Tensions are high at Universal Ostrich Farm in Edgewood, B.C., where police are 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.
Staff Sgt. Kris Clark, senior media relations officer for the BC RCMP, told Global News that they were asked by CFIA officers to join them in executing a warrant on the farm.
“Based on what the CFIA needs to do, based on what their business entails, we want to make sure that there are no people on the property that are subject to the search warrant, just like any other search warrant, when we secure a home for a search warrant, we remove all the people within.”
Clark said there are three parcels of land that are subject to the search warrant and where the supporters are located is not part of the search warrant.
He would not provide the number of RCMP officers that are at the farm on Monday but he said they include the police liaison team and officers who specialize in policing critical events or large events throughout B.C.
“I think it’s clear to point out that the representative for the farm has been very clear that she doesn’t want any violence, that she doesn’t want anybody hurt,” Clark added.
“And so there has been some rhetoric online that we certainly have seen some threats, but we haven’t seen any of that today, and we don’t anticipate that. We continue to use a measured approach, which starts with communication. We’ll take the time necessary to execute the search warrant safely for all involved.”
“Well, essentially the liaison officers implied to me that I would be able to accept the warrants on behalf of the family, then present the warrants to the family and then obviously we would be able to send them to the lawyer,” Jeffrey Gaudry, a social media influencer who is at the farm, told Global News.
“The CFIA agent, when it came down to presenting the order, gave a different scenario, saying he legally can’t present me with the warrant, technically, I am not an owner, I’m not technically on paper represented of the farm.”
The CFIA has refused to release details or the timing of any operation.
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.
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.
— with files from The Canadian Press