As darkness descended, a grim scene unfolded behind a curtain of hay bales, deliberately positioned to obscure the view of the impending operation. Nearby roads were cordoned off, ensuring the execution site remained hidden from public sight.

In stark contrast, hundreds of protesters gathered at a distance, engaging in collective prayers and holding vigil for those condemned. Their presence, though distant, was charged with tension and despair.

Among them, a mourner, overcome with grief, clung to the enclosure’s fence, pleading desperately for the events to halt, her cries echoing in the night air: “Make it stop.”

In a swift and chilling move, authorities extinguished the lights. Marksmen, equipped with night-vision goggles, took their positions and unleashed a barrage of gunfire from high-powered rifles. The mournful cries of the protesters were soon overwhelmed by the deafening sound of shots.

When silence finally returned, it revealed a tragic aftermath: 314 lives lost, their bodies strewn across the execution field. As dawn broke, a crew clad in Hazmat suits arrived to methodically cover the deceased with tarpaulins, preparing them for transport to a mass burial site at a landfill.

This grim event unfolded mere hours after the Supreme Court of Canada declined to intervene against the execution orders, sealing the fate of those who perished.

The condemned were ostriches – with names like Lulu, Priscilla and Q-Tip and distinct personalities to match. And their demise last week on a remote farm in British Columbia brought to an end an extraordinary months-long standoff between the birds’ defenders and federal officials.

Since December last year this ostrich saga has unfolded like the plot of a conspiracy thriller, after cases of avian flu were first detected in the flock. 

The killers left 314 ostriches dead, littered across the holding pen. In the quiet of the morning, a team in Hazmat suits arrived on the scene. The bodies were covered in tarpaulin before being carted off to a mass burial at a landfill site

Bizarre claims have swirled around these impressive creatures, including theories that government drones have been executing the birds with lasers and that the pharmaceutical industry is engaged in a cynical plot to stamp out a revolutionary ostrich-based scientific breakthrough.

The controversy, which has allegedly caused Right-wing radicals defending the birds to issue death threats and carry out arson, has drawn even the upper levels of the Trump administration into the bitter war over their fate.

Washington health officials have clashed with their Canadian counterparts after the controversial US Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, joined the campaign to save the animals from what he sees as oppressive, vaccine-crazed federal bureaucrats.

What has been dubbed the ‘Great Canadian Ostrich Standoff’ has echoes of other recent animal-cause celebres, like Geronimo the alpaca and Peanut the squirrel, who’ve been championed by anti-government activists intent on exposing them as victims of over-bearing and cruel officialdom.

Geronimo, who lived in Gloucestershire, was put down after several court battles in 2021 in line with the UK government’s policy of euthanising any animal with bovine tuberculosis. (His owner insists to this day he did not have the disease.)

Peanut was a tame grey squirrel who was euthanised last year in accordance with New York state laws against keeping the species as pets – appalling his legions of fans on social media.

But neither animal caused anything like the furore aroused by the flightless inhabitants of Universal Ostrich Farm in Edgewood, a village in the shadow of the Rockies.

Karen Espersen and her business partner, Dave Bilinski, had been rearing ostriches on their 58-acre farm for 30 years, initially selling their meat, hides and feathers as well as making a moisturiser out of melted ostrich fat.

The condemned were ostriches – with names like Lulu, Priscilla and Q-Tip and distinct personalities to match. And their demise last week on a remote farm in British Columbia brought to an end an extraordinary months-long standoff between the birds’ defenders and federal officials

Then, last December, their animals – the world’s biggest birds – started becoming ill and dying. Locals could see ravens picking over some of the 20 carcasses and alerted the authorities. Another 50 or so of the ostriches would later die of the virus.

After ascertaining the animals were being kept in conditions – such as sharing the same pond water as wild ducks – that put them at high risk of bird flu, experts in Hazmat suits from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) came to analyse the dead bodies.

They tested positive for H5N1, an influenza virus that has killed millions of poultry birds since 2024. This week, officials warned of a new outbreak in the UK after dead swans were found near Bristol.

The virus can spread to myriad mammal species and has killed at least one person in Louisiana, and infected 70 more in North America, including a teenage Canadian girl last year who nearly died.

The CFIA was adamant that under international rules to stop the spread of avian flu, the ostriches had to be culled immediately. It described it as the ‘most appropriate and humane option’.

However, Karen and Dave vehemently resisted. They’d become emotionally attached to many of the flock, some of whom they’d had for more than 34 years. They kept birds from both species, the Common and Somali ostrich, which can live up to 60 years in captivity and are technically known in a group as a ‘wobble’.

However, Karen and Dave raised rather more substantial reasons for being granted an exemption from the cull. They argued that those ostriches which survived the influenza outbreak had developed herd immunity to H5N1 and that their eggs would hold bird flu antibodies that could wipe out the epidemic entirely.

In fact, the pair had been working with a respected Japanese scientist, Yasuhiro Tsukamoto, who believes that ostriches, which have a powerful immune system, potentially hold the key to a huge breakthrough in biomedicine that fights not only bird flu but cholera, Covid and even obesity.

Executed: Aftermath of the cull as owner Karen Espersen and daughter Katie Pasitney, mourning their animals

CFIA officials were unimpressed, however, pointing out there was no evidence that ostrich antibodies protect other animals and insisting the order to cull the entire flock be carried out by February 1 this year.

The farmers fought on. Espersen’s daughter, Katie Pasitney, set up a social media campaign pleading for help to save the birds she called her ‘big, beautiful babies’. 

Inevitably, many people answered the call – but they were hardly just sentimental animal lovers. Many Canadians – particularly on the Right – have complained for years about a federal government they say is oppressive and authoritarian.

During the pandemic, Canada was rocked by the so-called ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests and blockades – originally a campaign against vaccine mandates for cross-border lorry drivers but rapidly becoming a general attack on jabs and other Covid restrictions.

The Freedom Convoy’s organiser, Tamara Lich, latterly became a fervent supporter of the Universal Ostrich Farms and organised benefit concerts for the birds. By the end of January, some of these small-government protest veterans had arrived at the farm and decided to stay.

Determined to save the ostriches while simultaneously putting two fingers up to federal overreach and public health bullying, they set up camp across the road from the ostrich pens, their numbers at any one time rising to 200. One of them was so committed to the cause he walked around in a feathered, full-body ostrich suit.

Farm spokesman Katie Pasitney became a Right-wing media star, sharing platforms with anti-vaxxers and giving endless interviews from a makeshift media centre just yards from her precious birds.

Both Espersen and her partner became infected by bird flu but insisted they didn’t notice any symptoms. Meanwhile, the family had brought their case to court and won a stay of execution until they finished their appeal.

The farm called on the CFIA to revisit them and test the other animals. This sounded reasonable, but the agency insisted it wasn’t coming back given the threats on the phone and by email from the ostrich defenders and the supposed dangers posed by the birds themselves (they can weigh up to 300lb and run at speeds of more than 40mph).

Visiting animal inspectors weren’t the only ones in danger. One morning in late March, the farmers said they found one of the ostriches in a pool of blood, shot dead just below the ear.

The victim, named Sarah, had been the poster bird of Espersen’s Facebook campaign. ‘A sniper’s bullet ended her life but not her story,’ one online supporter wrote.

The farm was quickly transformed into a fortress, with trip wires set up around the ostrich pens and connected to ‘bear bangers’ to scare away intruders.

Volunteers patrolled with walkie-talkies while Espersen and Bilinski started sleeping in the pens with their animals.

From their social media posts, the ostrich defenders sounded increasingly conspiratorial with some of them claiming to see government drones flying overhead at night – while Karen also blamed federal interference when their website inexplicably crashed.

Two months after the first shooting, another ostrich was killed. This time Espersen and encampment occupants insisted they’d not only heard a drone flying overhead in the early morning but had seen an ‘Army-sized’ object as big as the bonnet of a car flying above them.

This second ostrich was apparently struck down by a shot that travelled 18 inches down its neck from the top of its head. Nobody had heard a gunshot and Bilinski suggested it had been killed by a laser beam.

As the odd happenings at Universal Ostrich Farm flooded social media, they were picked up south of the border by John Catsimatidis, a billionaire New York supermarket magnate and Republican radio show presenter.

In late April, he had Kennedy Jr on his show and mentioned the ostriches. Catsimatidis presented the story as a tale of a pioneering ‘natural healing process’ being thwarted by ruthless ‘Big Pharma’ – knowing it was just the sort of scenario that fixates Kennedy, a vaccine sceptic who has vowed to ‘Make America Healthy Again’ by more natural means.

He’d already called for the US and Canada to stop culling H5N1-infected chickens and, having himself kept an emu as a pet at his California home, could have had a soft spot for the large, flightless birds.

Kennedy told Catsimatidis he was ‘horrified by the idea that they’re going to kill these animals’. The ostriches had gone from being a local, to a national, to an international issue.

In late May, Katie Pasitney was phoned out of the blue by Kennedy and Catsimatidis to announce that they had written to the Canadian government to urge it to reconsider the culling.

Yet another senior health official in the Trump administration, TV medical expert Dr Mehmet Oz, also got in touch with the farm’s owners to say he’d offered to fly the ostriches to safety at his Florida ranch but his hands had been tied by the cull order.

Catsimatidis said he had even mentioned the ostriches to President Donald Trump – who has a fractious relationship with liberal Canadian prime minister Mark Carney. The latter has refused to comment and he ignored a written request from Kennedy, Oz and Catsimatidis in July offering ‘to stand with you in a joint public statement that highlights cross-border compassion and thoughtful decision making’.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere in Edgewood was getting ever nastier as the farmers and their friends became ever more convinced by those – often anti-vaxxers – who claimed they were the victims of a conspiracy involving the Canadian government, the pharmaceutical industry and even the United Nations.

Many of the farm’s neighbours felt intimidated by its owners and their supporters. They claimed protesters had posted the names, addresses and pictures of CFIA officials and police officers online, and threatened local businesses.

Neighbour Lois Wood, a 72-year-old widow and volunteer firefighter, said she was relentlessly harassed after the ostrich farmers blamed her (wrongly, she insists) for alerting the authorities that the birds were dying.

Another close neighbour, a local rancher, said it was ridiculous to believe any sniper would shoot an ostrich in its head, which is so small, when its body is so big. He claimed the farmers might have killed the birds themselves.

One morning in late September, a 40-vehicle police convoy was spotted by lookouts heading towards the farm as law enforcement drones circled overhead and the electricity was suddenly cut off.

Protesters brandishing placards and walkie talkies leapt into action, some of them lying in the road to block their progress although they and their comrades didn’t stop police occupying the farm. Someone claimed they’d placed a bomb on the property.

Espersen and Bilinski were arrested and taken away in handcuffs – although they were soon allowed to return to their farm. According to Lois Wood, shortly before the police convoy arrived, one of the ostrich defenders – who’d told friends he intended to go to prison over the protest – turned up with a can of petrol and poured it over the front of her trailer home.

She only managed to stop him setting it alight because she’d come outside to feed her cats. They fought and he ran off after punching her in the face.

Under CFIA rules, the farmers are no longer eligible for any compensation (which could have been $3,000 for each culled ostrich).

The pair also owe thousands of dollars to the government in fines and legal expenses, although Catsimatidis said he’d paid $50,000 of their court costs.

On the night the rest of her wobble were killed, Karen reportedly wrote on Facebook: ‘Rest in peace my feathered friends. This is a sad day for Canada.’ Her daughter Katie said Espersen ‘lost everything in one night of gunfire’.

Some of their critics have added insult to injury by dismissing the intense furore over their doomed wobble as truly ‘bird-brained’.