Release The Ostriches' Grippe

The Supreme Court of Canada has cleared the way for the ostrich cull, but fascist extremism isn't so easy to euthanize

It was (not actually) a peaceful month of minimal ostrich news. I cannot believe that I have even used the word “ostrich” this much in my life. I went into virology because I prefer studying microscopic parasites to vertebrates. I should have known better than to think I wouldn’t have to know about these terror birds. I’ve been studying viruses through the lens of the hosts they infect for my entire career. Sometimes the hosts are incredibly annoying. Ostriches fall into this category.

Today, the Canadian Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of the bird flu-infected ostrich farmers. To quickly recap (and if you’ve got time, I wrote an encyclopedia about it here): there is a flock of ostriches in British Columbia (BC) that had an outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza last December. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) ordered them culled. UOF sued CFIA and it’s been a radicalized absurdist yokelfest in Edgewood, BC ever since. UOF made a lot of baseless scientific claims about their business to exempt the ostriches, despite clear evidence to the contrary. CFIA rebutted this with a lot of scientific evidence, as well as the fact that they are obligated by law to carry out the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH) protocols for avian flu management.

If the ostriches are not culled, Canada will violate its trade agreements and jeopardize the entire $2 billion export trade market. In addition, Canada will send the message that an increasingly smaller and more unhinged group of crooked-toothed rednecks can dictate agricultural regulatory policy by regurgitating some of the most poisonous, aggressively stupid right-wing anti-government fascist talking points. Now it’s up to Canada’s Supreme Court to rule on it. They just said (wisely, in my view) that they have better things to do because the law is clear: CFIA is correctly in charge of managing poultry outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza.

The owners of Universal Ostrich Farms (UOF) are antibody supplement and medical freedom convoy grifters who have hosted a ramshackle village of itinerant unshorn, slack-jawed Facebook Live extremists for months on their remote ostrich farm. They are actively raising loonies for their right to be unemployed squatters who film vertical shorts for far-right propagandists like Chris Dacey, Mike Rude, anyone at Rebel News, and their own social media (mostly Facebook, because the target audience is definitely your uncritical elderly Aunt Becky or whoever).

This has resulted in violence. UOF’s 72-year-old neighbour Lois Wood confronted ostrich supporter, trucker convoy stan, and firebug Tim Regan while he was attempting to burn down her house, causing Regan to allegedly douse her in gasoline and punch her in the face. Wood bit him and kicked him in the balls, so he was arrested after being identified by Wood’s teeth impressions on his wrist.

The Supreme Court has decided their judgments are best served on other cases where the law is less clear. This was a wise decision. That means CFIA can proceed with the cull. The ostriches must go.

The vaccine-hating, natural immunity-loving ostrich truth squad now has no recourse for non-violent resolution. Contrary to popular belief in my gun-loving home country of the US of A, Canadians do indeed have guns. And knives. And jerry cans of gasoline. And a steady stream of far-right propaganda telling them that following the law is a liberal scheme to take your freedom to increase your risk of food insecurity, economic ruin, or death by preventable infection away. There are a ton of armed Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) at the farm protecting CFIA. There is also a caravan of deranged ostrich fanatics with nothing better to do than consume anti-government extremist political content on Rumble.

In their most recent ostrich situation report, CFIA reminded individual ostrich supporters that it is illegal to obstruct their inspectors or officers performing their duties under the Health of Animals Act. They emphasized the importance of respecting court orders throughout the legal process and affirmed that CFIA is committed to following the law.

CFIA once again beseeches the Ostrich Freedom Riders to stop violating legally binding quarantine orders, including with their fleet of drones.

However, the ostrich farm legal process has now arrived at its endpoint. There is no higher legal authority in Canada than the Supreme Court to which the UOF can appeal. They must accept that CFIA will carry out the cull in accordance with the law, but given Team #SaveOurOstriches’ behaviour and the motivations of the trucker convoy-supporting agitators who are egging them on, I am concerned about what will happen next. Now that there are no more options for legal recourse, I’m worried that ostrich deaths might mean human deaths, as well.

How are things at Freedom Ostrich HQ?

Over the last month and a half, the ostrich vagabonds have been living their most morally righteous anti-government overreach lives, and by that I mean it’s been like an episode of a reality show that should have existed in 2011 on CMT, except more maple MAGA.

At one point, UOF spokeswoman and farm owner’s daughter Katie Pasitney claimed the ostrich cause was endorsed by the Charles Darwin Foundation. Even after the Charles Darwin Foundation disavowed UOF and reiterated that they were focused on Galapagos tortoise conservation, Pasitney insisted that the foundation supported her cause, based on supportive comments from an intensely Christian wine merchant from Abbotsford, BC who claims to be descended from Darwin himself. I guess he didn’t share his supposed great-great-grandfather’s interest in the origin of the species, because he claims to be indifferent to evolution versus creationism, since it’s more or less God’s business.

The farm adjacent to UOF was seized by CFIA as a secondary quarantine site. These are not uninvolved neighbours, as this farm is owned by Alyson Turnbull, who is the niece of UOF owner Karen Espersen. CFIA’s warrant prevented Turnbull from harvesting her crop of garlic, causing the embedded wingnut press corps to dub her “Garlic Girl.” Eventually CFIA gave permission for the great garlic harvest to commence, but not before Rebel News and Dacey Media presented it extensively as the worst allium-mediated injustice in Canadian history.

In addition, convoy veteran Jim “Poppa Bubbles” Kerr was arrested for violating the CFIA’s quarantine zone. He became so incensed at becoming a victim of government overreach that he apologized publicly for taking it out on his wife Thundra. She forgave him after he presented her with a stuffed ostrich and they both went back to filming propaganda videos with their fellow itinerant travelers.

And speaking of criminals, the assailant who attacked Wood, Tim Regan, moved to rural BC from Ottawa to engage in full-time anti-CFIA shit-stirring. As with so many other medical freedom movements, he is now protesting with unsupported “scamdemic” conspiracy theories. I truly hope the RCMP is keeping an eye on Wood’s property and looking out for her physical safety.

Alleged senior citizen attempted immolator Tim Regan with his bird flu plandemic propaganda (Credit: @SisuVanHell, who is Canada’s top ostrich expert)

Incidentally, Pasitney agrees with this sentiment, since Monday she retweeted this claim that avian flu is “manufactured and patented” as some sort of deep state agricultural bioweapon. Until October 1, 351 dead wild birds in Canada and 673 dead wild birds in the US have tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza, all of which is H5N1. There are infected birds and wild animals everywhere in North America. This creates an incredibly dangerous situation that dramatically increases the risk of bird flu making the jump to transmit between humans, which is the only reason that it is not causing human outbreaks—and potentially a pandemic—right now. This was not the result of human actions, but of human inaction: failure to contain the outbreak in birds allowed this virus to emerge naturally and spread around the world.

D1.3 is the genotype, not the strain, and it is from wild birds in British Columbia that brought it both to UOF’s farm and eventually to Ohio

On Tuesday, tragedy struck again. A guy identified only as Tom died. He had a heart attack and was unceremoniously covered with a sheet and filmed by Pasitney for a very special Facebook Live in which she filmed Tom’s body before his next of kin had been notified. Tom was a copiously bearded long-term resident of the farm’s camping yard. He was evidently a treasured member of the community, but not so precious that they couldn’t toss a white sheet over his fresh corpse and use it to drum up donations to the old GoFundMe, which has raised almost eighty grand.

Scoping out those sweet, lucrative fat pads to render into cosmetics

The ostrich road to perdition

We will see how the cull proceeds. In September, when culling was imminent prior to the appeal was made to the Supreme Court, UOF supporters engaged in a widespread harassment campaign against anyone they thought was helping CFIA, including the CFIA employees at the farm, individual RCMP officers and their family members, Lois Wood, various businesses throughout BC and Alberta, Ian Hanomansing at CBC, Judy Trinh at CTV, critics online, and, to my perpetual chagrin, me. That campaign has continued in the midst of the ostrich absurdity.

I have exchanged several emails with Wood since she reached out to thank me for speaking plainly about UOF. I emailed to ask her about her health and safety after Regan attacked her and she wrote back saying that she had recovered and returned to her farm and would not be intimidated by violent. She included a picture of her wearing novelty vampire teeth and invited the criminals on the next property over to come at her. Lois Wood is my kind of woman, so I hope that she and everyone else who is not an ostrich fascist will be safe after today’s events.

Although fortunately nobody has attempted to burn down my house or assault me, I have received so much unpleasant correspondence that I had to create a folder in my Outlook entitled “Ostrich Hate Mail.” Here is a sample of one of the lovely messages I received this morning.

Just another Thursday: someone I’ve never met hopes for my agonizing death

I was recently the subject of a verifiably insane death threat—delivered to the voicemail of another employee at my university who I have never met—in which the caller disparaged me extensively, calling me a “cunt pig,” a “vicious fucking whore,” “Dr. Angela Mengele Rasmussen,” a “shit pile,” a “scuzzy, stinky cunt,” and a “batshit crazy fucking scum-ass witch.” He accused me of making bioweapons for former US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci (who also made “the AIDS virus” with former PEPFAR Director Deborah Birx), money laundering for Ukraine, being a Nazi brownshirt, poisoning and giving turbo cancer to the entire population of Canada, conspiring with the “Royal Canadian Mounted Gestapo,” and having “sexual fun after midnight with all the crazy sexuals” because I served on a NIH working group to address sexual harassment in 2019. I suspect he does not know very much about sexual harassment since, as someone who has been sexually harassed and sexually assaulted, I would not describe the experience as “fun.” To top it all off, he said I needed to be fired, hung from the neck until dead along with Fauci like the Nazis at Nuremberg, and “shot out of a cannon into a volcano so (I) can burn into hellfire.”

Not only was this extremely disturbing to the unlucky and completely uninvolved employee who received these messages, my university’s protective services and security team were seriously concerned for my safety. As a result, I lost a day filing a police report and working with my university security and the constable investigating the case. Although the caller was eventually found and the situation was resolved by the police, I can still hear the hatred and vitriol in the caller’s voice. This man, who I never met, really, really hated me. He was triggered to act upon it because he came across a CityNews podcast in which I was interviewed about the scientific, agricultural, food security, and economic issues associated with managing H5N1 avian flu and the UOF situation. I also extensively discussed the issues with the exploitation of public health and animal health policy to undermine the rule of law by radicalized anti-establishment lunatics. It happened in my home country. It could happen here in Canada too. I am deeply worried about that.

The far-right media amplifying the UOF extremists specializes in weaponizing lies and disinformation to provoke action and incite abuse, harassment, and violence against their ideological opponents. Yet, you might not realize that if you listen only to the ostrich convoy’s claims of sorrow and trauma. At an on-farm news conference, Pasitney declared this “the saddest day in Canadian history.”

Between bouts of sobbing, Pasitney regained her composure long enough to accuse CFIA of “playing God” and vowed to make them pay by ending them. Pasitney threatened CFIA, along with Minister of Agriculture Heath McDonald, CFIA President Paul McKinnon, and lead CFIA Inspector Cortnie Fotheringham: “you’re never gonna come back from this. So you’ve signed your finish line.” Then she called for a global revolution against the Canadian government and evidence-based agricultural regulatory policy intended to protect the economy, the food supply, and human and animal health. Deadbeat ostrich supporter Jeff Gaudry was less restrained and shouted expletives at Tyvek-clad CFIA staff trying to corral the ostriches this afternoon. Pasitney then screamed ostrich names intermittently with the names of government officials to direct the mob to her preferred targets.

While it did not involve ostriches, this is exactly the strategy that the current US administration used to destroy public trust in science. Contrarian influencers blamed Fauci and Big Public Health/Big Pharma/Big Virology/Big (insert demonized group here). They weaponized lying and doubt so successfully that these same people are now in powerful positions regulating vaccines and drugs, all biomedical research, and national public health capacity with teen sperm enthusiast Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. himself presiding over them all. Already this has gutted vaccine access and development, decimated surveillance including for bird flu, and even areas of health that Kennedy claims to like, such as preventive medicine. They fabricate emotionally evocative claims about everything from Tylenol to metabolism to inactivated flu vaccines. The reason why this is politically advantageous is that it normalized viewing established government sovereignty and the democratic rule of law as the enemy of the people. It caused Americans to reject government by the people and for the people in favour of a fascist dictatorship. Under the guise of “freedom,” Americans gave their true freedoms away.

As an American, what has happened to my country as a result of these professional liars breaks my heart on a daily basis. The anti-public health rhetoric paved the way for a domestic terror attack on the CDC, and it’s ushering in widespread death and destruction globally as America falls to authoritarianism. I recognize the same thing happening here, in the bird flu “scamdemic” protest signs, turbo cancer bullshit, and anti-vax wailing about natural immunity. Canada is one election away from the terrible future that is America’s present reality. After the ostriches are gone, Canada must stamp out the disease of violent extremist tyranny.