It was mid-September by the time I turned off a rural highway near Edgewood, British Columbia, and onto the short dirt road to Universal Ostrich Farms. The morning was hot and, to the south, beyond a rustic gatehouse, I could see a sleepy protest camp where early risers were smoking the day’s first cigarettes among the scattered tents and RVs. To the north, behind tall wire fencing and quarantine tape, were several hundred ostriches. Caterpillar-browed and effusively eyelashed, they chased one another with the bent-legged gait known as “Groucho running.” Any time now, federal agents were expected to roll up and exterminate them all.
The camp still had the serenity of its mountain-valley surroundings. Only a few hundred people live in the Edgewood area; the entire region, called the Kootenays, is more than twice the size of Vermont but with a quarter of the population. The first person I met at the farm, a man acting as a gatekeeper, gave his name only as Atari. “I’m just an old hippie,” he said. Atari wore elephant-print pants and a purple wizard’s cloak, and kept handy a face mask emblazoned with the words what if love wins? Comfortably in middle age, Atari was a veteran of recent blockades against logging in old-growth rainforest; when I asked where he was on the political spectrum, he replied, “Invisible.”
But as he showed me around, Atari’s earth-warrior air felt not quite aligned with the camp’s broader and deeper tone of complaint. Placards on the paddocks announced ostriches lives matter and we have herd immunity, leave us alone. A sandwich board at the entrance to the long mess tent read i’d rather be free than safe, a message that was hard to connect with domesticated ostriches at all. It seemed like a lot of subtext for a place that, as one camper put it, isn’t even on the way to anywhere else.
The ostrich controversy had begun when hundreds of wild ducks descended on the farm in the fall of 2024. Shortly thereafter, an anonymous tipster informed the Canadian Food Inspection Agency that some of the farm’s four hundred or so ostriches were dying. CFIA inspectors collected swabs from two carcasses, and a lab promptly found a marker of H5N1 bird flu, a fast-spreading and often lethal disease that many virologists fear could spill over into our own species at pandemic scale. Forty-one minutes later, the CFIA issued—Orwell would appreciate the agency’s flair for euphemism—a Notice to Dispose. A death sentence for all the birds.
Most farms in Canada accept animal culls as a grim but necessary measure to protect their industries from epidemic disease and trade restrictions. The CFIA has, without inspiring notable public outcry, killed millions of birds over the past five years in its fight against H5N1. But Universal Ostrich Farms, a beak-to-tail-feathers operation that has sold everything from the animals’ meat to salves rendered from their fat, chose to challenge the order as unfair and unreasonable. The most obvious cri de coeur would be for the struggling family farm or animal welfare, but Karen Espersen and Dave Bilinski, the farm’s co-owners, made a surprising appeal to health science. Since the start of the pandemic, they claimed, UOF had been involved in medical research, working toward a “universal cure” for COVID-19 that did not involve vaccines. They also said that the ostriches that had managed to survive the bird-flu outbreak (at least sixty-nine had died), now had antibodies in their blood that could provide “an absolute cure, a natural cure” to this dread disease as well. Surely these rugged survivors should be kept alive and studied?
Under CFIA rules, the farmers had been given a chance to save their flock: they could prove, quickly and with rigor, that their birds had “rare and valuable genetics.” They did not do so. But if they had, the UOF’s other failings seemed certain to doom the flock. Justice Russel Zinn, who wrote the initial court decision in the case, noted that the farm’s owners had answered “no” to thirteen of twenty questions about their adherence to certain biosecurity protocols, when even one “no” would likely have guaranteed a cull. Zinn concluded that there was no basis for the farm’s claim of unfair treatment, handing the ostrich farmers their asses so decisively that they went on to argue, unsuccessfully, that their lawyer had provided “ineffective counsel.”
Around these cold ashes, a set of believers started to warm their hands. It was a movement with roots in 2022, when protesters opposed to Canada’s COVID-19 restrictions clogged the capital city, Ottawa, with thousands of cargo trucks. Donald Trump encouraged the truckers to make Washington their next stop, and American supporters donated some $6 million to the cause. Canada’s famously smug prime minister, Justin Trudeau, called the protesters a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views” and, in an act since ruled unconstitutional, sent in the police to break up the blockade by declaring a national emergency. For many Canadians, however, the “freedom convoy” is remembered as the death knell of pandemic strictures.
Triumphant, the crusaders began a search for other signs of despotic overreach, seeing adumbrations of Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum everywhere, from barriers intended to slow down neighborhood traffic to cutbacks to small-town train schedules. In Universal Ostrich Farms v. CFIA, they found the perfect martyr. Here was a federal agency threatening a “natural health” enterprise while sounding the alarm about another pandemic. A self-declared Ostrich Army began to grow, both online and in the protest camp at the farm. The owners proved to be capable public victims: Bilinski possessed a righteous indignation, Espersen invoked the power of prayer, and her daughter, Katie Pasitney, emerged as a talented influencer. They framed the standoff as a “spiritual war.”
By the summer of 2025, the New York billionaire John Catsimatidis was speaking out against the cull; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had written to the CFIA to offer the “full support and assistance” of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in long-term research on the ostriches; and Dr. Mehmet Oz, punning that “Canadians should stop putting their heads in the sand,” had offered to provide the flock a new forever home on his Florida ranch. “We found out what happened during the COVID pandemic, when the bureaucrats made all the decisions,” said Oz, by then overseeing his own large bureaucracy, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. A meme began making the rounds: a cartoon ostrich above the motto don’t tread on me.
As Atari wrapped up his tour, the day’s heat was chasing the Ostrich Army out of their beds to go and greet the reinforcements who were trickling in. After months of legal high jinks under a stay of execution, all that stood between the Universal Ostrich Farms flock and death was the possibility—slim, said experts—that Canada’s Supreme Court would agree to hear the case. That decision was expected any day, but so was the arrival of a CFIA “depopulation” team that might slaughter the birds in the meantime.
Shai Lacombe, a cheerful woman in a black maga cap with one A replaced with a red maple leaf, explained to me that, in the movement’s early days, the farm had attracted supporters with a wide range of perspectives, but many had since abandoned the cause. “A lot of people weren’t awake,” she said. Still, she felt there was a rich diversity of views in the camp: “virus-believers, non-virus-believers; flat-earthers, non-flat-earthers; God-believers, not-believers.” Pasitney herself said she had not been conspiracy-minded at first but had eventually come around. “How can you not even start to believe a bit of that?” she said. “This situation brings that out.”
Elsewhere on the farm, I heard one person claim, to approving nods, that planes were crop-dusting the protest with mind-control drugs. I listened as two thirtysomething ostrich defenders (outliers in a camp with the overall demographics of a Neil Young concert) discussed the COVID-19 vaccination campaign as a calculated “intelligence test” intended to identify vax refuseniks as a dangerous, Mensalike minority. I studied the face of one close confidant of the farmers, searching for any sign that she was bullshitting me, as she made the case that the CFIA ultimately would not kill the ostriches because members of the global Illuminati wanted to drink the birds’ antibody-rich blood, the same way they drink the blood of human babies: “They want the best of the best, and these are the best.” And so, when a camper brought up Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came”—the poem that lists the victims of rising Nazism, the one that begins,
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
I knew exactly how her story would end. “First the chickens, then the ostriches—what next?” she said.
Then they came for the ostriches
And I did not speak out
Because I was not an ostrich.
At the rear of the Ostrich Army camp, behind a gate and a fence, was the cottage where the farmers spent most of their time. There, among trees and flower gardens, they took media calls and held strategy sessions with chosen supporters. Inside, at a table off the kitchen, Pasitney and Espersen walked me through the claim that their ostriches were essential to medical science. The research involved two partners, they said, a Quebec-based company called Immune Biosolutions and a Japanese veterinary scientist named Yasuhiro Tsukamoto, who, even in an online “President’s Message” as head of a regional university in Kyoto, goes by the name Dr. Ostrich.
Immune Biosolutions, the farmers told me, had worked with their birds to produce ostrich eggs rich in COVID-19 antibodies, from which they were able to derive a potential cure for any COVID variant. But the research had ended abruptly—clear evidence, for many in the Ostrich Army, that Big Pharma had taken over Immune Biosolutions to keep natural cures for COVID and bird flu from reaching the public. Dr. Ostrich, Pasitney and Espersen said, planned to use UOF ostrich antibodies and other byproducts—some derived from slaughtered birds—in a quest to sell goods like cosmetics and medical masks with embedded COVID-19 antibodies. Espersen seemed most excited by Dr. Ostrich’s work on a pharmaceutical-free weight-loss treatment, which she said could make GLP-1s obsolete.
None of this holds much water. I spoke with current and former executives of Immune Biosolutions, each on the condition that their names would be withheld to protect them from the fury of ostrich defenders. Their work with UOF antibodies had yielded no published research or usable treatments, they said, and it had never advanced enough for anyone to claim, as Bilinski often did, that the ostriches had “the strongest antibodies in the world.” There is, after all, nothing special about having antibodies. We all develop antibodies after an illness, but they fade over time and new flu variants emerge, starting the cycle anew. 1 And as for Dr. Ostrich and his weight-loss supplement, even UOF’s own exuberant business plan acknowledges the slightness of the supporting research. The threatened flock certainly wasn’t essential to Tsukamoto, who told Canada’s public broadcaster, “An ostrich is an ostrich.” He could always find another supplier.
The farm provided the courts and CFIA with nothing that either institution recognized as serious science. The Ostrich Army, though, dismissed the courts as corrupt and, beginning in late January 2025, started to flood CFIA offices with hateful messages and threats. “We had never encountered a situation like this before,” said a senior agency executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity, again for reasons of personal safety. Employees who could be connected to the UOF case through court documents or other means were targeted with messages “indicating that they should receive the same treatment as we were proposing for the ostriches,” as the executive put it. CFIA offices hundreds of miles from the ostrich farm had feces smeared on their entranceways, walls were graffitied, vehicles vandalized. Two employees were put under police protection, one of whom was ultimately forced to relocate with their spouse and children. The agency’s public communications withered into unsigned statements recycling terms like “stamping-out policy” and “timely depopulation.” It hadn’t been a faceless bureaucracy, but it became one.
Now that CFIA euthanizers were finally preparing to come to the farm, all sides understood that they would do so with the protection of the national police force, anachronistically known as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Ostrich Army spoke of the impending incursion as the advent of jackboot autocracy, but plans to resist it seemed more equivocal. This much was clear: when the Mounties arrived, lookouts on the highway would radio a warning to the protest camp, where one long blast on a vehicle horn would signal that the hour of reckoning had come. The wait for it wore on everyone.
“Most people here haven’t slept more than four hours for forever,” said a woman who went by Julia del Rio, though she hinted that this might be a nom de guerre. We were gathered around a birch-log fire beneath a Milky Way that stood out from the night like a snowed-over road. Campers steadily picked out lights in the sky that they were certain were surveillance drones. Stare long enough at a twinkling star, and it will seem to move.
Suddenly, the pointing turned urgent. “Those are moving,” said a man who camped alone, away from the bush-party atmosphere that sometimes took hold after dark. “Drones! Those are drones!” Then everyone was running and shouting.
“Where the hell are our lasers?”
“What the hell is happening?”
“They are real! They are real!”
Someone located a multi-thousand-lumen flashlight and cast its god ray on the enemy. Above us were two helicopters, and as they loomed over the farm, one opened its own blazing white eye and swept the camp with it before both of the choppers cut sharply away. The intruders were promptly dubbed “the black helicopters,” though the darkness made it hard to say what color they were. Admittedly, it did seem plausible that the farm was being surveilled. “We need some firepower,” said the man who camped alone. “We need some fucking high-powered rifles in here.”2
This was only the first of a steady stream of nerve-jouncing incidents over the following days, including gunshots in the hills and endless false alarms about approaching police officers. I heard protestations against the “hate” Facebook group set up by Edgewood locals who opposed the Ostrich Army, and outrage that someone had plastered a sticker reading edgewood sniper club on one supporter’s van while he was shopping in town. I also saw campers wearing T-shirts with slogans in support of the Coutts Boys, two men sentenced to six years in prison for showing up at a protest against COVID-19 measures equipped with guns, ammunition, body armor, and a pipe bomb.
Many ostrich defenders had truly suffered from those measures—refusal to abide by public-health rules had cost some of them their jobs, homes, even access to their children. Others were drawn from rural Canada’s monied class, rolling up in luxury pickup trucks and RVs. As a crowd, they were united only at touchpoints, such as a shared sense of post-pandemic exclusion from the warm embrace of Canadian fellow feeling, disappointment that Trump had yet to say a word in defense of the threatened flock, and a lack of compunction about white nationalism. Often put forward bluntly, the latter could also impress in its refinement. One visiting musician, reading the room, replaced the words “Aryan twang” with “whiny old twang” in his rendition of the Canadian classic “Bobcaygeon,” turning the Tragically Hip’s quiet statement against fascism and racism into an anti-woke complaint.
Then, just ahead of first light on September 22, 2025, an RCMP convoy was spotted on the highway that isn’t on the way to anywhere else. At Universal Ostrich Farms, a horn blew long into the night.
The Mounties appeared first as a line of headlights winding through the last curves of the road. Everything was briefly silent, and then the valley filled with the white noise of rolling tires. More than forty vehicles streamed past the farmers’ fields. The Mountie-to-protester ratio was nearly one to two.
Furtive hands had been busy overnight, and the dirt track leading from the highway to the farm was now a hero’s journey of obstacles: cars, a forklift parked crosswise, felled trees, a campfire, a cable strung across the road. I paused at a propane tank dressed up to look like a homemade bomb. “It’s all optics!” said Pasitney, hurrying past in the predawn shadows. Winningly, Canadianly, the Ostrich Army had marked these hazards with do not enter tape and traffic cones; the fake bomb was accompanied by a sign reading explosive. The plan was simple: slow the police as much as possible to buy time for the farmers’ lawyer, who was pressing for a last-minute stay of execution while the Supreme Court considered whether to hear the case.
One of the men surveying the blockade was Jeff Gaudry. “We need a Hail Mary, just a Hail Mary,” he said. A conservative influencer who had been a regular at the farm for months, Gaudry had emerged as the voice linking the ostrich farm to a wider movement pitting personal autonomy against perceived government overreach. He had Canadian-boy-next-door looks and a knack for making his opinions sound like common sense. Not anti-vax, but anti-vaccine mandate. A proud Canadian, but who could fail to admire America’s “strong leadership”? He was hesitant to put any name to the crusade he had come to represent. “You could call it a movement of love,” he said.
But Gaudry was plainly intimidated as he walked the half mile of no-man’s-land between the farm and the headlights of the convoy. A phalanx of officers came forward to meet him at the first roadblock, a scattering of logs. Corporal Philip Atoui, an RCMP liaison, looked at the timber the way a disappointed parent looks at a living room littered with toys. “If we can get this cleaned up, that would be a great start.” Gaudry agreed that the protesters would dismantle this first barrier as “an olive branch.” “We’re going to walk. We’re not going to run,” Atoui replied, assuringly.
For the next forty minutes, the Mounties pressed steadily toward the farm, a small corps of protesters often helping to clear the way. The logs disappeared, the cable came down. Then the advance was interrupted by a hubbub down the road. By the time I reached the action, a small crowd at the campfire was rewatching what had happened in a video freshly posted on social media. In it, a masked figure dressed in black and carrying a jerrican walks away from a bungalow belonging to Lois Wood, the elderly neighbor suspected by the farmers of tipping off the CFIA about the disease outbreak in the first place. The masked figure then loops back, and a howling Wood appears in the frame. She follows the intruder, the two disappear behind a shrub, and then the person in black stalks away into the forest to the southeast.
An RCMP officer, returning from the scene of the trespassing, said he had smelled gas around the house and saw bruising around Wood’s eye from an alleged assault. “We’ll take a pause for the cause to sort this out,” he added. Mere minutes later, the crime seemed solved: the local detachment commander, Corporal Paul Britton, came back from the farm with a man in handcuffs. It was Tim Regan, a friendly home-renovations guy from London, Ontario; he was wearing his usual red-and-black mac, which made him look like a stock Canadian from a TV ad for Molson.
It seemed impossible that the person in the video could have been Regan. The intruder was last seen fleeing in a direction away from the farm. How had he made it back here so quickly? Why make a change of clothes worthy of Clark Kent only to admit to his crime at the earliest questioning? Regan had spent months as the farmers’ loyal dogsbody and, days earlier, had told me he would respect their request that protests remain nonviolent. A modern nation-state seems likely to keep close watch on people who plant fake bombs and talk pretty openly about the possible need for armed resistance, yet no one else seemed to wonder if Regan was a mole, the same way that I, alone, seemed to watch closely each time Pasitney cried for the cameras, certain that I never saw tears.3
By now, an RCMP team had advanced nearly to the gates of the farm. Only a few barriers still stood in the way, including the campfire. Atoui told the protesters that they needed to put it out. “Everyone’s coming down to take over down here,” he explained.
“Why don’t you guys put it out,” said one woman.
“Well, we didn’t start it,” said Atoui.
“I’m not sure you didn’t start it,” the woman retorted, and suddenly everyone was smiling. An officer sang the chorus to Billy Joel’s 1989 hit “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” The protesters stomped out the embers. At high noon, thirty police cars rolled in and parked along the length of road between the ostrich paddocks and the protest camp. With them came two CFIA officials in black uniforms.
For a moment, the crowd was strangely muted. Then Doug Shingleton, an Ostrich Army point man, urged them to face off against the RCMP. “We can do anything we want over here!” Shingleton called out. “Scream your heads off—anything!”
“Let me out!” shouted Jim Kerr, a peacocking influencer, as he grabbed and shook the fencing. Another man cried, “Just doing my job—that’s what they said at the Nuremberg Trials!” “You are doing the work of the devil!” screamed Gaudry, soldier in the movement of love. But the gates leading into the ostrich pens were now behind police lines. The CFIA had taken control of the farm.
The farmers negotiated a final feed of their flock the following morning, but as noon approached, it was clear they were dragging it out in the hope that their lawyer could delay the cull. As they fed the birds in a place so deep in the fields that they were almost out of sight, officers in white hazmat suits arrested Pasitney and Espersen for obstructing the CFIA. Seething supporters gathered near the pens’ main gate, hungry for confrontation, but men in camouflage and tactical vests whisked the two women away to a nearby staging area in a four-vehicle motorcade that slipped almost unnoticed out a side exit.
For hours, Ostrich Army sentries had been reporting the slow approach of flatbed semitrailers loaded with oversize straw bales. Now the trucks were parking in the farm’s north field while a forklift began stacking the golden blocks. As the first driver to deliver his cargo returned to the road, a cap pulled down over his face, his truck’s license plates and logos obscured with tape and cardboard, protesters descended on his vehicle like Mad Max raiders, beating on the cab’s windows and tearing away the wrappings to reveal the name of a small business for them to hunt online.
By nightfall, the bales had been arranged into a walled structure that the protesters dubbed the “kill pen.” This seemed like a reasonable theory. Ostriches roamed around it with what appeared to be watchful indifference—their species emerged near the dawn of avian evolution, and they give the impression that, at a genetic level, they have been through some stuff. At one point, an unknown trigger sent them all racing in one direction, exactly like birds on the wing, but on foot. On the roadside, the crowd wailed.
A little before 4 am, cloying herbal smoke choked me from my sleep. I crawled outside into the pall. Night’s narcotic thinking led me to conclude that some katabatic shift of winds had buried the valley in the wildfire smoke that yellows so many summers these days. But there were raised voices and crisscrossing flashlight beams in the distant fields, so I drove to the highway overlook to investigate. Flames were licking up the sides of the kill pen.
The cause of the fire seemed obvious: arson had been committed by a person or persons desperate to halt an extermination that they saw as a tipping point into a new dark age. Campers were beginning to gather; here or there a phone lit a face out of the night like a pilgrim in a tenebrist tableau. A woman’s voice spoke from the darkness. “It can’t have been one of us,” she said. “None of us would do something that causes the ostriches so much stress.”
Others seized on this reasoning, and the mythmaking quickly spiraled. With anti-cull sabotage ruled out, suspicion settled on the food-inspection agency. But why would the CFIA set its own ostrich pen on fire? To shroud the farm in smoke, of course. A literal smoke screen.
“They’ve started the cull!” someone shouted. “It’s happening right now!” A line of faces lit up as the group spread its latest story among one another and around the world.
This was the Ostrich Army way: every event called for interpretation, an attempt to see through to hidden endgames. “One thing with black magic,” one camper would later say to me, “is they tell you what they’re going to do before they do it.” And so, at first light, when firefighters had won the day and the smoke cleared to reveal the ostrich flock still standing, the sight didn’t lead to any reconsideration of the night’s theories of clandestine slaughter. The Army simply moved on, hoping to make better sense of the next move, or the one after that. The birds really could die this day.
The grim mood persisted even after Pasitney and Espersen reappeared in camp; the RCMP had released them on the condition that they not enter the ostrich pens. “Join us for one more prayer,” Pasitney said to the farm’s supporters. Sixty or so people formed a desultory circle in front of the birds or slumped on bleachers hung with a banner that read the world is watching. Dressed in black, Pasitney wiped her eyes. Beside her, Gaudry closed his. “Lord, in these moments where we don’t have much left, where we feel like every single one of our avenues has been exhausted, when we feel like we can’t rely on our system, when we can’t rely on our law, when we can’t rely on the things and the foundations that we truly thought we once could, it comes down to you,” he began. “Lord, today is the day for miracles.”
The congregation intoned their amen and broke into a loose, milling group. Moments later, murmurs, then cheers, rippled out from where Pasitney, Gaudry, and Espersen stood. “Miracles happen!” shouted Gaudry. The farm’s lawyer had just called Pasitney. The Supreme Court of Canada had stayed the cull order until the court decided whether to hear the appeal.
“And we just had a prayer,” exulted Espersen.
“We just finished a prayer!” said Pasitney.
“God is good!” said Espersen.
Gaudry turned to me. “We got it, brother,” he said, then dropped to his knees in the dirt and prayed. I found myself caught up in the joy, the awe. The second they finished the prayer! But already the thought tugged at me that the scales that had turned were not celestial, but legal, the workings of the same system condemned in the camp as corrupt and broken. And when another journalist told me that the whole scene had felt manufactured, that Pasitney must already have known the ostriches had been saved before she called her supporters to prayer, it instantly had the ring of truth. I later traced the timing of the court’s email to both sides’ lawyers, though. It really had been sent at the perfect moment.
For fifty years in the mid-twentieth century, a zealous Christian sect of Russian immigrants called the Sons of Freedom resisted assimilation from a base not far south of Edgewood. Accusing Canada’s government of tyranny, they answered pressure to conform by protesting nude and burning or dynamiting state-run schools and other buildings. “It was the same kind of government as the Canadian that crucified Christ 2000 years ago,” reads one Sons of Freedom manifesto. I could easily imagine the Ostrich Army screaming these words at the RCMP. The state has never known what to do with such people, and tends to respond to them with a hostility that only deepens their fears and beliefs, which then makes them even more alarming to the powers that be. Under persecution, the Sons of Freedom developed what the historians George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic called an “upside-down manner of interpretation,” finding secret or opposite meanings in what they saw or heard. They became susceptible to con artists who rallied to their cause. Such groups, said the historians, have always represented a question: How well has a democracy succeeded if it fails to reconcile its most extreme dissenters?
Those words seemed to hang heavily over the farm when, in early November, a quiet month after the ostriches received their last-minute reprieve, I returned to Edgewood. The Supreme Court had announced that it would rule two days later, on November 6, whether to hear the farm’s appeal. If it ruled in favor, the birds would live at least until the court determined their fate. If it ruled against, the stay of execution would be lifted and the ostriches put to death. The CFIA was mum on when or how that might happen.
The straw-bale pen was a golden castle now, with turrets on one side in the form of repurposed ice-fishing shelters. Their most obvious use was as sniper nests for shooting the ostriches. The protest camp, which had been reduced to a small corps of devotees, was growing by the hour as familiar faces trickled in for the moment of truth. I sat awhile in the warm cab of a pickup with Luca Robinson, a youthful forty-one-year-old who had taken a leave of absence from his job to stay full-time at the farm. He recalled first meeting “conspiracy people” among fellow resisters to COVID-19 strictures. “They sounded so far out to lunch when I first got involved,” he said, but he came to find them convincing. He remembered how passersby called them crazy for carrying signs claiming that the disease had a 99.98 percent survival rate; the official number turned out to be nearly that high. He learned about a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation “futurecasting” scenario called “Lock Step” that showed how, in a pandemic, world governments could achieve autocracy through initial steps like mandatory masking. Robinson felt as though he had watched that happen.4
Now, looking at this “overdone paramilitary operation with hundreds of police,” he, too, was inclined to believe that the birds held natural cures for COVID-19 and bird flu. And while some in the Ostrich Army thought that the CFIA was already killing birds, boiling them down, hydro-vacuuming their remains into shipping containers, and smuggling them off-site, Robinson put more credence in the claim of an American medium who, after projecting her consciousness through the astral plane, had called the farm to say she had seen the ostriches being delivered alive to the United States. Why would Big Pharma kill birds worth billions of dollars when there was profit to be had? “This could be like a jewelry heist, in a sense,” Robinson said. Raised a Jehovah’s Witness, he believed that Satanists and Luciferians had gained positions of power in society and saw the rest of us as “less than,” so if the cull went ahead and the CFIA started killing ostriches, Robinson was willing to risk arrest trying to stop them. “What do you have to lose?” he asked. “Like, how could you not get arrested?”
The CFIA had its own explanation for the police-state atmosphere at the farm. It was, in effect, owing to the presence of people like Robinson: people who saw in a livestock cull at a family farm the terrible march toward dictatorship and genocide and who might resist it with desperate fury. “There were significant risks identified that made us want to be as prudent as possible,” my CFIA contact told me. The agency declined to be more specific, but the words brought to mind a man at the camp who had told me, “Someone’s getting shot before all this is done. Somebody’s going to get bumped.” When I asked which side he thought would take a bullet, he said the CFIA.
How high the stakes in Edgewood had become! Good versus evil, freedom versus the end of all that. Yet as the culling hour neared, a more earthly concern came into relief: the CFIA could be about to kill more than three hundred oddly charismatic flightless birds, none of them sick with avian influenza.
Could the flock still carry the disease after an outbreak ten months earlier? “That original one, no. I don’t think you’re going to find someone who’s an actual scientist who says that,” said Aliza Simeone, a professor of clinical infectious diseases and biosecurity at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine. The CFIA executive who spoke to me explained that ostriches that have survived bird flu can become reinfected, through another visit by sick wild ducks, for example, and then spread the virus without showing symptoms. But this same fact can be used to argue for or against a cull. Over the past quarter century, the powerful, highly contagious form of avian influenza that hit Universal Ostrich Farms has spread from poultry to wild bird populations around the globe. Even the World Organization for Animal Health, whose guidelines the CFIA follows, is reconsidering how effective culls are in halting bird-flu outbreaks in a world where the next wild duck to land at a farm could trigger another one. Already, in South Africa, an ostrich flock that survives bird flu would only be quarantined and rigorously tested for reinfection, not slaughtered. But the CFIA saw no point in testing. Stamping out the disease among livestock is still the standard response around the world, so stamping out it would be.
On decision day, sleet was streaming down, and at 6:45 am, the Supreme Court of Canada posted its latest batch of decisions: This time, there would be no miracle. The court wouldn’t hear the case; the stay of execution was lifted.
Cars and people gradually began to line the highway overlook above the straw-bale castle. We watched tiny figures atop the nearest wall set up lights facing the onlookers. Then four people in white PPE—the camp had dubbed them “marshmallows”—herded the ostriches into a holding area outside the pen. It took a long time, and through it all the crowd raged. They wished cancer upon the marshmallows. They expressed hopes that the marshmallows would be disemboweled. They laid curses upon the marshmallows, and their children, and their grandchildren. Sometime in the midafternoon, I overheard a credible suspect acknowledge involvement in the attempted burning of the kill pen. So it had been the farm’s supporters! Of course it had been. “The fire couldn’t get enough air,” the suspect said, ruing the fact that they hadn’t thought to cut the baling twine to loosen the straw.
Eventually, only one bird was still free-ranging, and his mistrust of the marshmallows was absolute. They waved pool noodles at him, and a blue tarp, but again and again he ran from the gate that led to the castle. Finally, this last rebel followed the rest of his kind, and with that, reality seemed to break through. “Pretty birds, pretty birds!” called out Pasitney, now definitely crying. “We need thousands here, and nobody’s fucking coming!” shouted Shingleton. Trump had not intervened. The world was not watching, but the ostriches were, their heads bobbing above the pen like periscopes. The joke came to me, darkly: the birds were unflappable.
“What do you do when tyranny walks in the front door?” asked a woman wearing a bucket hat. “Do you ask it politely to leave?” Masked men carried what looked like gun cases into the pen and entered the castle’s turrets. No one tried to stop them. There would be no arrests.
At twilight, the mountains were etched against a dim horizon, the kill pen below like a torchlit encampment. Then night fell, and the scene was hidden from view either by darkness or the blinding lights on the castle walls. Just after 6 pm, gunshots rang out in the uncanny valley—the square kra-kow of rifle fire. The killings had begun, and the few protesters still waiting in the cold rain howled, their worst nightmares finally made real.