In March, a group of around 50 activists broke into Ridglan Farms, a dog breeding and animal research facility, and liberated 22 beagles, a breed said to be favored by the industry because of their docile and eager-to-please temperaments. The company, which had been the focus of a largely successful multiyear animal rights campaign, was scheduled to surrender its breeding license on July 1 to avoid criminal prosecution after a state investigation had found evidence of felony animal abuse, including severe and unsanitary confinement, eye surgeries performed without anesthesia, and unnecessary euthanasia.
But the protesters still weren’t satisfied. They also wanted Ridglan to surrender the animals in its possession to ensure they wouldn’t be killed or sold for use in future experiments. And so, on a bright and chilly April morning, a surprisingly bipartisan group of 1,000 activists traveled to Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, to engage in what they hoped would be a mass “open rescue” of the more than 2,000 beagles that were still held in the facility.
The first, smaller liberation was met with comparatively little resistance. This time, however, the company was prepared. Perimeters were blocked and trenches dug and filled with manure to dissuade trespassers. Private security guards and police patrolled in force, ready to repel demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Some of the protesters wore hazmat suits and carried tools intended to help them enter the facility and open cages, but the majority of attendees were dressed in regular clothes and looked like ordinary Americans. Which is what they were, for the most part. Lawyer and organizer Wayne Hsiung had intentionally emphasized a shared concern for animals and a commitment to the principle of nonviolence that attracted people from across the political spectrum. Anti-capitalist vegans stood shoulder to shoulder with dog-loving conservatives. Parents with children and seniors in wheelchairs cheered from the sidelines as more brazen activists tried and failed to breach the barriers.
Not long after the attempted rescue mission began, Gretchen Primack crouched in pain, her eyes burning from pepper spray. A poet and bookseller from New York state’s Hudson Valley, she had traveled roughly 1,000 miles to try to rescue the dogs. But facing pepper spray and rubber bullets, protesters like Primack had been beaten back.
After four tense hours, the crowd retreated. Twenty-seven people had been arrested, and several were hurt; one demonstrator reportedly lost multiple teeth. As Primack rushed a friend who had been hit with rubber bullets to the ER, she wasn’t alone in feeling, she told us, “totally demoralized.”
And then, just as fast as the cops had gassed the protesters, the activists won. Hsiung called it “the greatest turnaround in animal rights history.” Their victory was, in part, thanks to support from right-wingers.
In April, shortly before the smaller scale raid on the facility, the popular conservative podcaster Tomi Lahren interviewed Hsiung and praised the activists for their bravery. The “bipartisan” issue of animal cruelty, she said, is “one of the few areas I think we can all come together on.” After the action, Lara Trump, President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law and a proud beagle owner, urged Ridglan to make a deal and sell the dogs. Working behind the scenes, reportedly aided by well-connected allies and some deep-pocketed Trump donors, the activists secured the release of 2,000 dogs on undisclosed terms.
Under past administrations, bold direct actions like the one seen in Wisconsin have typically been dealt with harshly; for decades, law enforcement equated animal liberation with domestic terrorism. Yet even as it viciously suppresses First Amendment dissent in other arenas, the Trump regime has seemingly embraced some forms of militant animal activism and opportunistically seized the moment to take credit for the heartwarming Ridglan outcome. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins released a joint video statement boasting about the “major win for animal welfare,” while Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin posted a photo of himself with a beagle and doubled down on the administration’s preexisting commitment to eliminating animal testing in January. The far right clearly sees political value in these animal welfare fights. So why has the left largely ceded the issue to them?
In 2019, Emily Atkin wrote an insightful article for this magazine titled “Why Animal Rights Is the Next Frontier for the Left.” In it, she predicted that “it’s only a matter of time before [the left has] a serious discussion about the ethics and wisdom of consuming billions of animals every year.”
When it was published, we nodded our heads in agreement, hopeful her analysis would prove prescient. What neither we nor Atkin foresaw was the possibility that animal rights might actually be the next frontier for the right. When, the day before the 2024 presidential election, Vivek Ramaswamy posted that “animal cruelty will eventually become a genuine concern for conservatives,” and that it “shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” we scoffed in disbelief. Perhaps we shouldn’t have. Even then, conservatives were up in arms about P’Nut, the pet squirrel turned social media star who had recently been seized and euthanized by New York state authorities, a viral symbol of supposed government overreach and hostility toward pets. “Just go out there and vote for P’nut,” advised Elon Musk.
Today, Ramaswamy’s call is even harder to discount. A movement is gaining momentum on the far right that can’t simply be reduced to opportunistic concern about celebrity squirrels. In addition to launching a “strike force” to crack down on puppy mills and dogfights, the Trump administration is working to rein in animal experimentation. The National Institutes of Health, or NIH, the world’s foremost funder of biomedical research, has dedicated $87 million to the development of animal-free research methods, and the Food and Drug Administration has published a strategic road map to phase out animal testing. Kennedy has met with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, about the possibility of turning NIH-backed primate research centers into animal sanctuaries—a possibility the NIH has reportedly followed up on.
Tomi Lahren, along with fellow influencers Laura Loomer and Mike Cernovich and Republican officials including Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna, all worked to defeat the Save Our Bacon Act, a misleadingly named bill being pushed by the pork industry that would have preempted state-level welfare protections that provide gestating sows a tiny bit of room to move.
To be clear, the Save Our Bacon Act is a Republican bill, a fact that underscores the fundamental incoherence and hypocrisy of the right’s relationship to animal welfare. Trump’s fossil fuel–guzzling and pro-corporate policies are, of course, disastrous and deadly for humans and nonhumans alike, and the president and his allies are busy deregulating the government agencies capable of monitoring and halting the animal welfare abuses some right-wingers have begun to decry—including, most recently, with a major rollback of the Endangered Species Act. RFK Jr. may sincerely love dogs, but he has also used his bully pulpit to promote red meat consumption and claims to follow the flesh-heavy “carnivore diet.”
Still, you don’t have to squint too hard to see the potential outlines of a phenomenon similar to Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA. Once again, we have a set of broadly popular issues generally seen as belonging to the left, but never centered or taken seriously there, leaving a vacuum to be filled by savvy conservatives.
The polling justifies the enthusiasm, “While the Left and Right don’t align on much these days, over 85 percent of Republicans and Democrats do agree animal testing should be phased out,” reports the conservative Washington Examiner. Eight out of 10 voters also consider preventing farm animal cruelty to be a moral concern, while 72 percent report being more likely to vote for a candidate who supports protecting threatened and endangered species.
Few progressives appear to take seriously the transformation unfolding on the right—one that may well secure victories for some vulnerable animals while also further elevating an anti-government, anti-science, anti-egalitarian agenda. That appears to be the goal of the White Coat Waste Project, an initiative led by Anthony Bellotti, a former Republican operative who cannily connects animal testing to right-wing preoccupations including Covid conspiracies, federal spending cuts, and transgender fearmongering (based on misrepresentations of hormone studies conducted on mice).
Justin Marceau, faculty director of the Animal Law Program at Sturm College of Law and co-founder of the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, is hopeful about a subset of conservatives expressing what he describes as “genuine care about nonhuman animal well-being.” Meanwhile, he and many of the people he speaks to are also deeply frustrated with many of their ostensible political allies, including a Democratic Party that appears to take animals and their human advocates for granted. “For nonhuman animals who are dying by the billions every year, we’re already in the worst-case scenario,” Marceau explained. “I think Democrats view people who care about animals as a fringe subset of people who care about climate and the environment. They seem to think it’s just not a constituency that they could lose. I think they’re wrong about that.”
Once again, the parallels to MAHA feel inescapable. A few years ago, it was almost impossible to imagine crunchy moms who hate Monsanto becoming a key part of Trump’s electoral coalition. But here we are.
Of course, MAHA quickly revealed its MAGA-laundering fraudulence. Every time its goals have come up against corporate interests in this administration, the corporate interests have won out, often spectacularly so—as when Trump successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to shield glyphosate manufacturers from liability for the health impacts of their pesticides, an almost farcical contravention of MAHA’s ostensible values.
“I don’t see the political right turning on big corporate power when it comes to factory farming,” Marceau acknowledged. “But Democrats have not gone to battle with these big corporate interests either.” And even if the right doesn’t take on the meat industry directly, it “could plausibly deliver victories for animal advocates that were truly unimaginable under Obama or Biden.”
Our conversations with animal rights activists revealed a personal and profound sense of betrayal with regards to the wider left—the ideological and political community, or constellation of communities, separate from the Democratic Party. Consider the fact that the Ridglan protests were covered by mainstream and right-wing news outlets, but barely made it onto the radar of liberal and left media, a massive direct action against a corporate target seemingly unworthy of serious coverage or consideration.
This resistance on the left to even a basic vocalization of compassion for nonhuman animals helps explain why the animal rights movement celebrated some MAGA figures who have begun stepping into the vacuum. “It’s difficult to watch animal rights folks accept this embrace from the right, but at this point I honestly can’t blame them,” explained an activist, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “If you tell people to fuck off enough times, they’re gonna fuck off. And that’s what the left has been doing to animal rights activists for decades.”
Much of the reluctance to embrace animal rights seems to stem from a broader, zero-sum assumption that these fights distract from or are irrelevant to more traditional leftist issues. This perspective is profoundly divorced from the reality of our industrial system of meat production, the horrors of which are deeply intertwined with the consolidation of corporate power, the exploitation of workers and immigrants, and the destruction of our environment. Far from the prevailing sense of animal rights as a sort of individualistic lifestyle issue, disconnected from a broader critique of capitalism, ending systemic violence against animals actually requires taking on a range of fights that fit in perfectly with the populism that is driving the left’s current political resurgence.
Interestingly, of all the interviews conducted for this piece, it was a conservative activist who best articulated a shorthand for this synthesis. Liam Gray, a former editor for The Daily Caller, is founder of the Wilberforce Institute, a conservative animal rights outfit “focused on ending big government, taxpayer-funded animal cruelty.” Speaking about animal testing companies like Ridglan as well as Big Ag actors like Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods, Gray said, “The divide on animals right now is feeling less like left versus right and more like people versus special interests. And the more that Democrats don’t respond to that, and side with the special interests, and take for granted that they have the animal people behind them, I think the more it’s going to hurt them.”
Of course, this intersectional approach to animal protection is not guaranteed. MAGA is already attempting to instantiate a very different form of animal politics—what The Atlantic’s Daniel Engber has labeled “Animal Nationalism,” in reference to traditional twentieth-century fascist politics that elevated a subset of animals alongside a subset of supposedly superior human beings.
While conservative groups like Wilberforce are deeply committed to reducing the suffering of all nonhuman animals, for many on the right, it’s clear that some animals are worthy of concern—the cats and dogs in JD Vance’s hateful libel against Haitian immigrants; the bald eagles and whales that have been dishonestly instrumentalized to further right-wing attacks on wind farms—while the vast majority of living beings are imperiled by MAGA’s program of xenophobic cruelty, corporate corruption, and planetary arson. Rather than allow compassion for animals to become another tool in the right’s system of hierarchical politics, the left has the ability—and, indeed, a duty—to elevate a moral framework for animal rights that objects to violence against humans and nonhumans alike on universal grounds.
Fundamentally, any project that aims to decrease needless suffering—which has always been an essential goal of the left—is simply and glaringly incomplete if it does not recognize the vast suffering that humans needlessly inflict on nonhuman animals. Living beings that are capable of joy and pain, affection and sadness, deserve moral recognition. And addressing their immiseration is not at odds with fighting an authoritarian oligarchy that exploits us all. Indeed, not doing so poses serious political risks.
It would be an ethical and tactical blunder to let MAGA uncontestedly lay claim to the compassion that so many feel toward animals. But there is still time to change course. As Marceau put it, “The best-case scenario is that this movement on the right awakens the left to the idea that animal welfare and animal protection ought to matter. To me, that’s the true ideal, because there’s an alignment there that actually makes sense.”
