The Saga of the H5N1 Freedom Ostriches
CFIA murder drones, baptisms in bird shit, and poorly attended anti-vax music festivals: what the hell is going on up here in Canada
I live in Canada and keep a vigilant eye on the bird flu situation up here. Right now, birds aren’t migrating so there aren’t a ton of poultry outbreaks. These will probably pick back up when the weather starts to turn and the birds hit the flyways. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has continued to test milk across the country and have not found positive samples to date. I did a study with a bunch of my colleagues in the Pan-Canadian Milk Study Network to test milk for antibodies to flu, indicating a previous infection. All negative. Canadian dairy cows are moo flu-free, at least for now. Wild birds and mammals still have H5N1 and it’s around, so it’s not time to let down our guard, but the situation is not nearly as perilous as it is down south.
One reason for that is the CFIA actively carries out their mandate to safeguard the food supply and the health and safety of animals used for agricultural production by culling farmed poultry when there is an outbreak of a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus like H5N1. This “stamping-out” policy is designed to eliminate bird flu from commercial poultry operations, which is essential for public health, as well as food security and the Canadian economy (poultry is a $6.8 billion business in Canada). That’s where we begin this cautionary but also extraordinarily stupid tale about what happens when MAGA-wannabe trucker convoy separatists decide that science-driven health policy is optional.
In December 2024, the Universal Ostrich Farm (UOF) in Edgewood, British Columbia received a most unwelcome holiday surprise: an outbreak of H5N1 that killed 69 ostriches. CFIA issued a mandatory depopulation order for their entire 400-bird flock. The UOF owners took CFIA to court. Remnants of the trucker convoy movement, a ragtag assortment of low-budget January 6th cosplayers who occupied Ottawa for weeks in 2022, joined the party, and took the fight to Rumble. US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. got involved. The Freedom Ostriches’ fate still hangs in the balance pending a federal appeals court decision.
Previously on this season of “Real Ostrich Liberators of Western Canada”
According to court records, sometime in late November 2024, a flock of 300-500 ducks visited a pond on the UOF property, which is in a remote part of BC called West Kootenay. H5N1 ducks are bad news for poultry farmers, because they get bird flu but they don’t get very sick from it. In birds, flu is a gastrointestinal disease as well as respiratory, so transmission can occur via both of those routes. Since ducks don’t get sick, you can’t tell if a duck is infected by looking at it, so surveillance and good biosecurity practices that will keep ducks away from your flock is critical to keeping H5N1 out.
Infected ducks go about their duck business, quacking and waddling and flying around looking for food, water, shelter, and other birds to hang out with and breathe and shit on. In doing so, they give bird flu to other animals that do get sick, like chickens and ostriches. Ostriches were dying of suspiciously avian flu-like symptoms at UOF by the first week of December.
Ostriches develop a range of avian flu disease from completely asymptomatic to lethal. There’s not a ton of data on ostrich pathogenesis (the process by which viruses cause disease), but age is a major driver, with younger animals being more prone to severe outcomes. By “severe outcomes” I mean typical high path avian flu: hemorrhagic diarrhea, pneumonia, and neurological dysfunction (often in chickens this presents as neck twisting and I don’t even want to think about what that looks like in an ostrich). It’s a pretty horrible way to go and it’s hard to miss this happening to 15% of the animals in your flock, especially when they are 6-foot-tall flightless terror birds. Whether through negligence or deception, the UOF did not report this to CFIA as required.
By December 28, someone anonymously snitched to CFIA that ostriches were dropping dead at UOF, who promptly investigated and issued a quarantine order. On December 31, 2024, CFIA confirmed H5N1, issued a Declaration of Infected Place and Notice to Dispose (order to cull the 400 bird flock).
UOF applied for an exemption on the basis of their ostrich flock’s “rare genetics” and by claiming to be a scientific research facility based on their collaboration with a scientist in Japan, who is using ostrich eggs to produce antibodies. Meanwhile, CFIA was still getting dying ostrich complaints from the concerned citizens of Edgewood. CFIA inspected them on January 7th, 2025 and found biosecurity to be lacking: wild ducks following inspectors into the quarantine zone, hanging out in ostrich enclosures, and eating from the ostrich feeders. They fenced off the pond that had attracted the wild ducks that initially introduced H5N1 to the farm, but (possibly due to their specialization in flightless birds) didn’t account for the fact that wild ducks can fly.
There were also weasels living in the barns. Weasels are susceptible to lethal H5N1 disease and they are carnivores, which means they will go out looking for other potentially susceptible mammals and birds to prey upon and possibly transmit flu to. There were a whole lot of unrestricted cross-species interactions occurring in violation of CFIA’s quarantine order and Infected Place designation.
CFIA denied the request for exemption on January 10, 2025. The UOF took them to Federal Court, which granted a stay of execution to the flock on January 31, the day before the deadline to carry out the cull. The case proceeded to wind its way through the Canadian judicial system.
Then, on March 21, an ostrich was shot and killed by an unknown assailant. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) investigated, but so far the killer has escaped justice. Then, on May 13, a Federal judge dismissed the UOF’s case and vacated the stay, allowing CFIA to proceed with the cull.
However, it was not to be, because by this time, UOF’s owners Karen Espersen and Dave Bilinski and Espersen’s daughter Katie Pasitney had been rousing support on trucker convoy social media. As early as January 2025, Pasitney was courting groups like BC Rising, which claims that COVID-19 was a United Nations plot for global domination, and has since encouraged convoyers to go to the farm. A wretched band of unshorn, aspirationally seditious Canadian 51st State enthusiasts have descended upon West Kootenay in their literal clown cars to block CFIA from depopulating the flock. They are led by a professional Freedom Convoy livestreamer named Jim Kerrm aka “Poppa Bubbles” on account of his bubble truck being in the vanguard of brave anti-vaxxers who descended on Ottawa in 2022. He also led the convoy’s attempted reboot of Pizzagate in 2023 called “Save Our Children,” and has now appointed himself a leader of what he has named the “Save Our Ostriches” movement.
A “big beautiful rooster” was shot in May 2025, leading Kerr and Pastiney to speculate that CFIA had employed murder drones to carry out the cull. Death from the skies is not an approved humane slaughter method for ostriches per CFIA guidelines, but the RCMP once again put its best avian homicide detectives on the case. Also, the ostrich rebels acquired a Cybertruck for security purposes, although its unclear how this would thwart future drone attacks except as a prop in Poppa Bubbles’ Instagram feed.
For the past two months, the valiant defenders of the imperiled Freedom Ostriches have been hard at work in the trenches of social media to rally support. Arguably their biggest success in the information war was to catch the eye of long time falconer and unsanctioned animal corpse necropsy aficionado Kennedy, after billionaire worst-grocery-stores-in-NYC magnate and right-wing talk show host John Catsimitidis joined the movement in May. Kennedy, along with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, tweeted a letter to CFIA proposing that instead of culling the ostriches, they instead collaborate on a research study.
Not to be left out, CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz quickly offered up his Florida estate as a site to carry out this groundbreaking research. It’s unclear what exactly this will entail since Kennedy’s letter covers everything from studying natural immune durability in ostriches to antibody-dependent enhancement to testing antivirals. I suspect it has something to do with Kennedy, Bhattacharya, and Makary’s general enthusiasm for letting viral infections spread unchecked in the population rather than implementing evidence-based public health interventions like quarantine and vaccines.
Team Ostrich has also been fundraising to collect plenty of loonies for their cause, with mixed results. On one hand, they somehow scammed someone out of a Cybertruck. On the other, they recently held a “Farm Aid Canada”/”Live-Stock” concert to pay UOF’s legal fees and the thousands of dollars in fines from CFIA for failing to report the outbreak and repeated violations of quarantine orders.
Despite an incredible lineup of Canadian fringe extremists and a location on a plague-ridden ostrich farm in remote BC, this event was not well-attended. It’s hard to believe the underemployed weirdos comprising the Canadian anti-public health community wouldn’t want to make the pilgrimage to West Kootenay to see performances by the likes of Tamara Lich, a convoy agitator who was convicted for her role in the convoy and is now facing a sentence of years in prison, and Shadoe Davis, who hosts a Rumble show called “Shadoe at Night” devoted to Canadian-focused conspiracy theories (the usual anti-vax, pro-authoritarian disinformation common to the US except with more Mark Carney and Justin Trudeau). A few die-hards showed up, but overall the turnout was pretty weak.
Not even an ordained emissary of Jesus Christ himself could compel a huge audience to attend, despite Pastor Artur Pawlowski showing up preach the gospel of Save Our Ostriches, both through relentless social media posting and baptizing new cultists in a river filled with ostrich effluent and farm/RV park runoff. Pawlowski is a hardline right-wing activist who racked up multiple arrests for violating public health orders in 2020 and later was convicted for encouraging convoyers blockading the border crossing at Coutts, Alberta to defy police orders. Now he is bringing fiery promises of God’s hatred upon anyone who doesn’t full-throatedly support anti-vax Christofascism in the battle for ostrich salvation.
The Federal Court of Appeals heard arguments in the case last week and reserved their decision, which means the three-judge panel hasn’t finalized the fate of the ostriches just yet. What will happen next?
I don’t know and am on the edge of my seat, but there are two big open questions for me: what is the scientific value of these ostriches and what kind of risk do they present?
The Universal Ostrich Farms research consortium
A big part of the case for saving the Freedom Ostriches rests on the premise that they are actually are being used for critical scientific research. I am not exactly sure what this research entails, but it sounds like it has something to do with immunology and ostrich eggs.
Here’s Poppa Bubbles on Instagram explaining the scientific value of the Freedom Ostriches. In this little Instagram video, he claims that if you just get your hands on some magical ostrich eggs, you can just “mist yourself in the face” and there won’t be any need for the 500,000 doses of H5N1 vaccine that Canada purchased for its strategic national stockpile.
Unsurprisingly, I found Kerr’s explanation to be inadequate and inconsistent with any immunization method I’ve ever heard of, since passive immunization (immunizing yourself with antibodies rather than a vaccine that will make your immune system produce its own antibodies) usually doesn’t involve snorting a big bolus of raw ostrich yolk. CFIA claims the UOF owners did not provide evidence that any type of scientific research is occurring on the premises. That tracks with evidence from the literature, which is non-existent since there are no papers, preprints, press pieces, or really anything listing anyone from UOF as a collaborator.
As best as I can tell, their Japanese collaborator, Yasuhiro Tsukamoto, is the President of Kyoto Prefectural University, co-CEO of Ostrich Pharma USA, and the GOAT of applied ostrich immunology. He developed a method for immunizing ostriches and then extracting antibodies from their eggs. This method had already been developed in chickens, but Tsukamoto adapted it to ostrich eggs, which are much bigger. In 2020, UOF stopped raising ostriches for meat and began to focus on commercializing their antibodies. In 2021, they boasted about developing a nasal spray from ostrich anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies that could “neutralize the delta variant.” Hard to tell if that’s true, since they have not published their results nor mentioned it again.
It also seems that infectious diseases may not have been their exclusive focus, since Tsukamoto’s co-CEO said that their company was actually making antibodies against human digestive enzymes as a weight loss supplement. In fact, CFIA maintains that the farm facilities are not “suitable for controlled research activity or trials” and that UOF did not provide sufficient documentation of the research being performed there. They did not provide breeding records or genomic evidence of their birds’ “rare genetics,” and thus failed to make the case to CFIA that these birds have scientific value.
It also goes without saying that Kennedy, Bhattacharya, and Makary’s assessment of the scientific value of these birds is greatly overestimated. In my opinion, you could probably use these birds to harvest antibodies and look at long-term ostrich immune responses. This would be useful and informative, but not groundbreaking. We already know quite a lot about avian antibodies. They are a little different than mammalian antibodies (they are IgY instead of IgG), so they have advantages for some diagnostics and therapeutic applications. But they also have disadvantages, too, starting with the fact that clinical products are generally not developed in an outbuilding of a bird flu-infected poultry farm by anti-vaxxers.
I feel pretty confident that they are not running columns to purify these antibodies in the imaginary state-of-the-art immunology lab at UOF. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to speculate that they weren’t harvesting antibodies from those ostriches at all, but just providing eggs to commercialize the technology for the Canadian market.
What is the actual risk here?
The virus that the UOF ostriches were infected with is a novel clade 2.3.4.4.b. reassortant and is classified as a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus based on its sequence.
The “highly pathogenic avian” designation is based on what it does to chickens (kills them gruesomely) and is usually associated with a particular sequences of amino acids in the hemagglutinin (HA, the H in H5) protein called a furin cleavage site. Those who have been following COVID-19 origin debates know all about furin cleavage sites, since a beloved but inaccurate lab leaker claim is that furin cleavage sites are reckless virologists’ secret ingredients for gain-of-functioning up an innocuous virus into a pandemic.
But furin cleavage sites occur naturally in many viruses, including influenza. In bird flu, their effect is not to increase pandemic potential (they don’t make HA more likely to infect mammals or humans) but to make the virus more pathogenic in birds.
So this virus is highly pathogenic and is a danger to chickens, turkeys, and other farms. It is a reassortant virus (it exchanged genome segments with another flu virus), which also means that it may have different effects in different hosts. It is also a danger to other animals and to humans.
Without question, the “stamping out” policy applied by CFIA is the most effective way to stop an avian flu outbreak and prevent its spread. It is also important for Canada’s trade agreements, since Canadian poultry exports are a nearly $2 billion business. Canada, along with most other countries, has entered into an international agreement to adhere to the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH) standards for animal disease control. WOAH requires culling to prevent the spread of avian flu.
Although it may seem harsh to cull every animal in an infected flock, this is more humane for the birds, especially in species like chickens where it absolutely wrecks them over the course of a couple days. It also prevents spread to other farms and reduces the safety risk for the workers doing the depopulating and cleaning up afterward. Depopulation is unquestionably the most effective way to respond to an outbreak in unvaccinated poultry.
But how dangerous are these birds virologically? The ostriches that didn’t get very sick may have cleared the infection and mounted immune responses. On the other hand, sometimes when animals don’t get obviously sick they don’t seroconvert (develop antibodies). If there are enough susceptible animals, it’s possible infection could be sustained silently through cryptic transmission, a couple ostriches at a time.
It’s hard to evaluate how much of a risk these birds actually present without testing them. And even then, if you PCR-tested both oral and cloacal swabs (combination urethra/anus/egg exit) you still wouldn’t be sure that these birds are truly negative because there are no standards to grant an exemption from culling, especially for a less-studied species of bird that we don’t know very much about. I doubt neighboring farms at risk of avian flu would be reassured by testing results generated by a caravan of poorly groomed, extremist grifters running molecular diagnostics out of UOF’s unfit-for-research facility, given the farm’s long and thoroughly documented history of abysmal biosecurity practices.
The Freedom Ostriches probably don’t present much of a risk in terms of avian flu emerging in humans. For one thing, there are a lot of wild birds and mammals throughout North America infected with H5N1. Huge herds of infected dairy cows in the US present a much more significant risk for zoonotic transmission than this mom and pop ostrich farm. For another, the Save Our Ostriches crowd constantly film ConvoyTok materials out of their pens and nobody seems to have contracted flu-like illness yet. These ostriches are probably a greater risk to their human defenders with their mean and disagreeable attitudes. They are capable of kicking hard enough to disembowel people, which none of the UOF birds have seen fit to do yet.
The Save Our Ostriches movement is anti-freedom
All that said, these ostriches should be culled for another reason: upholding the rule of law. As buffoonish as the ostrich Freedom Cybertruck Riders are, they stand for something that is more sinister than absurd. They actively undermine the authority of health officials to carry out their duties as federal law requires, jeopardizing trade and opening the door for others to block government regulators from doing their jobs. UOF has failed to abide by CFIA rules and have not made the case that they meet the criteria for exemption from depopulation. If the courts allow groundless ideology to supersede evidence-based policy for avian flu control, they elevate and encourage anti-government extremism and send the message that public health laws are optional. This prioritizes the political objectives of a few over the safety and well-being of the nation.
Take it from an American: treating anti-public health zealots as if they have a point will only allow them to continue endangering others in the name of “freedom.” If you want to see where that path leads, all you need to do is look at how Kennedy has systematically gutted American science, medicine, and emergency response capacity. The Save Our Ostrich movement has a right to free speech and expression, but they do not have a right to put the rest of the population at risk. If they prevail, it sets a dangerous precedent: that they can impose their ideologies on everyone else through bad faith combinations of bullying and libertarian whining about censorship. That is an attack on democracy and empowers fascist authoritarianism. CFIA must be able to carry out its mandate to protect animal health. If Canada wants to spare itself from America’s fate, those ostriches have to go.
You are a national treasure and I am so glad that you are at the U of S. Your posts are understandable, well written and sometimes scare the shit out of me. How you describe the trucker convoy and the Church of Bubbles (a new one for me) was excellent. Totally spot on about undermining the rule of law. So easy to do with far-reaching consequences that we are seeing in the US. Good for you tying this all together. An excellent morning read!
This is a very thorough and unusually direct critical description of the ostrich situation and their wing-nut advocates. One thing you did not include, Angie, was the USDA import rules, which would preclude their import without quarantine and documented disease-free status (assessed by US Dx labs).