Photographs by Alana Paterson
The police came at dawn. Karen Espersen watched them drive into the valley: more than 40 cruisers in a line. They were on a mission from the government. All of her ostriches must die.
Karen and her business partner, Dave Bilinski, were standing in the outdoor pens of their farm in the mountains of Canada’s West Kootenay. The fate of their flock had been taken up by right-wing media, and had become another front in a spiritual war. An angry group of their supporters, with signs and walkie-talkies, gathered on the property. They’d set up a barricade to slow the cops’ advance: several logs laid across the dirt near the turnoff from the highway.
The activists had been camping out for months; their numbers sometimes reached into the hundreds. They knew the government was saying that the ostriches had bird flu, but they were convinced that this was cover for some other, bigger scheme. The feds were conspiring with the United Nations and Big Pharma, they said. Small farmers’ rights were being trampled. But Dave and Karen’s birds had other, more powerful friends. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was making calls to Canadian officials; Dr. Oz had offered to evacuate the ostriches to his ranch in Florida.
Canada “respects and has considered the input of United States officials,” the nation’s deputy chief veterinary officer had said. But rules were rules, and birds were birds—even if they were the size of refrigerators. And so a convoy of police had been sent to occupy the farm. Law-enforcement drones were flying overhead. The electricity was cut off.
The farm’s supporters had already threatened local businesses that were renting equipment to the cops, saying they would shoot employees. Then someone claimed that they’d placed a bomb somewhere on the property.
At 7 a.m., while the police were stuck behind the logs near the highway, a man slipped out of sight, donned a balaclava, and grabbed a jerrican of fuel. He crept over to the next-door neighbor’s house and doused its front with gasoline. Not more than 50 yards away, a group of ostrich activists stood around a bonfire, streaming from their phones as they sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” When the neighbor came outside and tried to chase the would-be arsonist away, her screams for help were broadcast live on social media, above the sound of “Glory, glory, hallelujah.”
For decades, Karen and Dave had been raising hundreds of ostriches on a 58-acre plot in the small town of Edgewood, British Columbia. They’d earned a living from the meat and hide and feathers, and from a moisturizing lotion that they made from rendered ostrich fat. They’d also welcomed tourists to the property, bused in through the Monashee Mountains on a farm safari. But in mid-December of last year, the flock at Universal Ostrich Farms was overtaken by disease. The young birds in particular were having trouble breathing. Mucus leaked from eyes and beaks. Some were clearly feverish: They were roosting in puddles, even in the cold.
Over the next few weeks, the birds began to die, one by one, and then in groups. Dave hauled their carcasses across the property and buried them in 10-foot holes. The vet was out of town, so Karen did her best to nurse the sick. But more than 20 died, so many that they didn’t fit into the pits. Dave had to stash the rest beneath a tarp.
Locals noticed what was going on; you could see ravens feeding on the carnage from the highway. On December 28, someone notified the sick-bird hotline set up by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which monitors and manages agricultural diseases. Now the government was asking questions. Was there standing water on the property? Were the ostriches outdoors? Had Dave been aware of any wild birds nearby?
In fact there was some standing water, and the ostriches were never not outdoors, and lots of wild ducks had alighted in their pond and now were poking in the flock’s straw bedding and leaving droppings by the food bowls. To the CFIA, it sounded like a recipe for bird flu. A pair of government inspectors showed up two days later, in masks and Tyvek suits, and swabbed a couple of the carcasses. Their test results came back on New Year’s Eve: The birds were positive for the “H5” part of H5N1, the deadly strain of avian influenza that has raged through North America in recent years. According to the Canadian authorities, and in keeping with the nation’s agricultural-trade agreements, the outbreak had to be stamped out. The birds would have to die.
An ostrich is of course a grand and silly thing: more than six feet tall with giant eyes, a 350-pound sedan on muscled stilts. It chirps and booms and honks and grunts. It wags its tail and pulls the threads from your sweater. Some ostriches on Dave and Karen’s farm had names: Barney, Peter, Q-Tip, Sarah. One looked so much like Dave himself, with bushy white eyebrows, that it shared his name. Karen used to keep an ostrich as a pet—a Somali blue, the smaller kind—and she called it Newman because it liked to hop up on her couch and watch Seinfeld on TV. Her son remembers riding Newman like a pony.
Now Dave and Karen’s flock of charismatic megapoultry was a threat to public health. They tried to bargain with the government. They said the illness was subsiding. They argued that their older birds had never even gotten sick and might already be immune. They noted that the compensation they would receive for a cull—up to $3,000 per animal—wouldn’t be enough to cover their losses. And then Karen started spinning out a stranger story. Universal Ostrich Farms wasn’t just a farm, she told the CFIA; it was the site of cutting-edge research. She and Dave were working on a novel class of ostrich-based pharmaceuticals—medicines that could one day help rid the world of many different ills, including cholera, obesity, and COVID. The drugs might even put an end to bird flu itself.
H5N1 doesn’t pose a major threat to human beings—or, one should say, it doesn’t yet. The virus has not adapted to our airways. But a current strain has already made the jump from birds to dairy cattle, and more than 70 people in North America have contracted it through exposure to infected animals. Most human cases have been very mild. But around the time that Dave and Karen’s ostriches were getting sick, a teenage girl in their province was rushed to a pediatric ICU with failing lungs and kidneys. She had bird flu and nearly died.
Dave and Karen maintained that their birds were not a danger but a cure. Now that the survivors had been exposed to bird flu, Karen told the government by email, they’d be laying eggs that were full of bird-flu antibodies. That could be the key to something extraordinary: If those ostrich antibodies were extracted and sprinkled into feeders, she said, then wild ducks might inhale them and develop their own immunity. Treat enough birds this way, and the entire epidemic could be stopped.
Karen’s plan did not impress the experts at the CFIA, and to be clear: It isn’t sound. Extensive tests have not been run to show that ostrich antibodies protect other animals when they’re eaten or inhaled. Even if the antibodies were effective in some way, to stop the spread of H5N1 you’d have to load enough of them in feeders to shield the 2.6 billion migratory birds that cross the border into Canada each year. And CFIA scientists found no reason to believe that Dave and Karen’s ostriches would be a special source of antibodies, an agency spokesperson told me. The farm’s request for an exemption was denied.
But Karen’s email wasn’t entirely deluded, not in every detail. She and Dave had been in touch with Yasuhiro Tsukamoto, a scientist and the president of Kyoto Prefectural University, who has for years been pushing the idea that ostriches, and their powerful immune system, could be the basis for an industry in biomedicine—that the birds’ enormous eggs are factories for mass-producing antibodies in response to almost any pathogen. A single ostrich hen can make about a cup of these a year, Tsukamoto says, which might in turn be layered onto ventilation screens, painted into face masks, or used in ointments, sprays, and pills. A few such products have already been marketed in Japan, among them a soy sauce with ostrich antibodies for E. coli and a cosmetic line with ostrich antibodies for the germs that can lead to pimples.
Dave and Karen first learned about Tsukamoto’s work in March 2020, when he was inoculating ostriches with SARS-CoV-2 antigens. They did the same and hoped to sell their antibodies to a company producing masks. But they couldn’t land the deal, and ended up with freezers full of SARS-CoV-2-resistant egg yolks. A few years later, they’d moved on to something bigger: an ostrich diet pill, made from antibodies for the enzymes that digest sugar and starch. This could be a natural rival for Ozempic, they believed, sold as “OstriTrim.”
In November 2024, just around the time when all those wild ducks began to settle in their pond, Dave and Karen were finishing their business plan. They would partner with Tsukamoto’s licensee in North America, a company called Ostrich Pharma USA, and begin inoculating birds in early March. After that, the money would start pouring in. Within five years, the farmers’ business plan predicted, they’d clear $2 billion in annual sales.
But then an ostrich got a bloody nose and another one began to wheeze, and more were plopping down in icy water.
Katie Pasitney, Karen’s oldest child, grew up among the ostriches. She describes them as her family. So when Katie heard that the CFIA had ordered their destruction, she set out to raise hell. The birds themselves—those “big, beautiful babies,” she calls them—were natural mascots for a social-media campaign. In one early plea for help on Facebook, Katie put up a picture of a favorite ostrich from the farm. “Meet Sarah ♥️,” Katie wrote atop the post. “PLEASE HELP SAVE ME BEFORE I’M KILLED BEFORE FEB 1ST.”
By the end of January, Sarah’s fate had been taken up by right-wing media and online activists. Supporters began to gather at the farm. They built a campsite in the freezing cold and posted signs for Katie’s website, saveourostriches.com. People stopped by for the day and never left. A field kitchen was set up, porta-potties were installed, and volunteers were given jobs. They put up pictures of the ostriches, or wore them on their shirts and hats. At least one walked around in a full-body, feathered suit. At times there were 200 people in the field, just across the road from the ostrich pens.
The group was there to save the animals, but by and large, they weren’t PETA types. They knew Universal Ostrich Farms had long been in the killing business; in the mess tent, supporters were not averse to eating meat. They were less concerned with harm to living things than with the threat to human liberty. These were freedom activists—people who had joined the convoy protests that swept through Canada in 2022 to oppose vaccine mandates. What brought them back together in the valley of the ostriches was a trailing fury over government intrusion, and suspicion about the aims of public health.
In the front room of her mother’s house, Katie set up a makeshift media center, with seven laptops on the table and cords everywhere. A handwritten ON AIR sign was posted whenever she was being interviewed live. Reporters started showing up in person, too. In one conversation after another, Katie and the farmers argued that the virus had already run its course. By their accounting, the 69th and final bird had died from the disease on January 14. The remaining ostriches were healthy, they insisted, and their location was remote—85 miles from the nearest city. What benefit would come from killing them?
Meanwhile, Dave and Karen brought their case to court and won a stay of execution for the birds until they finished their appeal. As winter turned to spring, the conflict reached a stalemate. The CFIA announced that no more inspectors would be coming to the farm, because of the risk of infection by the birds, and of interference by the protesters. Its staffers were getting threats by phone and email.
Then one night at the end of March, someone showed up with a gun. The birds were sleeping in their pens, some with upright necks, in the ostrich way. In the hours before sunrise, Katie and the farmers said, one was shot just below the ear. Dave and Karen found the carcass in the morning, lying in a pool of blood. The assassinated bird was Sarah, the one from Katie’s Facebook post.
A couple of days later, one of the farm’s supporters posted a musical tribute to the fallen ostrich on social media, called “Feathers of Resistance (Sarah’s Song).”
Out in the fields ’neath Edgewood skies,
She walked with grace with ancient eyes.Not just a hen but hope in stride,
Her blood held truth they tried to hide.
“A sniper’s bullet ended her life, but not her story,” the poster wrote.
After Sarah’s death, a deeper sense of dread overtook the valley. The farm began to fortify. Trip lines were laid around the ostrich pens and hooked up to bear bangers to scare away intruders. Supporters equipped themselves with walkie-talkies. And Dave and Karen started sleeping in the ostrich pens.
Katie’s interviews and Facebook streams grew more conspiratorial. The supporters had been seeing government drones flying overhead at night, she told a podcast host in May. Karen, too, was obsessing over hidden plots. The farm’s website had malfunctioned in December, out of nowhere, even though she was sure that she’d set up the domain to auto-renew. Could it have been a government-associated hack? Could all of this have been a plan to stop her antibody business—to “squish our science,” as she later put it to me? Could it be that certain institutions were trying to hide the fact that H5N1 bird flu wasn’t really all that dangerous?
Two months after the shooting, a second bird was murdered in its pen. Karen said she heard a drone flying overhead between 1 and 2 a.m., and then she saw an “Army-sized” device flying overhead, as big as the hood of a vehicle. Some folks from the encampment said they saw it too, while sitting by the fire. There was a silent flash of light, and moments later, Karen found one of the biggest roosters on the farm, an ostrich called Joey, with a hole through its head. This time the wound was vertical, starting near the crown and ending 18 inches down the neck. The drone may have been equipped with a gun, Karen told me. Maybe a silencer, too. Dave wondered if it might have been a laser.
John Catsimatidis, a billionaire supermarket magnate and New York City radio personality, took a particular interest in the story of the ostriches. Toward the end of April, he invited a special guest onto the air: his old friend Bobby Kennedy. The secretary of Health and Human Services had come to talk about his plan for fighting autism, but near the end of the segment, Catsimatidis grabbed the chance to bring up the “awstriches,” as he calls them in his thick New York City accent. “Mr. Secretary, one last thing,” he said. There were these special birds in Canada, with a “natural healing process,” and now they were in danger because Big Pharma wanted them dead.
“I support you 100 percent,” Kennedy responded. “I’m horrified by the idea that they’re going to kill these animals.”
The cause was a natural fit for Kennedy. The anti-vaccine organization that he once chaired, Children’s Health Defense, had already aired an interview with Katie on its video channel in March. And Kennedy himself has often railed against government overreach in efforts to control potential outbreaks. Earlier that spring, Kennedy had declared that the U.S. and Canada’s policy of stamping out H5N1-infected chickens should be stopped. The survivors—the ones with naturally acquired immunity—could be used to repopulate poultry farms with hardier stock, he said. (Experts warn about the dangers of letting the virus spread unchecked; vaccinating poultry makes a lot more sense, two bird-flu scientists told me.) Kennedy also seems to have an affinity for large, flightless birds. He has kept at least one emu as a pet on his property in California.
One late night in May, Katie awoke to a call. At first she was confused, she said, but then she heard Kennedy’s raspy voice; the secretary was on the line with Catsimatidis. Some days later, as the sun set across the Monashees, Katie stood among the farm’s supporters in the field and choked back sobs as she prepared to read from a letter that Kennedy had written to her government. “We are respectfully requesting CFIA to consider not culling the entire flock of ostriches at Universal Ostrich Farm,” it said. The letter was signed at the bottom by three of the most important public-health officials in America: not just Kennedy but also FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya. (HHS did not respond to questions for this story.)
Katie’s “Save the Ostriches” campaign had until this point attracted hippies, libertarians, and anti-vaxxers, as well as local politicians in her province. Now it had the U.S. government.
I arrived in Edgewood a few weeks later, having come along the same twisting highway that the CFIA inspectors had used when they first drove out to test the ostriches almost six months earlier. As I pulled into the driveway, I could see the birds peering at my rental car from inside their large enclosures.
I checked in with a volunteer in a makeshift booth, and he handed me an Ostrich Sheriffs sticker. A Canadian flag hung from the fence at the edge of the encampment, along with handmade posters: STOP the MURDER of 399 OSTRICHES. Save Ostrich Science (S.O.S.). If your child got sick in your family, would you kill the whole family?
Jim Kerr, an ostrich-farm supporter with a long beard, took me on a tour of the premises. Kerr is known among right-wing activists in Canada for his livestreamed protest videos, and for the soap-bubble-blowing art car that he drives to freedom convoys. Kerr explained that the supporters had an action plan for when the feds arrived. Dave and Karen would go into the pens and stand among the birds. Volunteers would block the road and send up drones to document everything that happened. They’d had a dry run just a few weeks before I came, when someone thought they saw a line of SUVs, all white, coming down the road. The sentries notified the camp; barricades went up; three women lay down on the highway. It turned out to be a false alarm.
When I sat down with the farmers in the kitchen, Karen put out plates of sandwiches and cookies, and then she, Dave, and Katie launched into the story that they’d told so many times before, to politicians and supporters and the press. Katie, in particular, sometimes seemed to speak about the farm on autopilot, winding back to certain formulations about “giving small farmers a seat at the table” and the need to protect the “future of farming.” But still her voice would catch and the tears would flow, even in what must have been her thousandth telling.
Her connections with right-wing and extremist figures were expanding. She told me that she would soon be headed to a “Truth Movement” conference down in West Palm Beach, where she would share a stage with several noted anti-vaxxers, as well as Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader. And she let me scroll through a run of texts that she’d received in recent weeks from Mehmet Oz, who, like Kennedy, had gotten drawn in to her cause by Catsimatidis. Oz, the celebrity doctor who is currently the head of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, had suggested that he could bring the ostriches to Florida, but that wasn’t possible on account of the cull order. “I have spread the word widely and cannot understand why they cannot let me take these beautiful birds,” he wrote to Katie in one message. (Oz did not respond to a request for comment.)
Again and again, the farmers said the Canadian government’s response to their outbreak made no sense. Plainly they were right in some particulars. Why couldn’t the CFIA just test the birds again, to see if the virus was still present? The government had claimed that this was impossible, that its inspectors would have no way to gather swabs from several hundred dangerous animals that can run at the speed of a moped, without handling facilities of any kind on-site. But I’d heard otherwise from independent experts. Adriaan Olivier, an ostrich-industry veterinarian in South Africa, told me that high-volume testing could be done. South Africa has been dealing with bird-flu outbreaks on ostrich farms for years, he said, and could manage the screening of even several hundred adults in one day.
Then again, I could also see—really, anyone could see—that Dave and Karen had been flouting basic rules of biosafety on the farm. At first, they hadn’t told the government that their birds were sick. And their “quarantine” was barely that. The same farm dogs that nosed around my feet inside the kitchen were also running in and out of ostrich pens. After Dave and Karen fed the birds, they sprayed each other down with disinfectant, but they didn’t change their clothes or remove their shoes. And the volunteers were clearly handling the eggs and feathers.
Those who had been around the farm the longest hadn’t simply been exposed to H5N1—they’d been infected. The farmers mentioned this offhandedly. Not long before my visit, Katie had tested positive for H5N1-specific antibodies. Dave and Karen had also turned up positive, as had one of their earliest supporters, a woman who’d arrived at the farm in January. No one could remember having any symptoms, though, and Katie wasn’t willing to concede that she or any of the others had caught the virus from the ostriches.
The conversation circled back to the phone call from December that had prompted the government’s investigation—the tip-off to the sick-bird hotline. The farmers said it must have come from the woman who lives next door, Lois Wood. If it hadn’t been for her, none of this would have happened.
I spoke with Lois, a 72-year-old widow and volunteer firefighter, by phone a few days later. She lives just up the road from the ostrich farm. She can see the pens from her front yard. She said the situation had gotten out of hand. For months, the activists had been tormenting her: shining headlights in her yard, yelling out her name, tailing her when she was on her way to fire practice. “Finally—finally—somebody wants to hear the other side,” she told me.
Lois claimed that she never reported the sick birds to the CFIA: She’d tried to call, but no one answered, and she didn’t leave a message. But everyone could tell that the ostriches were dying, she said, and the CFIA was right to get involved.
Elsewhere in the town of Edgewood, the fight to save the ostriches has brought out skeptics of the cause. Jim McFarlane, a local cattle rancher who has known Dave since they were kids, told me that, like Lois, he’d had enough. Dave has been “a total fucking bullshitter all his life,” he said. He asked me what I thought about the story of the murdered ostriches—the ones that supposedly were shot in the head in the middle of the night. “I mean, come on,” Jim said. “I’m a hunter, and you’re going to go out there in the middle of the night and shoot at a little fucking ostrich head when you’ve got a 300-, 400-pound body there?”
It’s true: An ostrich head is like a Q-tip protruding from a very large piñata. The idea of aiming for it, at least while sneaking in the dark, seemed preposterous. Yet Dave and Karen insisted that not one but two birds had been killed like this. Jim thinks that Dave and Karen might have killed the birds, that maybe they were trying to draw attention to the farm for the sake of more donations. Lois had another theory: What if the birds were still sick? What if the outbreak hadn’t ended, and the farmers didn’t want the government to know? (Both ostrich murders are still under investigation, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. When I brought the claim to Dave that he’d shot the birds himself, he told me, “That’s insane.”)
The matter of the ostrich shootings is one of many that’s been taken up by a local Facebook group, “Edgewood—Uncensored,” in which a group of grumpy neighbors and others in British Columbia debate the ostrich farm and what they deem to be its hidden motives. They obsess over every open question and apparent inconsistency, such as who really called the CFIA about the sick ostriches, and how many birds were really in those pens. Some even wondered if the so-called standoff was a piece of theater, concocted by the government and its contacts in Big Pharma. Maybe no one ever really planned to cull the birds. After all, hadn’t Dave and Karen been involved in biotech? Hadn’t they injected ostriches with COVID?
If Katie, Dave, and Karen had built their movement from the bricks of outrage and suspicion, then those bricks were also being hurled against their walls. Paranoia had sustained them to this point, but paranoia was a force that they couldn’t quite control.
I drove out to the farm again in late September. The line of police cruisers had snaked into the valley just a few days earlier, and I could see the marks of occupation. The property was divided at the edge of Langille Road. Yellow tape stretched across the northern side, at the entrance to the pens, and officers were taking shifts on guard. Just across from them, the farm’s supporters had put up a set of wooden bleachers so they could try to watch and record everything that happened. An inscription had been carved into the top row: In Appreciation: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Some of the birds had been dedicated too: There was now an ostrich Charlie Kirk, an ostrich Dr. Oz, an ostrich Donald Trump.
I’d arrived at a moment of uneasy calm. Not so long before, every sign had suggested that the standoff was about to end. After many hours’ worth of yelling and negotiations, the police had seized the pens; Karen and Katie were driven off in handcuffs, and briefly held. The CFIA had put up a wall of hay bales in the field, presumably to hem in the flock and hide the coming slaughter. But hours later, just as Dave and Karen were finishing a group prayer, their lawyer called to say that the Supreme Court of Canada had intervened. The justices were considering whether they would hear the case, and that meant the ostriches would not be killed just yet. Everyone agreed that this intervention was divine.
Now the camp was far more crowded than it had been in June. No one took my name and phone number, or handed me a badge, when I arrived. Near one corner of the pens, I met a man named Thomas, who was taking footage of the Mounties with a camcorder. “I hate cops,” he said. “If one of those guys got a bullet to the head, I wouldn’t shed a tear.” Thomas told me that he’d been incarcerated for assault and fraud, but that his days as a criminal were over. “I don’t condone violence,” he said, “but I’ve started to think some violence might be necessary when there’s no other way to make people pay attention.”
Over at the house, Dave and Karen were meeting with the police department’s liaisons. Dave looked as though he hadn’t slept for days. His ears were bloody from the ostrich pecks that he’d sustained during his vigil in the pens. When I asked him what he’d do if the cull was carried out, he cried into his hand. If the ostriches were killed, Dave and Karen would have nothing left. They may no longer be eligible for compensation for the loss of the birds, according to the CFIA rules. They also owe tens of thousands of dollars to the government in fines and legal expenses. In the meantime, they’d been deprived of revenue for months, and the farm had already been facing heavy debts when all of this started. “There’s no recovery from this,” their lawyer, Umar Sheikh, told me.
Next door, in the grass outside Lois’s double-wide trailer, the smell of gasoline still lingered. When she came outside to say hello, I saw that she had bruises on both arms, cuts on her face, and a black eye. She’d only stopped the would-be arsonist by chance, she said: She’d come out to feed one of her cats and there he was, reaching into his pocket, as if to grab a lighter. She’d lunged at him, bit him on the elbow, and kicked him in the groin. Then he punched her in the face and fled. The police identified their suspect by the tooth marks on his arm.
The man was a freedom-convoy veteran, Karen’s son told me, who’d warned the others in the group that he planned to go to jail before this all was over. Both Katie and her mother claimed, at least at first, that the attempted arson never really happened—that the whole thing was a setup by the members of the local “hate group” who had criticized the farm online.
I asked Lois if she felt unsafe. She told me that she’d gone to stay with a friend on the night after the attack, but had come back to the farm to tend to her cats and her tomatoes. She said that there were a lot of cops around for protection, but also that she didn’t see herself as having many options. “People say, ‘Well, you should do a civil suit against them for slander, libel, whatever, harassment,’” she told me. “I say, ‘I could not bear to do that. Can you imagine going up against Katie? You wouldn’t win.’”
Moving out of Edgewood didn’t seem to be an option, either. Lois’s property, her 120 acres in the valley, was all she had, and who would ever buy it now? She was living on the site of a bird-flu quarantine. Fair or not, she was just as trapped as Dave and Karen. “I keep thinking it’s going to be over,” she said. And then it never is.
An end did come at last, six weeks later. On November 6, the Supreme Court decided not to hear the farmers’ case. The Notice of Requirement to Dispose of Animals issued by the CFIA more than 10 months earlier was reinstated for the final time. Shortly after nightfall, once the police had cut their floodlights and sealed off Langille Road, gunshots started ringing out behind the hay bales. At first there were a dozen, then many dozens more, as hired marksmen fired on the flock from platforms.
Katie squatted at the border of the pens, pulling at the fence and screaming, “Make it stop.” Karen stood beside the line of officers who blocked the road. “They’re killing my babies,” she said.
By the next morning, the cull was over. All of the ostriches—314 of them, by the government’s final count—were dead.
It was gray and it was cold in the valley. Autumn had returned: one full cycle of the seasons from the day Dave and Karen’s birds first began to falter in the slush. Waves of wild ducks were passing overhead once more. Since the start of fall, the bird-flu virus has again been spilling over into poultry flocks in North America. Another 8 million birds have been killed on U.S. farms in recent months, and 3 million more in Canada.
While construction vehicles shoveled up the ostrich carcasses and dumped them into trucks, the farm’s supporters gathered for a vigil, in person and online. It had been 297 days, they claimed, since any of the birds were sick. Whether this was true no longer mattered. The outbreak on the Universal Ostrich Farms had reached its end; yet even now, no one could agree about the nature of the threat. Had the poultry been a risk to public health? What about the farmers, who never thought the rules applied to them? And what about the government, which chose annihilation over compromise? Any middle ground was now awash with blood. Some kind of danger had been present in those pens; that was clear enough. Now that danger is stamped out.
