Could you imagine if the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had simply refused to show up at Universal Ostrich Farms from the very first day in September 2025. Picture the scene. Canadian Food Inspection Agency inspectors arrive at the gate with their court warrant and destruction order, unarmed and powerless to force entry. Owners Karen Espersen, Dave Bilinski, and Katie Pasitney stand firm behind locked fences, protesters wave signs from the camp they built months earlier, and three hundred large, fast, aggressive ostriches roam free across the property. Without a single RCMP cruiser in sight, the inspectors have no choice but to turn around and leave. That is exactly what would have happened, because the RCMP had no legal obligation whatsoever to participate. The Health of Animals Act does not compel police to enforce agency orders; assistance is entirely discretionary. A polite “no thank you” from the local detachment would have ended the entire operation before it ever started.
Yet the RCMP did far more than show up. They showed up willingly, repeatedly, and enthusiastically. They closed roads for days, set up perimeters, patrolled night shifts, paused the cull for crew changes, and guarded marksmen while floodlights turned the pastures into a killing ground. Recent photographs even show officers operating farm forks, loading hay bales alongside agency contractors, tasks so far outside normal policing that they look like hired labour. These are the same officers who, on any given highway in British Columbia, will refuse to move a piece of debris that could cause a fatal crash, directing frustrated drivers to call the Ministry of Highways instead. They claim it is not their job. But at Edgewood they willingly became the muscle, the logistics crew, and the security blanket that made the cull possible.
If they had refused from the start, the agency would have faced immediate humiliation. Inspectors would retreat, contractors would never unload equipment, and no pens would be built. The owners would continue feeding the flock, ignoring quarantine rules exactly as they had for months. Court contempt motions would pile up, fines would go unpaid, and every attempt to escalate would circle back to the same problem: someone with guns and arrest powers has to do the dirty work. Provincial sheriffs lack the numbers for a prolonged rural siege. Calling in the military for a bird flu case on a private farm would have been laughed out of Ottawa. The birds would still be alive today, the virus risk either faded or contained by default, and the agency would be stuck in an endless loop of paper threats.
The RCMP did not merely keep the peace; they were the force, and the enabling engine. They chose to turn a discretionary request into a full scale occupation. They transformed warrants on paper into dead ostriches in trailers. Remove their willing participation and the whole thing collapses on day one. The cull did not happen because the law demanded it; it happened because the RCMP decided to make it happen. That is the uncomfortable truth the public needs to see. They made it happen.