In 1954, Time magazine published a short article about the University of Utah using beagles in research to determine the dangers of radioactive material over a lifetime.
At a kennel dubbed “Beagleville,” 450 dogs had been injected with graduated amounts of radioactive material, including plutonium and radium. “These elements accumulate in the bones and bombard tender cells with damaging alpha particles,” the article said.
Despite this, and the fact that four of the dogs at Beagleville had died, the article advanced the idea that the research was important and the dogs were well-treated; the writer noted that they were “tenderly bathed” every day and the program director said, “These pups grow to adulthood under conditions far better than most beagles enjoy.”
It’s hard to find anyone writing so sympathetically about research on beagles today.
The beagle has become a poster dog for the animal-rights movement, and the focal point of a surprisingly diverse coalition that includes Lara Trump, the Fox News personality and daughter-in-law of the president, and Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, who frequently bashes Donald Trump on social media.
Their politics may be different, but they are united in concern about the use of beagles in scientific experimentation, especially when it’s funded by taxpayers.
Beagles are commonly used in research because of their temperament and size, said Ketty Hansen, co-founder of Utah Beagle Rescue, a nonprofit that finds homes for dogs that have been removed from laboratories, shelters or abusive owners.
“Beagles are just so sweet, very forgiving,” Hansen said. “You can poke them 20 times, hurt them, and give them a couple of minutes, and they will still lick you, and kiss you and love you.”
Hansen has been fond of beagles since childhood because of her affection for Snoopy, the “Peanuts” star who was the first fictional dog to be registered by the American Kennel Club.
But there are other reasons Hansen and millions of other people love beagles. They are consistently ranked in the top 10 favorite dog breeds in part because of what the AKC calls the beagle’s “adorable” face and its “pleading” expression.
It might be the most catalyzing face since Helen of Troy, but it’s launching not ships but protests, some of which have turned violent as activists try to free the beagles within breeding facilities.
“We are in a very unique moment” when it comes to animal testing in research, Lara Trump told me.
The story of how we got here involves not just the University of Utah’s Beagleville, but also the backlash against the COVID-19 pandemic response and its architect, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The protests at Ridglan Farms
Although research on beagles has been ongoing since the 1950s, the subject exploded in the news in April, when protesters attempted to break into Ridglan Farms, a beagle breeding facility in Wisconsin, in order to take the dogs.
It wasn’t the first time. The activist group Direct Action Everywhere, led by Wayne Hsiung, has done this elsewhere and had previously broken into Ridglan Farms. (Hsiung defended the practice in a recent essay in Current Affairs, titled “It’s My Civic Duty to Break Into Labs and Rescue Dogs.”) But social media garnered more sympathy for the protesters than for Ridglan Farms, and an estimated 1,000 people showed up to help “rescue” the dogs. More than two dozen people were arrested, including Hsiung.
In the aftermath of the protests, two nonprofits — Big Dog Ranch Rescue and the Center for a Humane Economy — paid Ridglan Farms an undisclosed amount of money in exchange for 1,500 beagles, which they are working to rehome. Big Dog Ranch Rescue obtained another 135 dogs this week.
The rehoming of these beagles has made for heartwarming videos on social media, and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said she has adopted two of them.
In light of viral clips like these, Ridglan Farms and supporters of animal testing have found it challenging to mount an effective defense.
On its website, where Ridglan Farms says it offers “purpose bred beagles for biomedical research,” the business offers its side of the story, saying that protesters have harassed its employees and customers and misrepresented their work.
The website says “our animals are happy, healthy and socially housed in comfortable, well-cared-for facilities that are regularly cleaned” and it includes links to photos and videos what it called the “assault” on Ridglan Farms, including one video of a van breaking through a fence.
“Awesome!” one comment on that video read.
It’s hard to win a public-relations war when the face of it is a caged beagle. And elected officials of all ideological stripes are seeing beagles — and the welfare of animals more broadly — as a winning issue and speaking out on the subject.
South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, who has posted online about the Ridglan beagles, said in an email, “Animal welfare is not a partisan issue. It is a moral one.”
Her congressional colleague Nick Langworthy of New York has spoken out about another beagle breeder and a new focus of activists, Marshall Farms, which also raises ferrets, cats and mini pigs for research.
Its website says, “For over 80 years, our animals have contributed to the development of life saving therapies and treatments for humans and pets; and raising happy and healthy animals has been our top priority.“
In a video posted to X, Langworthy said that more than 20,000 dogs are bred each year at Marshall Farms and that “sites like this need to be shut down.”
But ironically, it was outrage over previous ways of obtaining animals for research that led to commercial breeding businesses like this.
How beagles came to be bred for research
Jeremy Beckham, an animal rights advocate and recent law school graduate, published a paper called “Radioactive Beagles” in which he looked at the earliest beagle research at the University of Utah.
A former Utah resident who now lives in Portland, Beckham reported that the University of Utah was one of six centers that initially performed research on radiation using dogs. (Others included the University of California-Davis and Colorado State University.)
“Between the years of 1952 and 1983, federally funded radiation research killed more than 7,000 beagles,” at these locations, Beckham wrote in his paper.
As the Time magazine article shows, this practice didn’t stoke widespread outrage at the time; rather, it was seen as necessary since fears of nuclear war were rampant and the U.S. and Soviet Union were testing atomic bombs.
But the radioactivity was not limited to the bodies of dogs used in the studies; contamination near the California testing site later became an issue. And with each passing year, the push to end all animal testing has gathered steam, with animal-rights advocates arguing that such testing is no longer necessary because of technological advances such as AI modeling and cultivated cells.
The federal government’s standards are starting to reflect that. The Food and Drug Administration, for example, last year announced plans to phase out required animal testing on new drugs. The Environmental Protection Agency may soon do the same. The National Institutes for Health announced it would spend $150 million to research alternatives to reduce “dependence” on animal testing.
But Justin Goodman, senior vice president of advocacy and public policy for White Coat Waste Project, a nonprofit at the forefront of the issue, noted that NIH had recently renewed a research contract to fund cardiac research on dogs at Northwestern University, among other studies.
“Animal testing is bad science, but it’s big business,” Goodman said.
Breeding dogs wasn’t always part of the business, though.
In research he did when working for the California-based Beagle Freedom Project, Beckham learned that before the University of Utah established a beagle colony, laboratories would typically purchase dogs from a local shelter or “even literally round up stray dogs, which is kind of shocking to think about now.”
Eventually the public grew outraged by that practice, called “pound seizure,” and that led to the creation of the Animal Welfare Act of 1966, which established standards on research and testing.
Having animals bred specifically for research would turn out to be problematic in other ways for the public, but at least people’s lost pets weren’t winding up in labs.
According to federal reports, the use of dogs in experiments peaked in the late 1970s to early 1980s, with about 200,000 dogs used annually, and has steadily declined since then.
The most recent report, issued by the USDA in 2024, showed that there are nearly 43,000 dogs being used for research about 12,000 cats and 45,000 pigs, among other types of animals.
But that’s still 43,000 dogs too many for people who are against experimentation on animals.
“Taxpayers have a right to know that their hard-earned money is propping up the puppy torture business,” Goodman said.
Lara Trump’s beagles
Lara Trump, who celebrated the rehoming of the Ridglan beagles on social media, said in an interview that “we are in a very unique moment” with regard to animal testing, both because of expanded alternatives in research, and because of the Trump administration’s focus on transparency.
Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr., she said, has been skeptical of the need for animal testing and he has “sort of blown the doors off anything ‘normal’ that we’re used to,” she said.
At the same time, however, White Coat Waste has put up billboards calling out Kennedy for allowing government-funding animal research to continue; the signs say “End Fauci’s labs.”
Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, retired in 2022, but he became a household name during the COVID-19 pandemic — and as the pandemic response became increasingly politicized, became a villain to many on the right.
The turn against him was exacerbated when stories began to circulate that Fauci had approved funding for scientific research on beagles, and in a hearing, then-Rep. Marjorie-Taylor Greene held up a photo of two dogs lying on their side, with their heads confined in boxes. The dogs were part of a study in which they were subjected to the bites of sand flies, and the photo was in the researchers’ published report.
Fauci later described the outcry over the research as “lunacy” and “lies,” but in 2024, The Washington Post reviewed documents obtained by White Coat Waste and concluded that “NIH was not fully transparent as it tried to handle a public-relations nightmare.”
For research beagles, it was a public-relations win.
The Post noted that “Fauci’s office got 3,600 phone calls in 36 hours.” And 24 members of Congress signed a bipartisan letter quoting White Coat Waste Project reporting and expressing “grave concerns about reports of costly, cruel and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs.”
Today, the government may be doing some things on the issue, but not fast enough for the group’s liking. Some recent legislation, for example, seeks to outlaw testing that causes “significant” pain or distress to dogs or cats. Many animal-rights activists want to end all testing.
“We’re not interested in tidying labs up. We’re interested in shutting them down,” Goodman, of White Coat Waste, said in an interview.
The organization recently commissioned a poll that asked respondents if they would be more likely to support Robert F. Kennedy Jr. if he stopped or phased out taxpayer funded dog testing. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans, half of independents and one-third of Democrats said they would.
And nearly two-thirds of Republicans, Democrats and independents said they would support legislation ending federal funding for dog experiments, “regardless of whether alternatives are available.”
The nationwide poll was conducted by Bedrock Polling for White Coat Waste May 20-24.
For its part, the University of Utah no longer does research on beagles and hasn’t in more than a decade, according to Julie Kiefer, the university’s director of research communications.
Dogs are still used in some research, and the university says on its website that it works to exceed established standards of animal care.
“Research involving animals plays a really important role in advancing our understanding of human and animal health and in developing new treatments and therapies, and so we do carry out a limited number of studies with dogs in situations where the research really can’t be done in any other way,” Kiefer said, adding that the university is committed to “compassionate animal care.”
“Every study is carefully reviewed and overseen by veterinarians and trained staff in accordance with national and international guidelines.”
As for how the university’s research animals are obtained, Kiefer said they come from “an approved vendor that distributes animals that are bred for research purposes.”
How beagles became important to the right
When Matthew Scully, a speechwriter for conservatives like George W. Bush and Mike Pence, wrote about animal welfare in his 2002 book “Dominion,” he was an outlier on the issue within the Republican Party.
But now people are calling out the left for being indifferent or hostile to animal welfare, while the right, usually quick to side with business and free enterprise, has been vocal about research beagles. “The politics on animal testing have really gotten pretty scrambled up” over the past two decades, Beckham said.
For Lara Trump, her passion derives from personal experience. She is an animal lover who lost a beloved beagle in February, is on the board of Big Dog Rescue Ranch and has talked about the Ridglan beagles on her Fox News show.
“I had never had much experience around beagles prior to us getting Charlie, but we found the personality was unique, and so loving and forgiving, it’s very easy to see, once you get to know beagles, why they are the choice dog for animal testing, because they don’t hold a grudge and they have a great disposition,” she said in an interview.
Trump said she would never encourage animal-rights advocates to break the law — “although I understand they felt very passionate about what they were doing” at Ridglan — but she thinks it’s notable that the dogs were eventually released from the farm through negotiation. “And now all of these dogs are going to be rehomed and have incredible lives.”
Like Mace, Trump doesn’t see this as a political issue, but as a “common-sense issue.”
“I generally try to be apolitical when it comes to this space, despite my last name, because I think this is a space where you see a cohesive message coming from both the right and the left.
“Over 60% of the country has a family pet. ... We all want to do right by them. So I’m willing to work with anyone who wants the right result here, who wants the right things to happen. And I’ve been really proud to call people who have different political views my friends in this space, and I hope we can continue on that path because to me, nothing is more important than seeing the right things happen. And certainly one of those things is ensuring that the most vulnerable in our society — and you can certainly put animals in that space — I think we have that responsibility. So I’m willing to work with anyone. I wish more people felt like that.”