BREAKING. On Saturday April 18, 2026, activists from across the country who had begun arriving Friday April 17 gathered outside Ridglan Farms. They were met with tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray. The facility’s owner had built a manure filled trench to stop them. Multiple law enforcement agencies backed him up. Read every word of what follows and then ask yourself whose side the government is on.

A dog is on the floor of a cage it has never left. It has never seen sunlight. It has never felt grass under its feet. It was born in a warehouse and it will die in that warehouse. Right now there are two thousand of them in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin.

The facility pulls in $2.5 million a year. It has over 300 documented state violations. A judge found probable cause for criminal animal cruelty. Its own veterinarian lost his license for performing surgeries on conscious unanesthetized dogs for nearly twenty years. The federal government has known about all of it for over a decade.

The federal government did nothing. This was not by accident.This article is the paper trail that proves it.

The DA has since filed charges against the facility. After years of documented felony animal cruelty, 311 state violations, unanesthetized surgeries on thousands of dogs, and a judge finding probable cause for criminal conduct, he filed one charge. An ordinance violation for building a trench without permits. He charged the building permit. Not the dogs.

Every claim in what follows is documented and sourced at the bottom. Pull any of them. You will find them exactly where this article says they are.

What They Did to the Dogs

Former employees did not just quit and walk away. They testified under oath. Dogs were cut open for cherry eye surgeries by workers with no veterinary training, no anesthesia, no pain relief. Dogs were given paralytics so they could not move, then had their vocal cords removed without anesthesia. The reason? So the building would be quieter.

A Wisconsin state inspector put it in writing in his official report. The ammonia was so bad he felt sick during the visit and his throat and nostrils were still burning hours after he left. The state racked up over 300 violations against this facility. A Dane County judge found probable cause for criminal animal cruelty. The facility veterinarian Richard Van Domelen had his license pulled after the state board found he had spent nearly twenty years overseeing illegal surgeries on unanesthetized animals.

Van Domelen lost his license. He kept his job as facility manager.

Special Prosecutor Tim Gruenke, the La Crosse County District Attorney appointed to lead the criminal investigation, confirmed this on camera to 12 News. They were doing this procedure without using any anesthesia, without any pain relief, he said. He concluded the cherry eye procedures alone constituted animal mistreatment under Wisconsin law and that Ridglan had been doing it for years without meeting current veterinary standards. His investigation identified five separate areas for potential criminal charges before Ridglan agreed to surrender its breeding license to avoid prosecution.

State inspectors documented all of this. Former employees swore to it. Activists filmed it going back to 2017. A judge said it met the bar for criminal prosecution. And the federal government looked at this facility twenty-eight times and found almost nothing wrong. How. Keep reading.

How Many Official Bodies Found Ridglan in Violation

It was not just one judge. The list of official bodies that found Ridglan in violation of the law or found probable cause for criminal conduct has never been assembled in one place until now.

Dane County Judge Rhonda Lanford ruled in January 2025 in a 23 page decision that there was probable cause Ridglan had violated Wisconsin animal cruelty laws and that the Dane County District Attorney had refused to act despite overwhelming evidence.

The Wisconsin Department of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection documented 311 violations and proposed a $55,148 fine. Ridglan refused to pay it.

The Wisconsin Veterinary Examining Board suspended Van Domelen’s license. An administrative law judge upheld that suspension in September 2025.

Special Prosecutor Tim Gruenke independently reviewed the evidence and identified five separate areas for potential criminal charges. He concluded the cherry eye procedures constituted animal mistreatment under Wisconsin law.

The DEA accompanied DATCP investigators on an unannounced inspection in February 2026.

Two former Ridglan employees testified under oath at an October 2024 hearing about what they witnessed inside.

Multiple USDA inspector general audits found that federal animal welfare enforcement was described in official government reports as basically meaningless and ineffective, and that 80 percent of audited dog breeders had not fully corrected previous violations.

Every one of these bodies found problems. The settlement deal Ridglan negotiated wiped the slate clean. The 311 DATCP citations were dropped. The $55,148 fine was dropped. No criminal charges were filed. The dogs stayed in their cages.

The Ownership Structure Nobody Published Until Now

Ridglan Farms is owned by three veterinarians: David Williams, Jeffrey Ballmer, and Jim Burns, who let his own vet license lapse. The estate of a fourth owner, Ralph McGrew, also has a stake. Records show all four had ties not just at Ridglan but also at Mount Horeb Animal Hospital.

When Van Domelen’s license was pulled in September 2025, Ridglan told the press two of its three vet owners were still licensed and would step in. That means Williams and Ballmer. Here is what nobody reported: the same complaint filed by Dane4Dogs set off investigations into Van Domelen, Williams, and Ballmer all at once. All three. Same time. Same conduct. Same facility.

Williams had already been through this before. In 2015 the Wisconsin Veterinary Examining Board disciplined him after a patient died. The board found he failed to keep proper medical records. The board’s language was almost word for word what they used to pull Van Domelen’s license a decade later. Ridglan swapped out a vet who lost his license for two vets who were already being investigated for the same thing. Nobody published that until now.

The Network Nobody Mapped Until Now

According to reporting by Wayne Hsiung’s publication The Simple Heart, Rick Van Domelen, the Ridglan veterinarian whose license was suspended, is also the chair of the Town of Blue Mounds Board. The man at the center of the animal cruelty findings runs the local government of the town where the facility operates.

According to the same reporting, Jerry Blizzard, the son-in-law of Ridglan owner Jim Burns, serves as the town constable. Local law enforcement in Blue Mounds is the owner’s own family member.

According to Rise for Animals, an employee named Jerabek at the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, the state agency responsible for regulating breeding facilities like Ridglan, was defending Ridglan in official communications while referring to herself as the proud daughter of a veterinarian without disclosing that she is Jim Burns’s daughter. The owner’s daughter was working inside the state regulatory agency supposed to hold her father’s facility accountable without revealing the relationship.

Federal inspector Welch covering the same facility for a decade while finding almost nothing. The facility veterinarian chairing local government. The owner’s son-in-law running local law enforcement. The owner’s daughter inside the state regulatory agency. This was not a system that failed. This was a system that was built.

The Puppy Shipment Nobody Followed Up On

In March 2025, FOX6 Milwaukee got records showing Ridglan shipped forty puppies to an out of state buyer at five weeks old. Wisconsin law says no dog can be transferred before seven weeks. Ridglan said it had special permission from the state. It never produced a single document proving that permission existed. The story got a headline and disappeared.

The Missing Tax Filings

Public records suggest Ridglan Farms Inc., EIN 39–1066502, may not have filed its required Form 5500-SF employee benefit plan return since tax year 2023. This has not been independently verified by this publication. Investigators and journalists are encouraged to confirm this directly through the Department of Labor EFAST2 public database at efast.dol.gov. For a facility receiving millions in federal research contracts and $441,000 in forgiven pandemic loans, if confirmed this would raise serious questions about federal compliance obligations.

One Inspector. Ten Years. The Numbers Do Not Lie.

Go pull Ridglan’s federal inspection records from the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service public database. Since 2014, twenty-eight inspection records. Twenty-five of them show zero violations. One inspector named Welch ran twenty-four of those visits by himself.

Welch alone: 24 visits, 1 violation found, 4% violation rate

Welch with other USDA staff: multiple visits, violations found about 50% of the time

Welch with Animal Care Specialists: multiple visits, violations found every single time, 100%

Wisconsin state inspectors covering the same period: 311 plus violations, ongoing

Welch alone: four percent violation rate. Welch with backup: fifty percent. Welch with Animal Care Specialists: one hundred percent, every single time. The clean federal record Ridglan waved at its critics had nothing to do with what was actually happening to the animals. It had everything to do with who walked through the door.

Welch also covered the Moulton Chinchilla Ranch, another major animal welfare scandal with the exact same pattern. One inspector. Two facilities. Same result both times.

The Secret Policy the Government Ordered Its Own People to Hide

In 2018 the USDA floated a plan to reduce how thoroughly it inspected facilities accredited by a private group called AAALAC. The public pushed back hard. The USDA said publicly it was dropping the idea. A year later it did it anyway, in secret.

In February 2019, APHIS sent internal guidance to its inspectors telling them to only check one thing per visit at AAALAC accredited facilities. Either the animals. Or the building. Or the paperwork. Never all three. Inspectors could go years without laying eyes on a single animal. Inspectors were ordered to say nothing about it.

Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic dug this out through a Freedom of Information Act request on behalf of Rise for Animals and the Animal Legal Defense Fund. The lawsuit, Rise for Animals v. Vilsack, is in the federal court record. Ridglan had AAALAC accreditation. The clean federal record it used as a legal defense was built on a policy the government had no right to run, publicly promised it would not run, ran in secret anyway, and told its own people to hide.

Rise for Animals went through over fourteen thousand USDA inspection reports. AAALAC accredited facilities are forty-two percent of all inspected facilities but pull seventy-three percent of the two most serious violation categories. The policy protected the worst facilities in the system.

Your Tax Dollars Paid for Every Bit of This

The government was not only failing to act. It was writing checks.

NIH, three grants at University of Missouri: $12,000,000 — hundreds of live ticks glued directly to Ridglan dogs’ bare skin

NIH, separate grant: $597,893 — 38 five month old beagle puppies strapped into gas masks twice daily for two weeks, all killed at the end

SBA COVID pandemic loans: $441,000 — fully forgiven, taxpayers paid every dollar, zero repayment required

Department of Interior, NSF, USDA additional grants: undisclosed amounts — multiple experiments at universities across the country

Thirty-eight five month old puppies from Ridglan. Gas masks strapped to their faces. Forced to inhale experimental drugs for up to an hour at a time, twice a day, for two weeks straight. The researchers noted upfront that some would probably die. Every dog that survived was killed when the experiment ended. The NIH paid $597,893 for that. At the same facility the federal government was protecting through a secret inspection policy.

During COVID, while state inspectors were piling up violations against Ridglan, the Small Business Administration handed the facility $441,000 in pandemic loans and then forgave every dollar of it. American taxpayers paid that bill.

Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin stood up at a House hearing on April 16, 2026 and told Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to his face that the NIH was still writing checks to labs using Ridglan beagles despite everything that had been documented. Kennedy said he could barely believe it. The money was real. It is in the congressional record.

We Already Have the Technology. We Just Need to Force Them to Use It.

Ninety percent of drugs that work in animal tests fail when they reach human trials. Ninety percent. The whole pitch that animal testing keeps people safe falls apart under the industry’s own numbers.

The technology to replace it is already here. Organ on chip systems built at Harvard’s Wyss Institute can replicate how human tissue actually behaves. Human cell organoids. Computer models. These tools exist right now and in many cases they are more accurate than putting drugs into a beagle. The FDA already removed the legal requirement for animal testing in drug development when it signed the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 in 2022. Congress moved on.

Jane Goodall and University of Colorado professor

Marc Bekoff, who personally testified at the October 2024 Ridglan evidentiary hearing, wrote in the Washington Post in March 2025 that using dogs in experiments is a profound betrayal of trust and called for an immediate moratorium on federal funding for dog experiments and ultimately a full ban. Since 1979 the number of dogs used in experiments has been reduced by 80 percent. In 2015 the United States ended all federal funding for chimpanzee experiments which effectively stopped the practice. The same can be done for dogs.

But labs will not change on their own. They will keep doing it the old way because it is familiar, because their grant applications are built around it, because their staff was trained on it, and because nobody has stopped them. You cannot politely ask a fifty year old system to restructure itself. It has to be banned. Animal lab testing needs to be outlawed completely and the alternatives need to be the only legal option, because as long as the old way is still allowed and still funded by taxpayers, nothing changes for the dogs. You cannot put a dollar value on a life. The moment you do, you have already lost your way.

The Question Nobody in Washington Has Answered: Why Envigo But Not Ridglan?

In 2022 federal authorities went after Envigo, a beagle breeding facility in Cumberland, Virginia. The violations looked a lot like Ridglan. The response looked nothing like what Ridglan got.

Envigo, Virginia 2022: documented violations, judge finding of probable cause, vet license suspended. Federal response: DOJ seized all 4,000 dogs immediately, $35 million fine, criminal conviction, every dog rehomed. Rescuers were not investigated as terrorists.

Ridglan Farms, Wisconsin: documented violations, 311 plus state violations, judge finding of probable cause, vet license suspended. Federal response: handshake deal, no fines, no charges, dogs stayed in cages, eight more months of sales. Rescuers investigated as terrorists by FBI counter-terrorism task force. Final charge after a thousand people showed up: ordinance violation for building an illegal trench.

Nobody in the federal government has explained that gap.

What Happened When a Thousand People Said Enough

On March 15, 2026, activists got inside Ridglan and carried 22 beagles out into daylight. Many had never felt sunlight before. Eight were intercepted by police and returned to the facility. Twenty-seven people were arrested and charged with felony burglary for pulling dogs out of a facility a judge had already found probable cause to believe was committing criminal animal cruelty.

Between March and April the owner of Ridglan got busy. He dug a trench around the entire property. Packed it with massive hay bales. Filled it with manure, water, rocks, and whatever else went in there. Nobody knows exactly what is in that trench. He built it without the required permits.

Beginning Friday April 18 people started arriving from across the country. By Saturday April 19 over a thousand had gathered. According to the Dane County Sheriff’s Department, 29 people were arrested. Tear gas. Rubber bullets. Pepper spray. Nobody made it past the outer perimeter. The trench and the agencies made sure of that.

Wayne Hsiung, an attorney and one of the most well known animal rights advocates in the country, drove out on April 18 to serve Ridglan with legal papers for a lawsuit. He was arrested before he could hand them over. Probable cause for conspiracy to commit burglary.

While in custody, a federal counter-terrorism task force interrogated him. According to Hsiung, who stated this publicly on saveddogs.io and on his verified X account, agents kept asking him the same question over and over. Would you save a grub.

Hsiung posted from his verified account that federal law enforcement is investigating beagle rescuers as terrorists. The post is live at x.com/waynehhsiung/status/2045722624328716628. The same government that protected Ridglan for a decade through a secret inspection policy, funded tick experiments on its dogs, forgave its pandemic loans, and let it walk while Envigo got a criminal conviction, is running terrorism investigations on the people who tried to get those dogs out.

What the Cameras Caught

TikTok user Cari Ann posted video from inside the Ridglan perimeter. Search ridglan farms beagles update april 19. It is circulating with hundreds of shares. A person is on the ground, not moving, surrounded by tear gas. An officer stands over them. Then the officer gets on top of them. The person on the ground shows no signs of movement or resistance.

Direct Action Everywhere posted from their verified Facebook page that rescuers were being kicked, beaten, pepper sprayed, tear gassed, and arrested. Multiple independent videos confirmed it from different angles. Protester Nicholas Dickman went on camera for FOX6 Milwaukee and said law enforcement knocked out his teeth.

Multiple agencies. Chemical weapons. A person on the ground with an officer on top of them. Protecting a facility with 311 documented violations and a vet already stripped of his license for operating on conscious dogs.

What the DA Filed. And What He Left Alone.

Charges have since been filed against Ridglan Farms itself. After years of documented felony animal cruelty, 311 violations, a judge finding probable cause, and a thousand people showing up on April 19 trying to reach the dogs, the facility faced one charge. An ordinance violation for building the trench without permits. He charged the building permit. Not the dogs. Meanwhile the activists who tried to reach those dogs face felony burglary charges.

There is a reason felony animal cruelty charges were never filed despite a judge finding probable cause. Wisconsin’s animal cruelty statute, Chapter 951, specifically exempts facilities conducting research under approved institutional protocols. Ridglan operated under exactly those approvals. The law was written to protect them. That research exemption is one of the primary reasons meaningful criminal accountability has been impossible to achieve under Wisconsin law.

Even after July 1 when Ridglan loses its commercial breeding license, it can still breed beagles for its own internal research. July 1 does not free those dogs. It just stops outside sales. Two thousand dogs could still be living and dying in that facility after July 1 with no outside oversight and no requirement to rehome a single one of them. The settlement deal Ridglan negotiated lets it avoid admitting fault, avoid prosecution, and keep operating as a USDA licensed research facility indefinitely.

The full investigation into how this legal outcome was engineered, who built the system that guaranteed it, and how that same system protects facilities like this one in every state in the country publishes next at The Ninth Gate Independent. Subscribe now so you do not miss it.

What It Could Have Looked Like

In Virginia in 2022 the federal government went to Envigo with carriers and leashes and a plan. Four thousand dogs. Rescue organizations staged and ready. Law enforcement and advocates working together. Every single dog got out and went to a home.

Multiple agencies went to Blue Mounds on April 19 with tear gas and a counter-terrorism task force. Three hundred violations on the books. A judge already finding probable cause. A vet already stripped of his license. Virginia showed what the government can do when it decides to. Wisconsin showed what it does when it decides not to.

Two thousand dogs are still in those cages. The breeding license ends July 1 with no guarantee of what happens to them after that. What happens to those dogs is on the people in power now.

Emma Hurst, a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council in Australia and co-founder of the Animal Justice Party, posted publicly on April 14 about Ridglan Farms. The only reason these brave rescue missions are occurring is because our animal protection laws are failing in the first place, she wrote. All too often we see cases of animal cruelty where the authorities respond by punishing passionate community members instead of the perpetrators of animal abuse. She added that if the political system was working these rescues would never be necessary and that her job as a politician is to fight to outlaw the abuse occurring in the first place.

An elected official from the other side of the world is watching what is happening in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. The question is whether the people in power in this country are watching too.

Emma Hurst, Member of the New South Wales Legislative Council, Australia. Facebook: facebook.com/EmmaHurstAJP

A Note on Why This Goes Beyond Beagles

This article focuses on Ridglan Farms and the beagles trapped inside it. But the fight is bigger than one facility and bigger than one species. Every year millions of animals, dogs, cats, primates, rabbits, mice, pigs, and countless others, are subjected to the same conditions in laboratories across this country and around the world. In China, dogs are tortured on dog meat farms in ways too disturbing to describe. In labs on every continent, animals live and die in cages without ever knowing what sunlight feels like or what it means to be free.

This article is about beagles because that is where the paper trail leads. But the principle behind it applies to every living creature. Every animal, every insect, every living being shares this earth with us. In the eyes of God or the universe or whatever you believe gives life its meaning, no life is worth more or less than another. A beagle in a cage in Wisconsin and a dog on a meat farm in China are suffering the same betrayal. We bred dogs to trust us. We owe them better than this. We owe all of them better than this.

What You Can Do Right Now. This Is How You Help.

Call the Wisconsin Attorney General’s Office right now at 608–266–1221, press 4. Demand they intervene and remove every dog from Ridglan Farms before July 1.

Call the US Department of Justice comment line at 202–353–1555 and demand the DOJ seize the Ridglan dogs the same way they seized the Envigo dogs in 2022.

Support the legal defense fund for Wayne Hsiung and the activists facing felony charges at righttorescue.com. These people risked their freedom for those dogs and they need resources now.

Follow the Coalition to Save the Ridglan Dogs for the most current updates and ways to get involved at saveddogs.io.

Support the organizations fighting this battle every day. Rise for Animals at riseforanimals.org. Dane4Dogs at dane4dogs.org. Animal Legal Defense Fund at aldf.org. Nonhuman Rights Project at nonhumanrights.org. National Anti-Vivisection Society at navs.org.

Contact your federal representatives and demand they investigate why the NIH continued funding experiments using Ridglan beagles despite hundreds of documented violations. Find your representatives at congress.gov.

If you have footage from April 19 showing what law enforcement did, get it to Wayne Hsiung’s legal team through righttorescue.com immediately. It is evidence.

Use the hashtag SaveTheDogs everywhere. Share this article. Tag news organizations, journalists, and politicians. The story only grows if people keep pushing it.

More investigations are coming. If this article made you angry, if it made you want to do something, subscribe to The Ninth Gate Independent on Medium and follow Shane Walters for upcoming publications. The Ridglan story is not over and neither is this reporting.

Sources

Rise for Animals, Same USDA Inspector Assigned to Every Ridglan Inspection: riseforanimals.org

Rise for Animals, Suspended Ridglan Vet Replaced by Two Under Investigation: riseforanimals.org/news/ridglan-vet-replacement

Rise for Animals, Jerabek conflict of interest at DATCP: riseforanimals.org

Rise for Animals, Ridglan Hit With 311 Offenses: riseforanimals.org

Harvard Law School Animal Law and Policy Clinic, USDA Sued Over Secret Policy: animal.law.harvard.edu

Animal Legal Defense Fund, Challenging the USDA Secret Policy: aldf.org

Science Magazine, Facing Impossible Workload USDA Struggles to Oversee Lab Animal Welfare, August 2025: science.org

Science Magazine, Facing Claims of Animal Abuse, October 2025: science.org

Nonhuman Rights Project, Ridglan Beagles case page: nonhumanrights.org

White Coat Waste Project, Abusive Beagle Mill Sells Puppies to Labs: whitecoatwaste.org

Animal Wellness Action, Stop Federal Funding for Ridglan Farms Beagles: animalwellnessaction.org

National Anti-Vivisection Society, animal research reform and alternatives: navs.org

Marc Bekoff and Jane Goodall, This Is No Way to Treat Humans Best Friend, Washington Post, March 24 2025: washingtonpost.com

FOX6 Milwaukee, Ridglan Under Scrutiny After Five-Week-Old Puppy Shipment: fox6now.com

FOX6 Milwaukee, Nicholas Dickman teeth claim on camera: fox6now.com

12 News Investigates, Special Prosecutor Tim Gruenke on record confirming cherry eye procedures without anesthesia

CBS News, 1,000 Animal Rights Activists Try to Storm Wisconsin Beagle Breeding Facility, April 19 2026: cbsnews.com/news/ridglan-farms-blue-mounds-wisconsin-beagles-protest

CNN, Animal Rights Protest Wisconsin, April 19 2026: cnn.com/2026/04/19/us/animal-rights-protest-wisconsin

Associated Press, Animal Welfare Protesters Converge on Wisconsin Governor’s Office, April 20 2026: apnews.com/article/wisconsin-animal-rights-protests-arrests-beagles-535d2b62a411201afd6382deac845351

New York Times, Activists Tear-Gassed at Failed Raid of Beagle Research Facility, April 20 2026: nytimes.com

Democracy Now, Animal Rights Activists Target Wisconsin Facility, April 21 2026: democracynow.org

Wisconsin Examiner, Tensions Rise as Activists Police Prepare for Second Rescue, April 17 2026: wisconsinexaminer.com

Wisconsin Examiner, Ridglan Farms Research License Continues After Breeding License Surrender: wisconsinexaminer.com

Animals 24–7, Ridglan Farms Round 2 Tear Gas Mass Busts No Beagles Rescued, April 19 2026: animals24-7.org

Isthmus Madison, full Ridglan coverage: isthmus.com

Dane4Dogs, Ridglan case full timeline: dane4dogs.org

Right to Rescue, Ridglan case timeline and legal defense fund: righttorescue.com

USDA APHIS Public Inspection Records: aphis.my.site.com

Dane County Sheriff’s Office, Ridglan Farms FAQ: danesheriff.com

Congress.gov, Oversight and Enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act

Congressional Record, Representative Mark Pocan questioning RFK Jr., April 16 2026

ProPublica PPP Loan Database: projects.propublica.org

Ridglan Farms Inc. EIN 39–1066502 Form 5500-SF filing status unverified, check efast.dol.gov to confirm

Wayne Hsiung verified X post: x.com/waynehhsiung/status/2045722624328716628

Wayne Hsiung statement on counter-terrorism interrogation: saveddogs.io

The Simple Heart, Wayne Hsiung, Blue Mounds local government ties to Ridglan Farms

Direct Action Everywhere verified Facebook live post, April 19 2026

TikTok video by Cari Ann: search ridglan farms beagles update april 19

The Marty Project verified Facebook post, DA charges filed against Ridglan Farms

SaveTheDogs, About the Campaign: savethedogs.io

Wisconsin Chapter 951 animal cruelty statute, research exemption provisions: docs.legis.wisconsin.gov

This investigation was conducted by Shane Walters, independent investigative journalist and founder of The Ninth Gate Independent. Every claim is sourced to publicly verifiable government records, federal court filings, Freedom of Information Act documents, sworn congressional testimony, verified social media posts from named individuals, and reporting in major publications. Where information is unverified it is clearly noted. Shane Walters is not an attorney. Nothing in this article is speculation. All of it can be checked. Follow future investigations at The Ninth Gate Independent on Medium.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​