How 2,000 beagles set the animal rights movement on fire

Editor’s note, April 30, 4:00 pm: This piece was first published April 29 at 12:30 pm, before news emerged that two animal rescue organizations had reached a deal with Ridglan Farms to purchase 1,500 of the company’s beagles, give them medical care, and adopt them out to homes. The fate of Ridglan’s remaining dogs not covered by the agreement remains unclear. The story, which examines and contextualizes the long campaign against Ridglan and the broader animal rights strategy behind recent activist “open rescue” attempts, appears below in its original form.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 question. 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