The Ridglan dogs are safe and on their way to loving homes. A separate coalition of dog rescue groups paid an undisclosed amount of money to buy out the farm and permanently shut it down. This is a good thing. Cause for celebration. But there is a part of me that finds this outcome anticlimactic. I’m glad the dogs are getting out, rather than waiting longer. But I can’t shake the feeling that we could have won without paying them a penny, and that they don’t deserve a penny and in fact deserve lengthy prison sentences.
AIDAN KANKYOKU: The Ridglan dogs are safe and on their way to loving homes. A separate coalition of dog rescue groups paid an undisclosed amount of money, rumored to be around 25% of their list price, to buy out the farm and permanently shut it down… This is a good thing. Cause for celebration. Two thousand entire beings who as of this morning were still locked in tiny cages and facing indefinite imprisonment inside similarly small cages — or worse— are now on their way to safe and loving homes, where they can begin the long process of partially healing from the extraordinary trauma of their hellish lives up to this point. If they were humans, we wouldn’t hesitate to take this win, and we shouldn’t hesitate for nonhumans…
Does this count as a win for the rescue campaign? Definitively yes, and here’s why: the negotiations that led to this deal started weeks before even the March 15 rescue… This win happened because of the campaign. Only the rescues brought enough national attention to Ridglan for these donors to step up in the first place. Only the campaign made it clear to Ridglan that they couldn’t continue to get away with their massively profitable criminal business enterprise forever – and by the way, the campaign is the only reason they were investigated and had to surrender their breeding license in the first place.
And the campaign is the only reason this story will now be a central part of U.S. animal rights history for decades or centuries to come, instead of an unnoticed story of one more business shutting down while nothing fundamentally changes… But there is a part of me that finds this outcome anticlimactic. I’m glad the dogs are getting out starting today, rather than waiting longer. But I can’t shake the feeling that we could have won without paying them a penny, and that they don’t deserve a penny and in fact deserve lengthy prison sentences. Nonetheless, it raises questions worth discussing:
If people just wound-up buying the dogs, was the campaign even necessary?
What does this mean for the next steps of our political, legal, and media strategy?
Should we in general be willing to buy out animal abusers?
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