by
Pam Killeen
November 10, 2025
Biosecurity and Betrayal
In late summer 2025, the standoff at Universal Ostrich Farms (UOF) in Edgewood, British Columbia, reached a breaking point. An earlier appeal to stop the government-ordered cull had already been denied. Determined to save the flock, Katie Pasitney, her family, and supporters formed a human shield around the pastures, standing between the ostriches and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA).
Refusing to surrender, Katie and the farm’s lawyer filed one final appeal to defer the slaughter. As word spread, supporters multiplied. Across Canada and beyond, people waited, hoping reason would prevail.
Even with the public outcry, the CFIA pressed forward. Federal officials entered the property under court authority, moving equipment into the fields and constructing a corral of hay bales to contain the birds once the final order came down. It was the prelude to devastation.
On November 6, 2025, hours after the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the appeal, the CFIA began the cull using a hired marksman. By then, the ostriches were already trapped inside the hay-bale enclosure. The shooting began in daylight and continued after dark as floodlights illuminated the fields.
By the end, 314 healthy ostriches were dead. The CFIA later confirmed that a “professional marksman” carried out the operation. Independent photographers released images of birds collapsed in the mud—grisly evidence of state-sanctioned brutality the mainstream press refused to show.
Katie, daughter of co-owner Karen Espersen, had raised the flock from hatchlings. Her calm, determined voice became the conscience of Canadians who saw the cull for what it was: a government-sanctioned massacre disguised as disease control. “I’m calling for change for other farmers,” she said, demanding an end to Canada’s destructive “stamping-out” policy that values paperwork over life.
One headline called the site “ground zero for change.” The phrase was apt. Real change will not come from bureaucrats or corporate media, but from Canadians who still believe food should come from small farms, not global supply chains. The killing in Edgewood was not an act of protection. It was an act of power.
The Machinery of Control
The CFIA did not act alone. It was enforcing a policy born of international agreements, trade priorities, and global governance models that now shape national agriculture. At the center of this system is One Health—marketed as a holistic framework to “unite human, animal, and environmental health.”
On paper, One Health promotes cross-disciplinary cooperation to prevent disease and manage ecological risk. In practice, it operates as a top-down coordination system administered by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH, formerly OIE), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). These agencies have built global standards for biosecurity, livestock monitoring, and disease reporting that nations are expected to adopt in the name of compliance and trade access.
Under this structure, disease control merges with economic management. National policies become aligned with export demands rather than local realities. A small family farm in rural British Columbia can be treated as a potential biothreat, while industrial poultry complexes cramming tens of thousands of birds into barns are labeled “controlled environments.”
Common sense flips. Healthy outdoor flocks are destroyed in the name of safety, while factory systems that breed pathogens remain untouched because they serve vertically integrated corporate supply chains. Each regulatory action strengthens those networks.
Vertical integration means one conglomerate controls every stage—from feed mills and hatcheries to slaughterhouses and supermarket shelves. Once independent farms are driven out, competition disappears. Land need not be seized by force; regulation drives owners into bankruptcy.
The CFIA calls this “harmonization,” a term that sounds technical but means submission. National agencies quietly align their rules with international benchmarks to preserve “disease-free” status and protect export quotas. The objective is not animal welfare or food safety—it is uninterrupted trade. A single reported infection, even on a small farm, can jeopardize billion-dollar markets. The reflexive response: eradicate the flock, prove compliance, restore certification.
When the CFIA wipes out an independent farm, the production gap is instantly filled by corporate facilities already wired into global systems. Food no longer belongs to the people who grow it but to the financial structures that manage it. Each outbreak justifies more surveillance, more regulation, and more consolidation—sold to the public as progress.
Universal Ostrich Farms became the perfect case study. Its ostriches were not raised for food but for research—egg yolks studied for antibodies with potential medical use. Yet CFIA policy treated the flock no differently from industrial poultry, applying a rigid “stamping-out” order meant for export-oriented operations. Intent and context no longer matter. Once an agency declares infection, individuality disappears. The farm becomes a data point. Living animals become liabilities.
As agriculture is digitized, trust is replaced by surveillance. Electronic tags, sensors, and algorithmic alerts feed centralized databases that determine who may produce and when. It is marketed as transparency. In truth, it is permission-based food—a system that transforms nourishment into compliance.
This is the architecture of global control: owning the right to produce becomes as powerful as owning the food itself. Under One Health, governments serve the agendas of trade and biosecurity rather than the citizens who depend on them.
The Language of Safety
In every age of deceit, the first weapon is language. Words once meant to protect now conceal destruction. “Biosecurity.” “Public safety.” “Disease prevention.” Each sounds scientific and reassuring, yet together they form a lexicon of control.
When the CFIA ordered the killing of 314 ostriches, it did not say shoot or slaughter. It said depopulation. Officials claimed they were “safeguarding Canada’s poultry industry.” News outlets echoed the sanitized phrasing, drained of humanity. What happened in Edgewood was not a technical procedure. It was the extermination of a thriving flock under bureaucratic anesthesia.
“Depopulation” hides horror behind neutral vocabulary. “Containment” replaces compassion. “Compliance” replaces conscience. This linguistic sleight of hand numbs the public to ask no questions. If this were truly about health, why destroy what had already recovered?
The CFIA’s own records show that 69 ostriches died in December and January, but more than 300 survived—proof of natural resistance. Yet the agency demanded their destruction to prove no trace of the virus remained. In the name of health, it erased the evidence that health existed.
That is the system’s absurdity: it kills recovery to display control. A living, resistant flock would have been a scientific success story. To bureaucracy, it was a threat—a reminder that nature can heal without their permission.
Meanwhile, the real breeding grounds of infection—industrial barns, manure lagoons, and antibiotic runoff—remain untouched. These vertically integrated operations are shielded by the same regulators who punish small pasture-based farms. The public is told such complexes are “biosecure.” In reality, they are incubators for disease, protected by semantics and lobbying power.
This is how global food control advances—not through open tyranny but through linguistic manipulation. Killing is called “protection.” Consolidation is rebranded as “efficiency.” Change the language, and you change what people will tolerate.
Katie Pasitney refuses that distortion. She calls it what it is—slaughter—and in doing so forces Canadians to confront what is being done in their name.
The Face of Resistance
Bureaucracy did what decency should have stopped. It turned compassion into compliance and killing into procedure.
At the center stands Katie, now a voice for families across Canada who have watched government power crush small farming. She does not ask for sympathy but for accountability.
Her questions are simple but devastating: Why destroy healthy animals that survived infection? Why call the killing of resilience public health? Why do family farms bear the burden of “biosecurity” while industrial facilities—the true sources of disease—keep expanding?
This struggle is not about one farm. It is about who controls food in Canada—the people who grow it or the bureaucracies and corporations that regulate it for profit. Katie’s stand defends something elemental: the right to conscience, to reason, and to dignity in a system that punishes all three.
What Canadians Must Do Now
What happened at Universal Ostrich Farms should alarm every citizen who believes this country still belongs to its people. The CFIA called it biosecurity. The press called it protocol. History will call it a warning.
The killing of 314 ostriches was not about health. It was about control—over animals, over farmers, over food. When the power to destroy replaces the duty to protect, a nation no longer has a food system. It has a food regime.
That regime will not reform itself. It ends only when Canadians end it.
Here’s where to start:
- Buy from small farms. Support local producers who know their land, their animals, and their communities.
- Keep your dollars local. Every purchase from a family farm is a vote for independence.
- Reject doublespeak. Don’t accept “biosecurity” as a pretext for cruelty or “efficiency” as a reason to erase community.
- Speak up. Defend farmers like Katie—if their voices are silenced, yours will be next.
- Demand accountability. Insist that policy serve citizens and food sovereignty, not export quotas and corporate compliance.
This is about sovereignty itself—the difference between food as nourishment and food as leverage, between a nation that feeds itself and one that feeds from the hand that holds its leash.
Let Edgewood stand for something greater. Let it be ground zero for renewal—the kind that grows from soil, conscience, and courage. If Canadians act now, this story can still end where it began: with life, not loss.
Pam Killeen is a health coach, podcaster, and co-author of the New York Times bestselling book The Great Bird Flu Hoax (2006). She writes and speaks extensively on health, nutrition, and systemic corruption in science and public policy.
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