Why We Have the Right to Rescue the Ridglan Dogs

A simple guide to rescuing animals in Wisconsin who are victims of criminal abuse.

This beagle was a victim of animal cruelty at Ridglan Farms. Did we have the right to rescue him?

In March 2024, my two co-defendants and I were slated to go to trial after being accused of burglary and theft for removing three distressed beagles from cages at Ridglan Farms. The charges were dismissed on the first day of trial, and we turned the tables on the industry by successfully filing a petition to bring criminal charges against Ridglan instead. But as a result of the dismissal of those charges, the legal argument for the right to rescue was never properly developed in a court of law.

So I want to offer in this newsletter a very simple explanation of that argument, both for activists who are considering action and for other animal advocates. The theory behind the right to rescue has significant implications for the future of animal rights, including the fundamental question of whether animals are “persons” or “things.”

Is rescuing animals from abuse a crime?

There are a large number of criminal offenses that could be charged in an animal rescue scenario—burglary, theft, criminal damage, conspiracy—but virtually all of these incorrectly assume that rescuing animals from abuse is a criminal violation of an animal abuser’s legal rights. This assumption is incorrect. Rescuing animals from abuse is not a crime.

The first and most ambitious reason for this is constitutional. The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution says that no “person” may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” If animals are persons, then rescuing them from abuse is upholding, and not violating, this constitutional right. Indeed, this would be true even if the state attempted to pass a law allowing for the animal to be abused, as the Fifth Amendment overrides any state law that conflicts with it.

But, you might say, doesn’t the law distinguish between persons and animals? The answer is no. The Constitution nowhere indicates that animals are non-persons, and there is no constitutional precedent holding that they are. Indeed, given that corporations have been deemed persons, it seems absurd to say that animals are not. Corporations are stacks of paper defined by a commercial purpose. If a stack of paper is a person, then surely a dog or cat must be, too.

This theory, to be clear, is unlikely to be accepted by courts immediately, much as courts refused to acknowledge the personhood of human slaves 200 years ago, or of women 150 years ago. That does not mean the theory is incorrect. Future generations will be shocked that so many people accepted the absurdity of treating animals as less legally significant than a stack of paper in an office.

The second reason that rescuing animals is not a crime is that, even if animals are property, abuse undermines the owner’s property rights and enhances the rescuer’s. Virtually every state, including Wisconsin, has animal cruelty laws that prevent animals from being used in ways that lead to suffering and cruelty. Virtually every state, including Wisconsin, also has provisions of law that dissolve a property owner’s legal interest in an animal if they are implicated in animal abuse. In Wisconsin, this is Chapter 173 of the state laws, which indicates that an animal can be treated as “unclaimed”—that is, legally abandoned—if the owner is guilty of criminal abuse.

Importantly, Chapter 173 even includes a provision for private parties to take custody of animals if they are “abandoned” by their owner, so long as they do so on “behalf of a political subdivision” and bring the animal to a “pound.” While these terms are not defined, criminally neglecting an animal for years in a 2’ x 4’ cage would qualify as “abandonment” by most common understandings of that word. And a citizen acting to defend the state’s animal cruelty laws (i.e., on behalf of the political subdivision of the state and county) who brings animals to a place where the animals will be cared for (i.e., a pound) is working within their legal rights. In short, the existence of animal cruelty undercuts the animal abuser’s property rights, and enhances the animal rescuer’s.

The third reason that rescuing animals is not a crime is that a good faith belief in the right to rescue eliminates “criminal intent.” Wisconsin law expressly provides that good faith intentions, even if incorrect, can undermine the “criminal intent” that must be proven to convict someone of burglary or theft. For example, if I were to take someone else’s wallet because I believed the wallet was mine, I could not be convicted of theft. This is true even if my belief that the wallet is mine is wrong. Similarly, even if a rescuer wrongly believes that an animal abuser’s property rights have been extinguished by virtue of the abuse, she can still plausibly argue she has not committed a crime so long as that belief is held in good faith.¹

Are there defenses that establish a right to rescue?

The above legal arguments attack the very basis of a potential charge for open rescue: rescuing animals from abuse is simply not a crime. But the right to rescue has another set of arguments that go beyond these legal elements, i.e., so-called defenses. They ask the question, even if the conduct at issue is usually a crime, is there a special reason that it should be allowed in this case? And as set out brilliantly by Prof. Kristen Stilt, there are three defenses that apply to the rescue of dogs at Ridglan Farms.

The first is the defense of necessity. This defense is somewhat oddly-constructed in Wisconsin. It requires a defendant to find “natural physical forces” that must be stopped to prevent “imminent public disaster, or imminent death or great bodily harm.” That means the defense does not apply when trying to prevent human-caused abuses, such as surgically mutilating a dog. However, many other problems at Ridglan, including mass infections and psychological trauma, are not caused by human beings but by “natural physical forces.” If someone has a psychotic breakdown caused by dysfunction in their brain—the natural physical forces of mammalian biology under extreme stress—you’re entitled to break the law by speeding to take them to the emergency room. The same should be true of an animal suffering from psychosis, injury, or disease at Ridglan Farms. The harm they face is a natural force, so the necessity defense should apply.

The second is the defense of coercion. This defense covers a set of harms not covered by necessity. And it entitles a rescuer to act if a “threat” by some person causes the rescuer to believe that rescue is the “only means” to prevent harm caused by the threat. Ridglan has, for many years, not just threatened but carried out felony abuse against thousands of animals; every other means to prevent this threatened harm has failed. A legal defense of rescue would therefore assert that the rescuers were effectively coerced into their action by Ridglan’s threat of criminal abuse.

The third is the defense of others. This defense is more comprehensive than necessity or coercion—it permits a rescuer to “use force” to stop others’ unlawful actions even short of great bodily harm—but it only applies when the rescuer is defending a “3rd person” from “unlawful interference.” And here is where the work of Prof. Stilt shines. In her amicus brief in the original rescue trial, she identifies a long line of legal cases in Wisconsin where law enforcement have been allowed to break into people’s homes because animals are being abused— overriding an owner’s constitutional rights against search and seizure because a “person” is in danger. If officers are entitled to cite animal personhood in attacking an owner’s fundamental constitutional rights, and break into a building without a search warrant with guns, then surely animal activists are entitled to cite animal personhood in attacking a business’s (far less important) property rights.

What does it all mean?

This is, of course, a very simple guide and does not cover all the nuances of the law. It also is stated confidently, despite the fact that many of these theories have not been tested and may be rejected by judges. However, the main conclusion is clear: there are numerous provisions of law that plausibly create a right to rescue animals from abuse. While many of these theories may initially lose in court, that does not mean they are wrong. It took decades of litigation, for example, for the US Supreme Court to finally recognize the personhood of human slaves, or the citizenship rights of women. I suspect it will take a much shorter time period for courts to reach the right answers on animal rights. But we will only get there if people understand—and push—these theories in court.

1. This area of law is murky and contested, and it violates a general principle of the law, i.e., that ignorance of the law is no defense. A court may not allow a defense to present this argument, for that reason. However, that does not mean the argument is wrong, as many novel arguments are initially rejected by courts, even if they are ultimately proven correct.