Public outrage and sustained pressure from dedicated advocates helped secure the release of 1,500 beagles from Ridglan Farms, a Wisconsin facility that for decades bred and sold dogs to laboratories for painful and deadly experiments.

People around the world celebrated while watching the dogs feel sunshine, grass and tummy rubs for the first time. We cheered as they finally played, ran and experienced the comfort and safety of loving homes.

These beagles’ newfound freedom closes one chapter of cruelty, but we cannot forget that there are at least 650 beagles who remain at Ridglan and that laboratory cages are still filled with millions of other animals—living, feeling beings with whom many people are less familiar and for whom they may have less empathy—including monkeys, hamsters, rabbits, guinea pigs, mice, rats, fish, birds and others. All these cages need to be emptied, too.

Anyone who has had the privilege of sharing their life with a dog or cat knows that these animals feel pain and fear, experience loneliness and grief, form attachments, anticipate joy and have unique personalities. They possess rich social, emotional and cognitive lives. But these complex traits are not exclusive to the animals we’ve come to know and love.

Rats will work to free trapped companions, share food and place themselves at risk to help others. Monkeys form lifelong bonds, mourn losses and care deeply for their babies. Rabbits groom each other, seek out companionship and can become depressed in isolation. Mice express empathy and have social preferences. They all value their lives and freedom, just as the Ridglan Farms’ dogs and humans do.

These capacities, wants and needs do not disappear behind closed laboratory doors. They are simply ignored. The suffering these complex animals experience inside laboratories is seemingly limitless in both type and scale. Rats are brain-damaged. Monkeys are force-fed pesticides. Rabbits are blinded. Mice are burned alive. Others are driven into despair and anxiety in experiments designed to induce fear, trauma and mental distress.

Many live in isolation, confined to barren cells and deprived of everything that makes life worthwhile. They endure prolonged restraint, invasive surgeries, painful diseases and psychological deprivation before being killed. Painkillers are often withheld to avoid affecting test results. On top of all these horrors, many are victims of documented negligence, sometimes leading to starvation, suffocation or drowning.

Every single cut of a scalpel and shove of a tube down a throat is a targeted act of violence against a thinking, feeling individual. And for what? Advances in human health? Hardly. Tests and experiments on nonhuman animals consistently fail to produce safe and effective new preventions, treatments or cures for human illness.

Federal agencies know this. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health have all signaled support for reducing reliance on animals and increasing investments in more accurate human-based, non-animal tools like organoids, organs-on-chips, computational toxicology, advanced imaging and AI-assisted modeling. While these developments are welcome, much-needed shifts in the scientific status quo, the pace of progress remains inadequate to address the scale of suffering occurring daily in laboratories.

Every day that another animal is bred into confinement, subjected to painful procedures and killed is an unacceptable delay of justice for our fellow Earthlings. Every dollar funneled into pointless tests that thwart scientific progress and fail to improve human health is a waste of resources.

The liberation of the dogs from Ridglan Farms briefly pulled back the curtain on an industry that has long flourished in obscurity, galvanizing people from all walks of life to oppose cruelty and demand state-of-the-art, human-relevant science. But how we harness this collective power and awareness next matters most.

We have the ethical imperative and the scientific tools to build a better system, leaving all animal experimentation in the rearview mirror. Now, we must confront head-on the abuse of all species used in laboratories and address their suffering with the urgency that compassion and scientific progress demand.

The rescue of 1,500 beagles opened the door to modernizing research and saving millions more animals. We must not let that door close.

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Katherine Roe, Ph.D., is chief scientist in PETA’s Laboratory Investigations Department, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org. Trained in psychology and cognitive science, she earned her doctorate at the University of California–San Diego and held research positions at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institute of Mental Health. Her career spans behavioral and neuroimaging research in language, memory and neurodevelopmental conditions. At PETA, she advances rigorous, human‑relevant scientific methods across academia, government and nonprofit research settings.

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