Tensions are high at Universal Ostrich Farm in Edgewood, B.C., where police are now supporting Canadian Food Inspection Agency officials to execute a search warrant.
The farm says a convoy of police vehicles and waste disposal trucks is parked outside their property.
This comes after the CFIA applied for a search warrant and ordered the cull of 400 ostriches following an avian flu outbreak on the farm.
Protesters remain on the farm to oppose the cull.
On the weekend, right-wing American influencer Chris Sanders said in a Facebook video that he is offering a couple of his ranches, and he’d like to help move the ostriches to Oklahoma, Texas and South Dakota.
Sanders says he is calling on truck drivers to help him save the ostriches.
The CFIA has refused to release details or the timing of any operation.
It wasn’t the first time the farm was thrust into the global spotlight, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote a letter to the president of the CFIA in May, asking the farm to be spared from a planned cull.
Kennedy, the U.S. secretary for health and human services, says in the letter to Paul MacKinnon that there would be “significant value” in studying the ostriches’ immune response to avian flu.
The farm lost bids to stop the cull in Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal, and last week was denied another stay of the cull order while it prepared to apply for leave to go to the Supreme Court of Canada, an application that must be made by Oct. 3.
More to come.
— with files from The Canadian Press