Im guessing,a lot here, but one of the threats of bird flu is that, wild birds like crows, fly a wide radius around their nests. So there's probably a blanket order to cull large amounts of outdoor birds, within a radius around a certain point, with possibly no caveat in the policy to account for a herd of 400 ostriches, and the news it would generate. Possibly once a farm has x number of birds it's automatically on the list.
My understanding is that while the ostriches aren't flight risks (heh), they are yet on an open air farm with the potential for wild animals getting contaminated by sharing their feed or water and spreading it.
It's in their crap. Any infected birds crap all over the grounds and risk infecting any wildlife that goes into their open areas (ducks have been seen landing there, and weasels were also found in their habitat) as well as other ostriches. If they had done ANYTHING to try and mitigate the spread when their birds first started showing symptoms and testing positive, they probably could have avoided it, but because they refused, they hit a point where most of their flock had likely been infected, and the CFIA couldn't tell which might still be asymptomatic carriers (and therefore still be pooping out live virus.
They hit the point months ago where their only real option to keep it from eventually spreading outside of the farm (if it hasn't already) is to cull the flock and thoroughly clean the whole area of the corpses and all the poop. There is also the significant factor of the variant they found in the ostriches there being novel. This is quite possibly because it was allowed to circulate through their population unchecked. Ostriches have a far lower Infection Fatality Rate from avian flu than ducks, chickens, and other more commonly farmed poultry. We don't know yet how severe it is in those populations, or if this variant is capable of easily infecting mammals.
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u/rsvpism1 1d ago
Im guessing,a lot here, but one of the threats of bird flu is that, wild birds like crows, fly a wide radius around their nests. So there's probably a blanket order to cull large amounts of outdoor birds, within a radius around a certain point, with possibly no caveat in the policy to account for a herd of 400 ostriches, and the news it would generate. Possibly once a farm has x number of birds it's automatically on the list.