Hsiung proceeds under § 939.45(6), the provision Coleman used for a common-law privilege in a first-impression case.

Dundon and Hobson turned on express abolition of the privileges asserted there. No Wisconsin statute abolishes the rescue privilege asserted here. Section 943.75 refers to the public-duty privilege for officials without declaring § 939.45(3) exclusive or repealing the common-law protection in § 939.45(6).

The common-law privilege preserved by § 939.45(6) limits an owner’s rights to exclude and possess when the owner is maintaining unlawful cruelty. The rule requires objective danger, exhausted remedies, direct rescue, minimum force, and protective placement. It can be stated as tightly as the rule in Coleman:

A person is privileged to enter and use only the force reasonably necessary to remove an animal when objective evidence supports a reasonable belief that the animal faces serious, presently continuing mistreatment prohibited by law; the rescuer did not create the danger; authorities have been notified and no timely, effective legal alternative remains; the entry and removal bear a direct relationship to ending the harm; the intrusion is confined to the rescue; and the animal is placed in veterinary or protective care rather than concealed, sold, exploited, or taken for private gain.

The rule requires evidence, exhaustion, proportionality, and care. It confines the intrusion to rescue and excludes punishment, sabotage, evidence-gathering for its own sake, concealment, sale, and private gain. The intrusion ends when the animal reaches safe placement; the privilege supports no use beyond protection.

Wisconsin law recognizes every component. Antoniewicz and Manor Enterprises recognize entry privileges created by law independently of consent. Cords v. Anderson holds that planning and deliberation do not disqualify a rescue. Section 895.484 applies an animal-specific rule to a locked barrier: a private citizen may force entry into a vehicle to remove a domestic animal in imminent danger after contacting authorities, provided entry is necessary, force is limited, and the rescuer remains with the animal. The owner’s permission is immaterial when those safeguards are met.

Coleman brings those principles together under § 939.45(6): law-created entry privilege, deliberate rescue, objective danger, exhausted alternatives, minimum force, and limited duration. Ridglan presents the same safeguards on a much fuller record. The danger had been established in court. Authorities had nearly two years to act. Hsiung used force to reach the dogs, removed them, and placed James in care.

Section 939.45(6) made the entry, the necessary force, and the removal legally justified.

V The Rule Applied

The Ridglan facts satisfy each element.

Objective evidence of unlawful harm. A judge held a full day of evidentiary hearings, heard former employees and veterinarians, received twenty-four exhibits during sworn testimony, and issued a twenty-three-page decision finding probable cause of felony cruelty by mutilation. DATCP later put 311 violations into a draft civil-forfeiture stipulation. The special prosecutor wrote that non-veterinarians had routinely performed eye surgery without general anesthesia, causing pain, and that the conduct was chargeable on its face.

The conduct described in the record was recurring and part of how Ridglan operated. Every additional day of confinement left the dogs exposed to it. Months of official knowledge did not end the danger. That record puts privilege squarely before the jury.

No creation of the danger. Hsiung did not place the dogs in the facility, design the procedures, perform the surgeries, or cause the state to leave them there. The danger existed independently of him.

No timely and effective legal alternative remained. Hsiung contacted the Dane County District Attorney at least seven times, while his allies sent close to a thousand emails. He invoked the statute written for a prosecutor’s refusal to act and testified under oath; veterinarians and former employees also testified. Their evidence led a judge to find probable cause, a special prosecutor to be appointed, and DATCP to prepare a draft stipulation identifying 311 violations. The process lasted almost two years.

It produced no criminal charge and no immediate release of the dogs. The non-prosecution agreement contemplated a license surrender months later and left Ridglan free to breed for research conducted at its own facility. It did not remove James from the building on March 15. A remedy that had reached a judicial finding and still left the dogs in place was no timely or effective alternative.

A direct rescue. James was inside. Hsiung entered, lifted him, and carried him out. James was taken for care rather than evidence, leverage, sale, or gain. Hsiung recorded the rescue, published it under his own name, and gave James a home.

A limited intrusion. The State alleges a cut fence, a broken window or metal door, and the removal of twenty-two dogs from a facility holding thousands. It alleges no violence against a person, secret resale, ransom, or personal enrichment. The participants acted in their own names, recorded the rescue, and disclosed it. Their conduct was confined to extraction and care.

No longer than necessary. Safe removal required more than carrying James to the property line. Immediate return to the institution maintaining the danger would have undone the rescue. The privilege continued through veterinary care and protective placement, including protective custody while a return would restore the danger. It transferred no commercial title and created no right of exploitation.

Section 939.22(28) defines “property of another” as property in which someone else has a legal interest “which the actor has no right to defeat or impair.” The rescue privilege gave Hsiung a limited legal right to impair Ridglan’s immediate possession long enough to secure James’s safety. That right defeats the “property of another” element for the protected intervention.

Section 895.484 also fixes the process that precedes forcible animal rescue: contact public authorities first. Hsiung did much more than place an emergency call. He spent nearly two years calling, petitioning, testifying, and waiting. The authorities knew. A judge found probable cause. The dogs remained.

The research-animal statute leaves the privilege intact. Section 943.75(2m) prohibits releasing an animal “lawfully confined” for research or commercial purposes without consent. Lawful confinement is an express element. A license and a locked door do not resolve that element after a court has found probable cause of felony cruelty inside.

Subsection (3) protects specified officials and preserves their public-duty privilege under § 939.45(3). Its text does not make subsection (3) exclusive. Section 939.45(6) remains in force, and § 939.45 reaches “any crime based on” privileged conduct. Coleman recognized a narrow common-law privilege alongside a categorical felony prohibition. Dundon refused a privilege only after finding that the legislature had abolished it. Section 943.75 contains no comparable repeal.

Dane County charged burglary, theft, attempted theft, and criminal damage rather than § 943.75. Those general property offenses remain subject to § 939.45. A charging choice cannot erase the common-law privilege preserved by the criminal code.

The research exemption in § 951.015 applies to teaching, research, or experimentation conducted under a protocol or procedure approved by an educational or research institution. Judge Lanford’s finding concerned routine surgical husbandry performed on breeding stock by non-veterinarians, without general anesthesia, to make dogs saleable. Gruenke invoked the exemption as a reason not to charge. The record identified no approved protocol authorizing that practice. A federal registration, a state license, and an approved research protocol are different documents; only the last fits the exemption’s text.

An owner cannot veto a privilege created for nonconsensual intervention. Section 895.484 demonstrates the rule: when an animal faces danger behind a locked barrier and the statutory safeguards are met, refusal does not bar necessary entry. Hsiung met more demanding safeguards at Ridglan.

VI The Charges

The entry, the minimum force used to reach the dogs, and the removal were parts of one privileged rescue. Section 939.45 reaches every crime based on that conduct.

The State cannot separate the door from the dog. The barrier stood between Hsiung and James. Opening it served the rescue and no independent criminal purpose. The privilege therefore covered the force reasonably necessary to enter.

No trespass. Under Antoniewicz and Manor Enterprises, a person is a trespasser only when he lacks consent and any other legal privilege. Hsiung lacked consent and possessed the privilege preserved by § 939.45(6). His entry was lawful.

No criminal damage based on necessary force. Section 939.45 applies to “any crime based on” privileged conduct. The force reasonably necessary to reach James was part of that conduct. A repair claim cannot turn legal justification into a felony.

The felony-damage theory also has an independent defect. Ridglan reported $34,754 in property damage. Wisconsin measures the reduction in value by repair or replacement cost, whichever is less. If the State uses felony criminal damage as the burglary predicate, Gilbertson v. State requires proof that Hsiung intended felony-level damage at the moment of entry. A later invoice addresses cost without establishing his intent when he crossed the threshold. Entering to carry out a beagle does not prove an intent to inflict felony-level damage on a building.

No theft or attempted theft. Section 939.22(28) asks whether the actor had a legal right to impair the other party’s interest. The rescue privilege temporarily displaced Ridglan’s immediate possession so James could reach safety. Hsiung exercised that limited right and placed James in care. The privilege defeats the theft theory at the point where criminal law defines the property interest.

No burglary. Burglary requires entry with intent to steal or commit a felony at the moment of entry. Hsiung intended to reach the dogs, use the force necessary to remove them, and place them in care. Those acts were privileged. Neither theft nor felony criminal damage existed as a predicate offense. Gilbertson also forbids inferring the required criminal intent from entry alone.

California’s published 2026 opinion reinforces the evidentiary rule. The First District reversed Hsiung’s felony conspiracy conviction and his conviction for trespass with intent to interfere with a lawful business because the trial court had excluded expert testimony, veterinary evidence, and prior reports to authorities bearing on his good-faith belief that the rescue was lawful. That evidence gives the act its legal character and belongs before the jury.

Wisconsin’s own authorities resolve the question. Section 939.45(6) preserves common-law privilege; Coleman permits a narrow rule in a first-impression case; Antoniewicz and Manor Enterprises recognize lawful entry without consent; § 895.484 recognizes forcible private rescue of an animal behind a locked barrier; and § 939.22(28) makes a legal right to impair possession part of the property analysis.

The Ridglan record satisfies the rule. A judge found probable cause of felony cruelty at the specific facility. Hsiung exhausted public remedies. He used force to reach the dogs, confined the intrusion to rescue, took nothing for gain, and placed James in care.

His conduct was privileged. The forced entry was lawful. The removal was lawful. The charges rest on acts Wisconsin law justified.

Fifty-one people are being prosecuted over opening a door that separated the rescuers from animals a judge had found probable cause to believe were victims of felony cruelty. Ridglan’s refusal did not extinguish the common-law privilege. The rescuers were entitled to enter.

VII How the Immunity Was Manufactured

Three features of the regulatory structure explain how Ridglan remained uncharged.

First, the state exemption. Wisconsin’s cruelty chapter does not apply to “teaching, research, or experimentation conducted pursuant to a protocol or procedure approved by an educational or research institution… at facilities that are regulated under” the federal Animal Welfare Act. The statute says approved by the institution.

The facility’s chief executive appoints the committee that reviews the protocol. Federal law requires at least three members, including a veterinarian and one person unaffiliated with the institution. An institution may appoint more outsiders; it need not do so. Committee approval can place the covered activity outside Chapter 951. Gruenke cited that exemption in explaining why he declined to charge. Here, that approval structure was one of the reasons he gave for declining to charge conduct a judge had already found supported by probable cause.

New York, where Hsiung is headed next, uses a similar exemption. Its cruelty statute, Ag. & Mkts. Law § 353, provides that nothing in it prohibits “any properly conducted scientific tests, experiments or investigations… performed or conducted in laboratories or institutions, which are approved for these purposes by the state commissioner of health.”

Second, the federal limit on experimental oversight. The Animal Welfare Act is the law people invoke when they assume someone is watching. At 7 U.S.C. § 2143(a)(6)(A), it provides:

“Nothing in this chapter… shall be construed as authorizing the Secretary to promulgate rules, regulations, or orders with regard to the design, outlines, or guidelines of actual research or experimentation by a research facility as determined by such research facility.”

The Act regulates housing, feeding, sanitation, veterinary care, and protocol review addressing pain, distress, and anesthesia. Congress nevertheless withholds authority over experimental design and performance as determined by the research facility, subject to the Act’s specified care and pain-mitigation rules. The Act also excludes from “animal” the rats, mice, and birds bred for research, which make up the overwhelming majority of laboratory animals. It contains no citizen-suit provision.

Third, enforcement collapsed. In 2024 the Supreme Court decided SEC v. Jarkesy, holding that when a federal agency seeks civil penalties for conduct resembling common-law fraud, the Seventh Amendment entitles the target to a jury. USDA had relied on similar in-house proceedings to impose Animal Welfare Act penalties.

The Animal Welfare Institute found that USDA issued 63 AWA fines in the fourteen months before Jarkesy and five in the fourteen months after. Eleven of those fourteen months produced zero. Official warnings rose from 66 percent of all enforcement actions to 91 percent. The report found:

“Since the Jarkesy decision, we have identified no fines issued for activities carried out under a research registration.”

An APHIS manager said: “Jarkesy has hamstrung us the most.” And: “We have an inability to do anything, even when we see bad stuff.”

Meanwhile licensed facilities grew from 11,785 in 2021 to more than 17,500 by 2024, while the inspector corps fell by more than a third. A February 2025 USDA Inspector General audit found that 80 percent of the dog breeders inspectors visited had failed to correct their noncompliances within the required time, and that risk-based protocols went unused for 95 percent of the facilities reviewed. Twenty years earlier, a 2005 OIG audit had already concluded that AWA fines were so small that violators treated them as a normal cost of doing business. Two decades on, the fines mostly stopped.

The enforcement gap is structural. An internally approved protocol can remove covered activity from state cruelty law. Federal law leaves experimental design to the facility. The AWA has no citizen-suit provision, and USDA enforcement fell sharply after Jarkesy.

Ridglan operated under extensive licensing. Inspectors reviewed cages, feed storage, veterinary logs, and paper protocols. Congress reserved experimental design to the facility, Wisconsin exempted approved activity, and private citizens had no enforcement action. The paperwork documented compliance within a narrow regulatory scope.

The system left Hsiung without an effective public remedy for the dog in front of him. Under those conditions, prosecuting the rescuer serves the company’s private possessory interest rather than Wisconsin’s legitimate interest in preventing theft.

VIII North Rose

The same regulatory structure governs a far larger operation in Wayne County, New York.

“They have this place behind an apple orchard, behind all sorts of hills and fences,” says Adam Durand of Beagle Lovers and Rescuers, “so you can really never see that it’s here. Even locals don’t even know that it’s here.”

The operation is Marshall BioResources—legally Marshall Farms Group, Ltd.—founded in 1939 as a ferret farm and now a vast U.S. breeding operation that sells dogs and other animals to laboratories. Hsiung calls it “the Death Star of Vivisection, inflicting more death and destruction on lab animals than any weapon on Earth.”

USDA inspection inventories show the scale. Across its New York sites, federal inspectors counted:

• 15,078 dogs
• 13,959 ferrets
• 2,108 pigs
• 2,058 cats

At North Rose alone, an inspection on May 19 of this year recorded 5,394 puppies, 9,171 adult dogs and 11,706 ferrets—26,271 animals at a single address. The dogs alone outnumber every beagle freed from Ridglan by about seven to one, behind one orchard.

Marshall holds three separate USDA registrations simultaneously—Class A dealer, Class R research facility, and Class T carrier. It sells animals to laboratories and conducts research itself.

Federal spending records trace its dogs to heart-failure work at the University of Utah, circulatory-arrest research at Johns Hopkins, and cardiac studies at Ohio State and Vanderbilt. A 2019 undercover investigation at a Michigan contract lab identified Marshall as the supplier for a year-long fungicide study; those beagles were released after public pressure. Published research also documents beagles head-only exposed to a potentially lethal inhalation dose of phosgene, a chemical weapon banned by the Geneva Protocol after the First World War. The papers omit the supplier’s name. Hsiung identifies Marshall, and the company has never answered the attribution.

One procedure is documented directly. In an NIAID-funded study at SRI International—which federal records obtained by the White Coat Waste Project identify as a Marshall customer—44 beagle puppies, six to eight months old, had their vocal cords surgically removed. The agency confirmed it and explained why, in its own words: “to reduce noise, which is not only stressful to the animals but can also reach decibel levels that exceed OSHA allowable limits for people and can lead to hearing loss.”

The dogs’ voices were loud enough to threaten a workplace safety standard. The selected remedy removed those voices while leaving the procedure unchanged; the agency described the surgery as a welfare measure and billed the public. The suffering became actionable only when it threatened the hearing of people in the room.

Marshall’s inspection record measures a narrow form of regulatory compliance. APHIS reports since 2014 record roughly a dozen citations across about four dozen inspections, nearly all classified non-critical and none repeated. The May and July inspections produced no citations, and Marshall holds AAALAC accreditation. Those records cover the subjects federal inspectors may examine; federal law leaves the design of the experiments to the research facility.

The citations document concrete failures. Dogs had injuries—an interdigital cyst, a hock injury, a mammary puncture wound—that remained present for more than a day and, in an inspector’s phrasing, were not identified by staff during daily observations. Waste accumulated on wire mesh in a whelping building until dams and puppies could not avoid walking through it. In March 2023, an inspector found a kitten with half its tail chewed to the bone by other kittens in its enclosure; APHIS issued an official warning that June under the federal rule requiring compatible grouping. Other citations recorded moldy feed and flaking paint above enclosures.

The sparse federal record reflects the limits of federal inspection: twelve years, about a dozen citations, one warning, and no citations this summer.

The AWA covers cages, feed, and veterinary logs while expressly forbidding the Secretary from regulating “actual research or experimentation… as determined by such research facility.” The reports cannot answer what Congress removed from inspection: what the experiment does to the animal. An atrocity can present an orderly regulatory exterior: paperwork in order, floors swept, no findings.

Italian authorities seized Green Hill, a Marshall subsidiary near Brescia, in July 2012, removing some two and a half to three thousand beagles. Three managers were convicted of animal mistreatment. In February 2016 the appellate court upheld their sentences and the seizure of the dogs. They were not returned. Green Hill never reopened. Later acquittals of different employees in a related prosecution did not disturb those convictions, the seizure, or the closure.

Marshall’s UK subsidiary, MBR Acres in Cambridgeshire, has been under continuous protest since June 2021 from a camp outside its gates. When activists took twenty beagle puppies in December 2022—eighteen of whom got away—eighteen people were charged across four Crown Court trials on materially identical facts. Two of the four juries acquitted. At Peterborough in March, one deliberated more than nine hours and cleared five defendants of burglary. Everyone admitted the act. The disputed element was dishonesty.

In a Westminster Hall debate on April 27, Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty, whose constituency contains the site, told the House: “It is no secret that MBR Acres was just a few days away from closure, owing to the pressure applied by activists, predominantly via their email campaign.”

Marshall answers criticism with scientific necessity, accreditation, and assurances that its animals are healthy. Those assurances rely on the same regulatory structure that leaves experimental design to the facility. They cannot displace the documented procedures, the federal funding records, or the suffering described in the agency’s own explanation.

Marshall speaks in the voice of an ordinary business, operating lawfully and staffed by people who go home to their own dogs. That ordinariness is the horror.

IX None of This Required a Monster

A familiar story says atrocities are committed by monsters, in secret, against the law. The record here is more ordinary.

In 1252 a papal bull authorized torture in heresy proceedings and, in the same breath, imposed limits on it: not to cost life or limb. It was regulated and came with rules. The historian John Langbein traced judicial torture to a law of proof that required two eyewitnesses or a confession for capital conviction. Torture entered European procedure as the device that produced the confession. Its abolition followed a change in that proof system. Once courts could convict without the old evidentiary formula, torture ceased to appear indispensable. Langbein calls the familiar Enlightenment account “the abolition legend.” For five centuries, the claim of necessity rested on what courts believed they needed in order to convict.

Britain’s present licensing system began with hearings on vivisection in 1875.

In 1875 a Royal Commission sat in London on the question of vivisection. It heard fifty-three witnesses. One of them, Emanuel Klein, co-author of the standard physiological handbook of the day, was asked what regard he had for the suffering of the animals he cut. He answered: “No regard at all.” He used anesthetics, he explained, for his own convenience—so the animal would not scratch him. T.H. Huxley, who had come to defend the profession, wrote privately: “It is not Hutton who has beaten me, but Klein.”

The Commission’s report nonetheless concluded that the whole subject had been “relieved of the greater part of its difficulty by the discovery of anaesthetics.” One dissenting witness, the physician George Hoggan, understood what the bargain purchased. Anesthetics, he said, were “far more efficacious in lulling public feeling towards the vivisectors than pain in the vivisected.”

The Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 followed—the world’s first law regulating live-animal research, built on licences, registered premises, inspection, and a requirement of anesthesia except where anesthesia would “necessarily frustrate” the experiment. Richard Holt Hutton’s minority report, which proposed complete protection for dogs and cats, lost.

Within seven years the licensing system was being administered with the assistance of an association founded by the researchers themselves, which reviewed licence applications and certified physiologists. Licences rose roughly a hundred-fold over the next two decades.

Within a single generation, public revulsion produced a licensing scheme; the licensed helped administer it; and the regulated practice expanded. The 1876 Act legitimated British vivisection and enabled its growth. The anesthetic—the humane innovation, the real mercy—became the instrument by which the public was persuaded to stop looking.

Ninety years later, the American system emerged from a different scandal and repeated much the same arrangement. Wisconsin’s § 951.015(3)(a) is the modern exemption. The facility’s own review committee repeats the same arrangement: the licensed reviewing the licensed. AAALAC accreditation is the modern certificate on the wall. The clean inspection report plays the role of the anesthetic, reducing the public’s capacity to perceive suffering without reducing the suffering itself.

It required a form.

X Who Is the Radical

Prosecutors cast Wayne Hsiung as an extremist and a ringleader, placing him outside the community of reasonable people.

Public opinion has moved sharply.

Gallup has asked Americans for twenty-five years whether medical testing on animals is morally acceptable. In 2001, 65 percent said yes. This May, 45 percent did—a record low, and a twenty-point collapse. On most issues in Gallup’s battery, moral acceptance has increased. Animal testing moved in the other direction. On this issue, the country is turning around.

Federal policy has moved as well. Congress amended federal drug law in 2022 to recognize non-animal methods alongside animal tests. In April 2025 the FDA published a roadmap stating that within three to five years it would “aim to make animal studies the exception rather than the norm” in preclinical safety testing.

That July the NIH announced it would “no longer develop new funding opportunities focused exclusively on animal models of human disease.” This March it committed more than $150 million to human-based methods, and in June it opened an office to direct the transition. Britain has set a target of reducing the use of dogs and non-human primates in dedicated cardiovascular safety studies by at least half by 2030.

Political opposition now crosses party lines. After visiting Wayne County, Representative Nick Langworthy, a Republican from New York, said: “This is barbaric, it’s cruel. We are killing perfectly healthy dogs in the name of the science, when it doesn’t need to be done anymore.” He and Representative Nicole Malliotakis wrote to the USDA in June seeking inspection information about Marshall; Hsiung reports that the deadline passed without a reply.

The coalition includes Republican members of Congress from New York, Democratic Representative Mark Pocan of Madison, Lara Trump—a board member of the rescue that emptied Ridglan—and Hsiung, who faces thirty-one years.

The 2025 federal figures show greater suffering among the remaining dogs. American facilities reported 42,026 dogs, of whom 37,583 were used in procedures. Total dog use has been falling for fifty years. But the number subjected to pain and distress with no pain relief at all—Column E on the federal form—rose from 410 to 628 in a single year, a 53 percent increase. The total is shrinking, but the most recent year brought a sharp increase in dogs used without pain relief.

Removing the vocal cords of forty-four puppies to satisfy a workplace noise standard, billing the public, and filing the paperwork is the radical act. Hsiung carried a dog away from a practice that more Americans now reject than accept and that federal agencies are moving to replace.

Calling Hsiung radical avoids the ethics of his position. Licensing and continued use show that regulators permit a practice; they do not establish its moral legitimacy.

Hsiung sees a licensed, audited, inspected American industry as a system that inflicts preventable suffering. Public opinion and federal policy are moving toward the same conclusion for which he is being prosecuted.

XI October

The plan depends on being public.

September 4–6, a summit in Madison. On September 12 the March to Abolish Animal Testing leaves Albany and walks 207 miles over fourteen days, reaching North Rose on Friday, September 25; the mass action at Marshall’s gates is the following day. Ella Magers, who co-directs it, has put the reasoning plainly: “We refuse to accept animal suffering as the price of scientific progress—because we know there is a better way.” The partners include the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and the Center for a Humane Economy. A parallel march is walking in Britain.

Then October 3—one month, as Hsiung notes, before Election Day. He has said what he intends: nonviolence trainings through the late summer, then a mass action, and a stated goal of freeing the country’s laboratory dogs by the end of the year.

He will announce the action beforehand, film it, and use his own name. If arrested, he plans to use a New York trial as he has used cases in Utah, California, and Wisconsin: to present the industry’s conduct to a jury. Writing in the Harvard Law Review Forum with law professor Justin Marceau and Steffen Seitz, he described the jury as “a noncaptured decisionmaker.”

Hsiung’s January trial will place the decision with a jury after legislators declined to act and regulators produced five fines in fourteen months, none involving a research registration. Twelve people outside the company, the agency, and the district attorney will see the dog and decide whether carrying him out was a crime.

Open-rescue juries have acquitted defendants in Utah, California, and England. A rural Utah jury acquitted Hsiung and Paul Darwin Picklesimer of everything in October 2022 after hearing why they rescued two piglets. A Merced County jury acquitted Alexandra Paul and Alicia Santurio outright in March 2023. Two English juries likewise acquitted defendants in the MBR Acres cases.

The acts were admitted. The question was whether jurors saw theft or rescue.

In January, in Madison, that fight starts again. The beagles the defendants are charged with stealing will be in Florida and Alabama and in living rooms, vaccinated, microchipped, named. The building they are charged with burgling will no longer operate as a business. The company identified in the probable-cause decision was not charged, and its principals never answered in a criminal case for the eye-gland surgeries—or for the vocal-flap procedures, which the special prosecutor concluded had been performed on enough dogs, long enough ago, that Wisconsin’s clock had run out.

The state will stand up and argue that the crime that occurred on March 15, 2026, was the removal of twenty-two dogs.

James lives with the man who reached through the window for him. Until that morning Ridglan treated him as an article of commerce, worth about two thousand dollars, held inside a licensed and regularly inspected operation, and stamped YPP5.

There will come a time—sooner than the industry believes, later than it should be—when what was done to him and to the fifteen thousand dogs counted behind the apple orchard in Wayne County this May will be taught the way we teach the anesthetized dogs of 1875: as a barbarism that came with paperwork. Something ordinary people did through licensed institutions, in an orderly way, on a form, because it was customary—and because almost no one could see it while it was happening.

The record will show where each of us stood while fifteen thousand dogs remained behind that orchard.

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