The farm’s loudest advocate south of the border is New York City billionaire and Republican megadonor John Catsimatidis, a self-described animal lover who on Thursday called for a “thorough investigation” into the saga. He suggested that the US Department of Justice should take up the probe if Canada refuses.<\/p>\n
Mr Catsimatidis’ involvement dates back to early May, when Ms Pasitney called into a radio show hosted by him to plead their case.<\/p>\n
“The Canadian government wants our farm killed off of two tests,” she told him, “even though they are fully healthy and doing amazingly well.”<\/p>\n
Moved by the birds’ plight, the billionaire enlisted figures in the Trump administration to take up the cause.<\/p>\n
Later that May, Kennedy met with Canadian officials to try to stop the cull.<\/p>\n
He pitched a collaboration on a long-term study of the ostriches to see if they had developed immunity to the avian flu. “There is significant value in studying this population,” Kennedy later wrote in a letter to Canadian officials, instead of the “indiscriminate” killing of the flock.<\/p>\n
Dr Oz offered to relocate the ostriches to his Florida estate, though the farm owners refused. “We want to keep this in Canada,” Ms Pasitney told the CBC at the time.<\/p>\n
But just a few days after the meeting with Kennedy, officials told the Canadian Press they would still go ahead with the “humane depopulation” of the flock.<\/p>\n
In July, Kennedy, Dr Oz and Mr Catsimatidis took the matter to the very top, pleading with Prime Minister Carney to make a “joint public statement” in support of the farm with them.<\/p>\n
Carney has not spoken publicly about the issue.<\/p>\n
His justice minister Sean Fraser did speak on Thursday, however, telling reporters that he is “pleased to see” the top court’s dismissal of the case.<\/p>\n
“It’s important that the minister of agriculture and CFIA are able to protect the health of the general Canadian public and the food we consume,” Fraser said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The farm’s loudest advocate south of the border is New York City billionaire and Republican megadonor John Catsimatidis,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":250144,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-250143","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}