While rescuers were still watching twenty-two dogs take their first steps in safety, Ridglan was setting up a sales booth.
Days after animal advocates entered Ridglan Farms and liberated beagles from their cages, Ridglan traveled to the 2026 ToxExpo to sell those dogs still trapped inside its walls.
A Marketplace of Bodies
At the three-day event—marketed to toxicologists and others who force chemicals and products into the bodies of living beings—Ridglan took its place in a sprawling exhibition hall.
Booth: #1307
Product or Service Category: Animal Services
Representative: suspended veterinarian Richard Van Domelen.
There, Ridglan advertised its remaining beagles as products: “bred to be better,” “raised to be the best,” available “for all your beagle needs.”
Ridglan tabled alongside some of its own customers, including Southern Research and IIT Research Institute—entities that purchase and use animals, including Ridglan dogs, in experiments.
Together, they represent a self-perpetuating pipeline: breeding, selling, buying, using. A closed loop of exploitation sustained through commercial partnership.
291 Exhibitors. One Industry.
What may be most jarring is this: Ridglan was just one vendor among 291 exhibitors in a massive marketplace where living beings are reduced to inventory.
2026 ToxExpo in attendance included:
➤ Elm Hill Labs: breeder and seller of guinea pigs.
➤ Hilltop Lab Animals: “produce[r],” seller, and user of rats, mice, and guinea pigs.
➤ Marshall BioResources: breeder, seller, and user of trademarked dogs, cats, pigs, and ferrets.
➤ Premier BioSource: breeder and seller of pigs.
➤ Safer Human Medicine: up-and-coming supplier and user of nonhuman primates.
➤ Sinclair BioResources: a “bioproduction center” that produces, surgically alters, and preconditions pigs.
➤ Worldwide Primates: “importer, distributor and breeder” of non-human primates.
Different names.
Different victims.
The same exploitation.
All in the name of profit.
And all predicated on a flawed and disproven claim: that harming nonhuman animals produces reliable insights for others.
Profiting Off Bad Science
The claim traces back to Claude Bernard, who rejected the theory of evolution to argue that all living beings operate under the same physiological laws—such that results observed in one species can be applied to another, and that species are interchangeable. This assertion became foundational to experimental biology and toxicology, even as Bernard himself acknowledged that different species respond differently to the same stimuli. It remains foundational today despite “science in general and biology in particular” having debunked it.
Science has demonstrated conclusively that Bernard’s position does not hold. Nonhuman animals are poor predictors of human response. Species differences alone undermine translatability and reliability, but the problem runs deeper still: experimental conditions—such as forcing substances at the highest tolerable dose—bear little resemblance to real-world human exposure. Results vary across labs—and even among individuals of the same species.
Modern biology has moved beyond Bernard’s fallacious framework. Yet, the animal research industry has not.
What This Moment Exposes
Seen in this context, ToxExpo—and Ridglan’s presence—does more than help reveal the scale and nature of the animal research industry. It reveals how the industry functions.
The rescue exposed the victims.
ToxExpo exposed the system that profits from them.
Just days after dogs were carried to safety, others just like them were being marketed on the convention floor as inventory. It’s proof of how quickly the industry moves to restore normalcy and continue business as usual.
The industry depends on this continuity: the ability to continue largely uninterrupted even in the face of exposure. And, it is precisely what animal advocates are working to challenge.
The ToxExpo was actually disrupted by activists with Direct Action Everywhere, drawing attention to Ridglan’s presence—and that attention matters.
Events like ToxExpo depend on normalization: the quiet, orderly presentation of living beings as products and of violence as science. Challenging that normalization through public exposure, advocacy, and sustained pressure is critical. It forces visibility where the industry relies on obscurity, confronts assumptions that would otherwise go unexamined, and creates the conditions necessary for change.
The rescue revealed the victims, while ToxExpo revealed the system—and what comes next must be dismantling it.
Your Call to Action: State and federal regulators have the authority and responsibility to strip Ridglan Farms of its dog breeding licenses and ensure all the dogs are removed to safety. Urge Wisconsin DATCP and USDA APHIS to act immediately.