Hundreds try to storm Wisconsin beagle facility, police fire tear gas, arrest protesters

Police fired tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets at hundreds of activists who tried to force their way into Ridglan Farms in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, a private breeding and lab facility about 25 miles southwest of Madison. Officers arrested protest leaders and other demonstrators after the crowd tried to storm the property and remove beagles that the facility keeps for medical research.

Authorities and reports put the crowd at about 1,000 people, though law enforcement said roughly 300 to 400 were at the breach point. Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said up to 400 activists were “violently trying to break in” to the property. The confrontation came on Saturday, April 18, 2026, and marked the second attempt in as many months to take dogs from the facility.

Ridglan Farms has operated for nearly 60 years and has long been a flashpoint for animal-rights protests and break-in attempts. The facility is described as a licensed research breeder that supplies beagles to laboratories and medical testing, and reports said it had about 1,800 beagles on site during the protest. Activists said they were rescuing animals they believed were being kept in abusive conditions, while the company has maintained that it operates legally under research-breeding rules.

The latest confrontation followed a March 2026 raid in which activists removed 22 beagles from the same property. Those dogs were later adopted. Activists involved in the campaign said they planned to return on April 19, 2026, to try to remove the remaining dogs.

The clash has put a national spotlight on a long-running policy dispute over what should happen inside animal-research supply chains and where lawful protest ends. Beagle-breeding facilities have become recurring targets because the dogs are widely used in drug testing and other biomedical research, a role that makes them central to both scientific development and the moral objections of opponents. In Blue Mounds, that conflict turned into a law-enforcement operation as officers moved to keep control of the facility and prevent a mass seizure of animals.