Ridglan Farms dogs used by Merck in their rabies trials suffered from sudden anorexia, signs of apprehension or nervousness, and paralysis. But the cruelty inflicted on those defenseless dogs is not just an animal welfare issue. Merck’s work on the painkiller Vioxx, millions of Americans were duped into buying a deadly painkiller. As many as 100,000 people had heart attacks and died as a result. This is a demonstration of a political system that allows the most powerful and wealthy interests to hurt or kill anyone — including you.
WAYNE HSIUNG: In November 2025, Merck quietly published results from an experiment where it injected rabies into dozens of Ridglan dogs, watched them descend into fear and madness, then cut out their brain tissue to vivisect.
Just one month earlier, in October of 2025, Ridglan had been implicated in hundreds of new counts of felony animal abuse. The state Veterinary Examining Board (VEB) was so shocked by the cruelty at Ridglan, including dogs being surgically mutilated without anesthesia, that it issued an order indicating that the situation at Ridglan “imperatively requires emergency action.” The VEB did its part to respond to the emergency; it suspended the license of Rick Van Domelen, the veterinarian and facility manager at Ridglan Farms. It was the only suspension the VEB would issue for the entire year of 2025.
Yet despite the official findings of animal abuse, and the mass outcry against Ridglan, there was one Ridglan customer who continued to shamelessly work with the company: Merck. Merck published its November 2025 study, which it had collaborated with Ridglan on, then it went back to Ridglan for even more dogs in 2026. As recently as May of this year, Merck was still buying dogs from Ridglan…
In the case of Merck’s work with Ridglan, dogs in the rabies trials suffered from “sudden anorexia, signs of apprehension or nervousness,” “ataxia” (loss of motor function), and even “paralysis.” As a dog neared her death, “a normally docile [dog] may suddenly become vicious.”
In the case of Merck’s work on the painkiller Vioxx, millions of Americans were duped into buying a deadly painkiller. As many as 100,000 people had heart attacks and died as a result…
Here, however, is the key point. The cruelty inflicted on those defenseless dogs is not just an animal welfare issue. It is a demonstration of something much darker: a political system that allows the most powerful and wealthy interests to hurt or kill anyone—including you. If Big Pharma can get away with ruthlessly torturing puppies, it can get away with hurting you.
That might seem like an exaggeration. It is not. Merck and other pharmaceutical companies have targeted, not just dogs, but human beings as test subjects for corporate profit. SOURCE
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