Uno walks with adopter John Ramer at Kindness Ranch Animal Sanctuary in Hartville, Wyoming.
COURTESY OF "THE NEW GOLD STANDARD"
On a hot summer day on July 21, 2022, John Ramer and his wife, Katy Collins, were a long way from home. They’d driven for 36 hours from Hartville, Wyoming — where Ramer is executive director of Kindness Ranch Animal Sanctuary, a 1,000-acre ranch for animals who have been used in laboratory research — to Cumberland, Virginia.
The U.S. Department of Justice had filed suit against Envigo RMS, a company breeding and selling animals for use in medical research, for violating the Animal Welfare Act — and as part of the settlement, over 4,000 beagles would be removed from Envigo. The efforts to remove and transport the mistreated beagles were coordinated by the Humane Society of the United States (now called Humane World for Animals) — and over 100 animal shelters and rescue organizations across America were preparing to help take them in.
Kindness Ranch was one of them. In fact, Ramer and his team work in “non-adversarial ways” with breeding facilities, laboratories and contract research organizations to get dogs out of labs and to Kindness Ranch — and had helped coordinate the release of about 1,500 dogs from Envigo’s Cumberland facility while it was still under investigation.
