Free the Beagles

Every row in this archive is a Certificate of Veterinary Inspection (CVI) — a one-page form a state-accredited veterinarian signs every time regulated animals cross a state line. It names the consignor (shipper), the consignee (buyer), the species and number of animals, the issuing vet, and the shipping date.

CVIs are regulatory documents but they are self-reported by the breeder and signed by their own veterinarian. A CVI is solid evidence that the shipment was declared, who declared it, and where it was declared to. It is not evidence of what happened to the dogs at the destination or of conditions at the breeder. We can confirm movements. We cannot confirm care.

Wisconsin's Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) publishes every CVI it processes at its public CVI records page. This archive includes every Ridglan-origin canine CVI from that source between April 2023 and April 2026 — 37 monthly batches, 198 confirmed Ridglan shipments.

What is not in this archive:

• Intrastate movements within Wisconsin — no CVI required.
• Shipments routed through another state's CVI system — Wisconsin only publishes CVIs it processes.
• International shipments — those use federal form VS 17-140 and live in USDA records, not DATCP.
• In-facility transfers at Ridglan's premises.
• CVIs older than April 2023 — DATCP's public window ends there.
• Anything Ridglan did not declare, if such movements exist.

The Wisconsin CVI corpus contains 211 canine shipments with a Blue Mounds, WI consignor address. 13 of those are unrelated individuals or institutions who happen to live in the Blue Mounds area — a backyard breeder shipping one puppy, the Milwaukee County Zoo, a family pet to a relative, etc. They got caught in early address-based matching and are not Ridglan operations.

The 198 shipments shown on this site pass a stricter rule:

• The consignor name explicitly contains "Ridglan" (196 shipments), OR
• The address is Ridglan's and the issuing veterinarian is one of Ridglan's two regular vets — Richard J. Van Domelen or Jeffrey T. Ballmer (2 additional shipments, where the dogs are declared as Merck-owned but housed and shipped from Ridglan).

The 13 excluded false positives are still in the underlying database but excluded from the public count, search, and exports. They do not appear in any public-facing count, search, or export.

Each Ridglan CVI was read by three Claude models from Anthropic (Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.7) with different prompts. We then compared the three independent extractions of the consignor name.

• Cross-tier agreement ≥ 0.85 — all three models read the form the same way. Treat as high-confidence; use the row directly.
• 0.70 – 0.85 — one model picked up a typo or different spelling. Almost always still the same entity; useful as-is but verify the destination if it matters.
• < 0.70 — rows are marked flagged for review on the shipments table. Click through to the source PDF before quoting.

Three of 198 Ridglan rows currently flag for manual review. The full per-field completeness ledger is maintained internally by Dane4Dogs and shared on request.

DATCP publishes new CVIs monthly, with about a one-month lag. This archive crawls DATCP on the same cadence. The current snapshot was ingested on 2026-05-17; the most recent CVI in it was issued 2026-04-08. If you're reading this more than four weeks later, new shipments may exist that aren't reflected on this page yet.

It can:

• Confirm specific shipments happened — date, headcount, declared destination.
• Identify recurring buyer relationships — which research labs, pharma firms, and universities take dogs from Ridglan and how often.
• Reveal cadence — when shipments tend to happen, how shipment size has changed over time.
• Surface individual animals — by tattoo / ear-tag ID where the form lists them.
• Identify the signing veterinarian for every shipment.

It cannot:

• Prove conditions of care at Ridglan or at any buyer.
• Confirm what was done to the dogs after arrival (research protocols, euthanasia, transfer, adoption).
• Establish USDA license violations (those live in inspection reports — see "Stronger sources we haven't used yet" below).
• Speak to dogs Ridglan may have moved without filing a CVI, if such movements exist.

This archive is the floor, not the ceiling. The following sources would strengthen the picture; we have not yet integrated them.

• USDA APHIS inspection reports for Ridglan — public, downloadable, would document violations and complaints.
• USDA Animal Care complaint records (eFOIA / FOIA).
• Wisconsin DATCP licensing & oversight records — open records request.
• PACER court records — Ridglan has been party to civil litigation.
• State veterinary boards — confirms credentials of the issuing vets (Van Domelen, Ballmer).
• Buyer-side disclosures — universities publish animal-use figures in IACUC annual reports; pharmaceutical companies disclose in NIH grant reports.

If you have access to any of these and want to help integrate them, contact us.

Send the CVI number and a one-line description of the issue to hello@savethedogs.io. We aim to review within 48 hours and either correct the record, re-run extraction on the affected CVI, or document why it stays as-is. The correction trail is visible in the database's extraction_runs table; older readings are preserved, never overwritten.

The detailed pipeline — every model invocation, prompt version, per-PDF cost, and provenance schema — is documented for the technically curious at /architecture (with an internal data-quality dashboard maintained by Dane4Dogs).

Source dataset: 38,128 canine CVIs published by Wisconsin DATCP (April 2023 → April 2026). Of those, 211 list a Blue Mounds, WI consignor address; 198 pass the strict Ridglan-operation filter (consignor name contains "Ridglan" OR issuing vet is one of Ridglan's two regular vets). Each Ridglan CVI was read by Anthropic Claude (Haiku 4.5 for first-pass identification, Sonnet 4.6 for structured extraction including a second ditto-aware re-extraction pass, Opus 4.7 for cross-validation). Total LLM spend on this archive to date: ~$208.