Days before setting out on a 207-mile march across New York, longtime vegan advocate Ella Magers spoke with The Humane Herald about the movement that brought her here, Jane—the rescued beagle now sharing her life—and why she believes people are finally beginning to make the connection.
There is an unmistakable excitement in Ella Magers as she prepares to walk 207 miles across New York.
Beginning September 12, Magers will join fellow advocates on the March to Abolish Animal Testing, traveling from Albany to North Rose, home of Marshall BioResources, a major breeder and supplier of animals used in research. The march is expected to unfold over 14 walking days before reaching Marshall on September 26.
Two hundred and seven miles is a long way to walk.
But talking with Magers just days before the first step, the distance doesn’t seem to be the thing occupying her mind most.
She is thinking about the animals. She is thinking about what has changed. And she is thinking about what might finally be possible.
Magers believes the end of animal testing is near.
It is a striking statement from someone who has spent decades advocating for animals. But her optimism isn’t rooted simply in hope. She sees a convergence happening: advances in human-relevant science, changing government policy, increasingly visible investigations and whistleblowers, and a public she believes is beginning to understand what has remained largely hidden from view.
People, Magers told The Humane Herald, are starting to make the connection.
It is a connection she made herself when she was a child.
Making the Connection
Magers’ relationship with animals began long before marches, campaigns or organizations entered the picture.
She describes herself as an animal lover from birth and a plant-based athlete since childhood. According to her own account, she stopped eating meat at seven after making the connection between animals and what was being put on her plate. That early realization eventually led her to veganism and became a thread running through much of her adult life.
But Magers’ path into advocacy hasn’t been a straight line.
She built a career in health and fitness, becoming a trainer, coach, speaker, author and podcast host. She founded Sexy Fit Vegan and eventually earned a master’s degree in social work. Her public work increasingly began exploring not simply what people eat or how they exercise, but the much more complicated relationship between behavior, identity and values.
Her own life informed that evolution.
Magers has spoken openly about struggles with body image and disordered eating, experiences that complicated what outwardly looked like success in the fitness world. Her approach eventually moved toward something broader: helping people examine their habits, understand themselves and bring their choices into closer alignment with what they actually value.
In retrospect, there is something remarkably consistent about the different chapters of her life.
See the connection. Then do something about it.
Eventually, that philosophy would lead her to a beagle named Jane.
Then Came Jane
Jane came from Ridglan Farms in Wisconsin, a facility that bred beagles for research.
Magers became involved in the campaign surrounding Ridglan, joining a larger movement seeking accountability for the facility and freedom for the dogs inside it.
When beagles were eventually released from Ridglan, Magers was there.
She has publicly described carrying Jane from the transport bus after the dogs came out. Jane fell asleep in her arms. Magers hadn’t gone there intending to adopt a dog, but somewhere in that encounter, the plan changed.
Jane went home with her.
For Magers, an industry capable of disappearing behind terminology like research animals, models and specimens suddenly had a representative sleeping in her home.
And this week, Magers shared a particularly lovely update with The Humane Herald:
Jane is doing remarkably well.
Those four words carry more weight when you consider where Jane came from.
Jane is no longer merely one of a population of beagles bred for research. She has a name. A home. A person who knows her individual personality and watches her continue to discover a life beyond the one originally intended for her.
That matters because numbers can obscure the very thing animal advocates are trying to make visible.
Thousands of dogs can become a statistic.
Jane is someone.
And Ridglan taught Magers another lesson, too: systems that appear permanent can change.
An Idea Becomes 207 Miles
Magers’ involvement with the March to Abolish Animal Testing grew out of that momentum.
Fellow advocate and poet Gretchen Primack had been involved in the Ridglan campaign as well. Magers later heard Primack discussing an ambitious idea: a march across New York beginning in Albany and ending at Marshall BioResources.
Magers reached out.
The idea became a partnership, and the partnership became a march.
The choice of destination is significant.
Marshall BioResources breeds animals for biomedical research, including beagles, and its North Rose operation has increasingly become a focus of animal-advocacy campaigns. Rather than turning Ella’s story into a catalog of what has been reported about Marshall, that subject deserves—and will receive—a closer examination of its own.
For Magers, though, Marshall represents something more immediate.
It is where she is walking.
The march’s demanding pace is intentional. Magers has publicly said that whatever discomfort participants experience along the route pales in comparison with what animals used by facilities such as Marshall experience throughout their lives.
But this is not simply an endurance stunt.
Walking makes something visible.
For two weeks, people who might never think about where animals used in experiments come from will encounter marchers moving through their communities. People will see signs, ask questions, encounter stories and perhaps investigate an industry they previously knew little about.
And that matters enormously if Magers is right about what is happening outside the movement.
People are beginning to connect the dots.
A Movement Meeting Its Moment
Animal advocates have argued against experimentation for generations. What makes the present moment particularly interesting is that the challenge is no longer coming exclusively from activists.
Science and public policy are changing, too.
In 2025, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration released a roadmap for reducing animal testing in preclinical safety studies and expanding the use of New Approach Methodologies, or NAMs. These include human-relevant approaches such as organ-on-chip systems, advanced in vitro models and computational methods.
That transition has continued.
In March 2026, the FDA issued draft guidance establishing recommendations for validating NAMs for use in drug development. A month later, the agency reported that it had achieved key first-year goals under its roadmap and described a broader shift toward human-relevant approaches to drug evaluation.
The FDA itself says that historically, more than 90 percent of drugs that clear animal studies ultimately do not receive approval, often because safety or efficacy problems emerge during human trials.
None of this means animal experimentation has ended. Nor does it mean every scientific question currently involving animals already has a validated non-animal replacement.
It does mean that a conversation once dismissed by some as an impossible demand from animal-rights activists is now taking place inside the institutions responsible for regulating modern medicine.
For someone who has spent decades waiting for that conversation to change, it isn’t difficult to understand Magers’ sense that something is shifting.
And Then, a Whistleblower
The atmosphere surrounding the march changed again shortly before Magers and The Humane Herald spoke.
New whistleblower allegations concerning the treatment of dogs at Marshall were referred to authorities in New York. The allegations prompted calls for a criminal investigation.
Magers had already been preparing to walk toward Marshall.
Now, she was preparing to do so while new allegations about what may be happening inside were actively hanging over the destination.
The claims remain allegations and deserve to be described that way unless authorities establish otherwise. The deeper reporting surrounding Marshall, the whistleblower accounts and calls for investigation also deserve examination independently from Magers’ profile.
But for the woman preparing to spend two weeks walking toward those gates, the timing is impossible to separate from the moment.
Magers has publicly described the new evidence as changing what marchers are walking toward.
And yet, when we spoke, she was excited.
Not because of what may be happening behind those gates.
Because of what is happening outside them.
The End Is Near
Movements can spend decades appearing to go nowhere.
Then changes that seemed isolated begin happening simultaneously.
One facility closes.
A dog gets out.
A whistleblower speaks.
A regulator changes course.
A technology once discussed as experimental becomes increasingly viable.
Someone hears about an idea for a march on a podcast and decides to call the person who had it.
And people who had never considered where laboratory animals come from begin asking questions.
Magers sees those pieces coming together.
That is why her belief that the end of animal testing is near doesn’t sound, in conversation, like a slogan. It sounds like the conclusion she has drawn from watching the landscape around her change.
Whether abolition comes as quickly as she hopes remains an open question. Enormous scientific, commercial, political and institutional systems do not disappear simply because their morality or effectiveness is challenged.
But neither are they permanent simply because they are enormous.
Magers has already watched one supposedly ordinary laboratory beagle become something entirely different in the eyes of everyone who meets her.
Jane was bred into a system that defined what her life was supposed to be for her.
Today, she is home.
And she is doing remarkably well.
There is something fitting about that being part of the story Magers carries with her toward North Rose.
At seven years old, Ella Magers looked at something the world around her considered normal and made a connection between an animal and what humans were doing to that animal.
It changed her.
Decades later, she believes more of us are beginning to make that same connection.
On September 12, she will begin walking 207 miles on the belief that enough connections can eventually change a system, too.
Perhaps the most important thing about Ella Magers isn’t that she believes the end of animal testing is near.
It’s why she believes it.
She thinks people are finally starting to see.
And once you make the connection, it can be awfully difficult to unsee it.
The Humane Herald 