Common ostrich. (Cropped and reduced, Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0)
All during the COVID-19 pandemic I sat and mocked the morons who were demonstrating in the streets against lock-downs and various other methods to control the population to reduce the spread of the disease, around the world, here in Canada, the United States, Australia, etc.
I watched the experts, who I will not demean by putting that word in quotation marks, speak sense to the masses. I decried the people who stalked doctors and nurses and other medical personnel, and besieged hospitals, in an attempt to intimidate them into stopping their vital work.
And now I’m watching the farce at Universal Ostrich Farms. As I said previously, I find it odd that I’m now apparently in bed with the same nut jobs I couldn’t believe were seemingly convinced the end of the world was near, who predicted I’d be dead with a year of the first COVID vaccine I took … five years ago.
I’m not a virologist; I will admit that up front. I believe I am a scientific and critical thinker. I don’t think that ostriches are magical animals, something that only occurred to me after reading the diatribes of a virologist. That virologist is Dr. Angela Rasmussen, who I recognised from her appearances on the TV news when she was explaining to Canadians (and anyone else who would listen) how COVID worked and why is was important to wear a mask and how to behave in groups of people to avoid transmission of the virus. She made sense to me then, so I am dismayed to learn that she is in favour of the “stamping out” policy of the CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) with respect to the ostriches.
As I said previously, “Would humanity have ever made its way out of the caves if we mindlessly executed every human that ever caught a cold?” That’s the crux of my argument against culling 400 ostriches. It’s not that I have a special bond with Speckles, one of the named ostriches; it’s that I have a bond with all … well, most … living creatures on this planet, especially those that are subject to the whims of authoritarian humans, who can decide with the stroke of a pen that 400 lives are meaningless and can be vapourised in the blink of an eye, or however many hours or days it takes to kill 400 animals. Why is life, human or otherwise, so disposable to us humans? That’s what I, and I’m sure many people, think and wonder about.
I’ve done some research on Dr. Rasmussen (which is a loaded assertion after the pandemic), which research I do for every blog post which is why I do so few of them. I am shocked at the extent to which some have gone to threaten and intimidate her. Those are the people I referred to above. There’s no excuse for that; I disagree with her, but I don’t think she should suffer the same fate as she thinks the ostriches should. I also realise that there is a huge difference between the “colds” that humans get, and “highly pathogenic avian influenza” (HPAI) that was diagnosed on the ostrich farm, so don’t bother disagreeing with me on that point.
Although it’s not the first time, I looked at her blog on Substack. The lead article there (as of 6 November 2025) is “Release The Ostriches’ Grippe“. I won’t focus on its title and the odd possessive of “ostriches”, and the use of the word “grippe” (which I had to look up, so I expect its context means more to some people than others), but when I opened it I found it odd that an “unbiased scientist” (she links to someone who goes by that moniker on her home page, so I assume she’s claiming to be unbiased herself) would open a supposedly scholarly article with, “I cannot believe that I have even used the word ‘ostrich’ this much in my life. I went into virology because I prefer studying microscopic parasites to vertebrates. I should have known better than to think I wouldn’t have to know about these terror birds. … Sometimes the hosts [of viruses] are incredibly annoying. Ostriches fall into this category.” OK, so Dr. Rasmussen has an emotional reaction to ostriches, but we’re still supposed to take her thousands of words about them at face value as being “unbiased”! So really, my emotional reaction to snuffing out 400 lives is just as valid. She goes on right after that to call the opposition to the cull “a radicalized absurdist yokelfest” after that, so she has even more biases than just the one against ostriches.
I was going to read her full article anyway, despite the fact that she goes on to demean those who disagree with the cull with more slurs. I chose a career it IT, where I can minimise my interaction with vertebrates, both bipedal and quadrupedal, but I still take interest in some of their blogs … the bipedal ones anyway. But ten days later work has overtaken me and the press has moved onto other shiny things. I’m not going to bother reading her full article because I’m sure it will be just a mean-spirited rant against the aforementioned “yokels” and anyone else who holds life to be sacrosanct. No thanks.
Updated, 2025-11-17: Immediately added that I understand the difference between a “cold” and HPAI. Also added the word “also” to the title.
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