TORONTO — What do U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., celebrity physician Mehmet Oz and some Canadian animal lovers have in common?

They all want to save a flock of 400 ostriches on a British Columbia farm.

But there’s a catch. The birds were in contact with a deadly virus: H5N1, a type of bird flu.

Canada ordered the birds to be culled after the bird flu spread through Universal Ostrich Farms in Edgewood, British Columbia, a town in the province’s interior, north of Washington state.

The plight of the wobble — a term sometimes used to describe a group of ostriches — has divided Canadians, but the birds have won allies across the border, namely top officials in the Trump administration.

Kennedy and Oz Intervene in Canadian Bird Flu Crisis

Kennedy last week urged Canadian authorities not to kill the ostriches but to do further testing to try to better understand the virus.

“We believe significant scientific knowledge may be garnered from following the ostriches in a controlled environment,” Kennedy said in a letter to the head of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which ordered the culling.

Oz, who oversees Medicare and Medicaid for the Trump administration, offered to relocate the doomed birds to his 900-acre ranch in Florida.

John Catsimatidis, a billionaire Republican businessperson who owns a New York City radio station, made a plea to save the birds on his radio program, demanding “truth, justice and the American way for the ostriches up in British Columbia.”

But most veterinarians agree that keeping birds alive that may still have active infections and could spread the virus to others is a threat to public health.

An outbreak of the virus in the United States has killed millions of birds, spread to cattle farms and infected dozens of people since 2024, one of whom died.

But a national campaign against the bird virus has been undermined by the political upheaval in Washington, which has led to funding cuts and the dismissals of scientists to detect the virus’s spread.

British Columbia Farm Becomes Center of International Controversy

Canada’s outbreak has been most prevalent in British Columbia, where the bird flu has killed 8.7 million birds since 2022 — more than half of the national total.

In December, a young ostrich at Universal Ostrich Farms fell ill with symptoms that looked like pneumonia. But testing revealed it was the H5N1 virus, and just over a month later, 69 of the 468 ostriches on the farm had died.

Tests by officials from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency confirmed a few of the birds had died of the same virus.

The agency ordered the farm’s owners, Karen Espersen and Dave Bilinski, to eradicate the surviving birds, but they argued that the animals should be kept alive to test their antibodies in order to potentially develop treatments for the virus.

The couple lost a legal battle in federal court to keep the birds alive.

“When they issue an order to euthanize all of our healthy ostriches,” it “crossed the total moral line,” Katie Pasitney, Espersen’s daughter, said in an interview.

Shayan Sharif, a professor of immunology at the Ontario Veterinary College who specializes in bird flu, said, however, that the condemned ostriches were of limited scientific value because there had already been similar studies in other parts of the world.

Still, he added, “I know that those animals are near and dear to a lot of people, especially their owners.”

Family Fights to Save Three-Decade Legacy

Pasitney, 43, grew up on the 65-acre farm, which has been raising ostriches for 30 years, at first for meat and oil derived from the bird’s liver. More recently, she said, the farm has switched its focus to research, partnering with scientists to study the birds and their immune systems.

Despite the potential presence of the virus, protesters have descended on the farm, which is under quarantine, holding news conferences and filming visits by food safety inspectors dressed in white coveralls and masks.

Canadian officials have not given Pasitney a date for the cull, she said. In Canada, birds that need to be euthanized are typically put down using carbon dioxide gas.

“We have a duty to protect Canadians from the serious potential risks that avian influenza presents to our people and our economy,” the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said in statement.

People opposed to the cull are using walkie-talkies to surveil the road leading to the farm for any signs of “a dumpster and a convoy of vehicles coming out here to kill our healthy animals,” Pasitney said.

Pasitney said she was moved by the support of Trump officials, and by a special guest who visited the farm, a 13-year-old girl. The girl’s mother identified her as the teenager who contracted the first human case of bird flu in Canada, which was detected in November, and who wanted the birds to live.

“They’re worth way more alive than they are dead because they have natural immunity,” Pasitney said of the remaining birds, but noted that a replacement flock of younger birds would be more susceptible to catch the bird flu.

She also said that exporting the flock was moot: The same agency demanding the bird cull would have to sign off on releasing the ostriches, and the family prefers to keep them on the farm.

For his part, Oz told The New York Post that the ostrich farm presented an opportunity for researchers to study herd immunity of the birds by keeping them alive.

“The Canadians should stop putting their heads in the sand,” he said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Vjosa Isai/Anna Rose Layden
c. 2025 The New York Times Company