LOS ANGELES _ Each morning, once the kids were off to school, Kerri Hand would slip out to her backyard, sit in a lawn chair and hang out with her feathered family.
There was Delores, a young turkey she got her 13-year-old son for his birthday, who would sit in her lap and beg for treats. Her family loved Delores so much they stopped eating turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.
Hand, 48, would laugh at their black silkies Queen Coconut and Bambi, fluffy chickens that look as if they had a fun time at a blow-dry bar, and Michael, a leghorn rooster who once overheated because he was running around so much to check on hens.
In watching the colorful birds parade around her yard, Hand felt at peace. Life was good _ until it wasn't. Her family's birds are now dead.
For the past year, Southern California has been plagued by an outbreak of a highly contagious viral disease that can affect all species of birds but is most deadly to chickens.
Known as virulent Newcastle disease, the virus poses no food safety concerns and essentially no human health concerns. Only people who spend a lot of time close to infected birds are at risk of pink eye or a mild fever.
But for owners, the outbreak has been devastating: 444 homes, farms and businesses in California _ the majority in San Bernardino, Riverside and Los Angeles counties _ have had birds test positive for the disease since May 2018, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. There is no cure or treatment.
All of L.A. County and parts of San Bernardino and Riverside counties have been under quarantine for months, with no one allowed to move their birds without facing steep penalties.
To stop the spread of the virus, more than 1.2 million birds, mainly chickens, have been euthanized in heavily affected areas, some of which weren't showing symptoms or hadn't been infected yet.
And that's the root of the outrage from a small but vocal group of backyard bird owners, led by Hand.
Before her birds were euthanized, Hand was a stay-at-home mom and retired law enforcement officer who used social media to share photos of her kids and pets.
But now she's become something of a poultry activist, organizing protests at homes where the euthanasia teams are scheduled to be and raising money to sue the state.
When she learned in April that her birds might be euthanized, she started a Facebook group with about 30 friends and family members called "SOB save our birds." It now has more than 4,700 members.
That's because on April 19, when Hand came home to find a euthanasia team with a court order to destroy an estimated 70 birds at her home, she was holding arguably the most powerful tool of protest in 2019: her cellphone.
Over the next few hours, Hand broadcast live on Facebook from her backyard, showing the team grabbing her family pets and killing them. Hand's one video has garnered 225,000 views on Facebook, far more eyeballs than any of the educational videos the state agriculture department has produced about Newcastle disease.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture has tried in vain for the past year to educate the public about the outbreak. But there is no central database of the estimated 100,000 backyard chicken owners in California.
Instead, agency staff has visited almost 150,000 homes and dozens of feed stores and community events. They've given more than 100 presentations at churches and held almost 20 town hall meetings.
But only after Hand's video did the outbreak start to gain significant attention.
Authorities and researchers agree that, while heartbreaking for families to lose their pets, euthanizing birds that aren't showing symptoms but live in areas where the virus load is high _ where epidemiologists are actively pulling data to assess which flocks pose the most serious threats _ is necessary to end the outbreak.
The virus can be spread in a number of ways, hitching a ride on vehicles, equipment and even on the bottoms of shoes as neighbors visit one another. Other birds can carry the disease on their bodies without being affected. And even if a bird survives an infection, it can still shed the virus for weeks.
"The reality is that the virus does not replicate in dead birds, but it does replicate in live birds," said Dr. Maurice Pitesky, a veterinarian and faculty member at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine who has researched how avian diseases spread.
"If we are on a block, and there's 10 houses on that block, and your birds, you think, are perfectly healthy, but there are one or two other homes on that same block that have infected birds, you have a high risk of those healthy birds getting sick," Pitesky said.
Hand lives in Perris, one of several communities heavily affected by the outbreak.
Early in the day's events, one worker attempted to explain to Hand why they were at her home. Hand had coops, but some of her birds did roam around her backyard freely.
"The fact of the matter is that a commercial facility in December was positive very close to you," the worker told Hand. "Recently, there was another property in less than a quarter of a mile in this subdivision that was positive for Newcastle disease. There is a commercial property across the street from you, which hasn't been infected yet. The issue is the high risk of your birds. ... Your birds are not cooped in a cage with a roof where there can be no contact with other birds."
Authorities have advised that, to limit exposure to Newcastle disease, all poultry be kept away from waterfowl and wild birds.
At Chino Valley Ranchers, an organic egg producer headquartered in San Bernardino County, staff met last June with a state agriculture department veterinarian and, per the state's requirement, moved their chickens, which normally walk around the farm on soil, inside.
Already practicing rigorous biosecurity before the outbreak by requiring visitors to dress in protective gear and sanitize their vehicles before and after visiting their farms, the company hasn't had any sick birds. But it is stressful, regardless of how careful they are.
"It's probably a 12 out of 10," said David Will, general manager of Chino Valley Ranchers. "It's an invisible disease. It travels in the wind. The host vectors are known but not clearly identified. Some bird species can live with this and become transmitters, but this particular virus is very, very targeted to chickens, and it's just scary."
