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Activists tried to free 2,000 dogs from a Wisconsin research lab. Then came the tear gas.

A viral campaign to rescue beagles used for biomedical experiments is part of a much bigger fight.

It’s exceptionally rare that the tiny, perpetually marginal, and politically outmatched animal rights movement manages to capture national attention. A lack of attention is that movement’s core problem and central organizing conundrum. How can it convince the public to make space in their minds for something they’d really, really prefer not to: the industrialized torture of animals by the billions for food, research, and other human ends?

One coalition of grassroots activists has offered one possible answer. It has recently mounted one of the most audacious and most news-making animal rights campaigns in recent memory, and, in the process, turned an obscure breeder of beagles for biomedical experimentation into an issue of national political significance.

On March 15, dozens of activists stormed Ridglan Farms, a dog facility outside Madison, Wisconsin, that raises beagles for research labs across the country and has been accused by state regulators of hundreds of animal welfare violations. The activists entered one of the company’s buildings and extracted 30 of the dogs held in cages there (who are, under the law, Ridglan’s property). Twenty-two beagles were driven off the site and have since been placed in homes, while eight were seized from activists by police and believed to be returned to Ridglan.

That event produced an arresting set of images seen by tens of millions of Americans in the news and on social media, and it reached the agenda of political leaders all the way up to Congress and the Trump administration. So, the group, a loose assemblage known as the Coalition to Save the Ridglan Dogs, sought to raise the stakes even higher: They would rapidly recruit and train hundreds of new volunteers and return to Ridglan within a few weeks to remove all of the nearly 2,000 beagles believed to still be confined there.

This next rescue attempt, on April 18, unfolded much differently, when more than 1,000 activists arriving at the facility were caught off guard by a major show of force from law enforcement. The police, primarily the Dane County Sheriff with help from other law enforcement agencies, tackled activists and deployed rubber bullets; pepper spray; tear gas; and, the sheriff’s office confirmed to me, stinger grenades, which are less-lethal grenades that release rubber pellets and are often used for riot control.

One woman had her nose broken. A 67-year-old Navy veteran was pinned to the ground, covered with tear gas, and struggled to breathe as an officer pressed a knee into his back. Another man trying to go through a hole in Ridglan’s fence was knocked unconscious by police and had a tooth knocked out. Police removed a woman’s protective goggles to douse her in the face with pepper spray. Numerous people ended up in the emergency room. Reporting from the scene, I found myself, for a minute or two, also choked by the tear gas.

Police force of this magnitude may be grimly familiar to human rights movements from Black Lives Matter to the recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but it is unprecedented in US animal rights activism. The day was a devastating defeat for the activists, who couldn’t come close to breaching Ridglan’s buildings this time — and no beagles were rescued.

But might there be a success hidden in this apparent failure? The activists now hope that the images of police repression that have turned the attempted rescue into national news can be leveraged into greater public support and momentum for their cause.

“We’ve created a new narrative that the animal rights movement has never had, which is that we’re getting the shit beat out of us by police, and we’re getting thousands of ordinary people to show up and get involved,” Abie Brauner, a lawyer and organizer in the action, told me. Scott Wagner, the Navy veteran who was tackled by police and who is still on crutches today after his leg was injured in his encounter with police, told me that “the PR does nothing but benefit the animal movement.”

Many casual observers will encounter Ridglan as an isolated story — one controversial facility subjecting dogs to lives of confinement and experimentation that would make dog-loving Americans recoil in horror — but it’s also part of a much grander strategy. “Ridglan is like a stand-in for all industrialized animal abuse,” Justin Marceau, a law professor at the University of Denver and head of its Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, told me.

The ultimate prize for the animal rights movement is to persuade people to connect the suffering of beagles to that of the many more animals raised for food on factory farms, whose exploitation is made possible by the same legal structure that treats animals as property with few limits on what can be done to them. It is a goal that’s always eluded the animal movement: Can the public’s empathy stretch beyond the animals we’ve chosen to love to reach cows, pigs, and chickens?

Why Ridglan, and why open rescue?

The recent actions at Ridglan represented the largest-ever iteration of a tactic developed by animal rights........

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