Emmanuel is experiencing nerve damage in his right leg and can’t eat or drink on his own after contracting the disease on Wednesday, content creator and hobby farmer Taylor Blake shared late Saturday on social media. Blake, whose family owns Knuckle Bump Farms in South Florida, said the farm lost more than 50 birds in three days — all but Emmanuel and Rico the swan.
Emmanuel — the roughly 5-foot-8, 120-pound emu, whom The Washington Post interviewed in July — faces “a long road ahead” to recovery, Blake said. But he is a “fighter,” she added.
The United States is in the midst of a months-long avian influenza outbreak that experts have said is the most severe since 2015, when a “highly pathogenic” strain of the disease affected more than 49 million birds. The Department of Agriculture called it “the most costly animal health emergency” in its history.
Blake said she suspects the outbreak of avian influenza at the farm was spread by throngs of wild Egyptian geese, a type of aquatic bird known as waterfowl, who routinely fly in “under the cover of darkness.” She said she believes they spread the disease among the domesticated birds there.
“The virus hit them extremely hard and very quickly,” Blake wrote on Twitter as she described the extent of her family farm’s loss: “Every single” chicken, duck, goose, female black swan and turkey at the farm died in just three days.
Emmanuel’s videos have reached millions of people on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter. Blake and a puppet of Emmanuel were featured on “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon in July, and Knuckle Bump Farms began to sell merchandise with the emu’s face on it.
Now, Blake wants to use what happened to her farm to raise awareness about the disease. She said she is “dedicated” to ensuring that Emmanuel survives it — describing a sling she and girlfriend Kristian Haggerty built so the emu could “start physical therapy.”
We put our brains together and built Emmanuel a sling so that we can start physical therapy with him, in the hopes that he will regain function of his right foot/leg. We have been tweaking and perfecting it over the last 48hrs. pic.twitter.com/rnltpoyzAE
— eco sister (@hiitaylorblake) October 15, 2022
In a video posted late Saturday, Emmanuel appeared alert, at one point looking straight into the camera as Blake showered kisses on his head.
Avian influenza is a viral disease that typically spreads from wild birds to domesticated birds through bodily fluids, including saliva and feces. In its highly pathogenic form, it is extremely infectious and deadly and cannot be treated.
The virus affects birds differently: Some are simply found dead with no signs of illness, while in others, it can lead to neurological damage, including seizures, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
While experts say the risk of it spreading from birds to humans is low, it can happen and can cause severe illness or death. In April, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that a person in Colorado involved “in the culling (depopulating) of poultry with presumptive H5N1 bird flu” had tested positive for the virus, experienced symptoms and then recovered. It said the health risk to the general population remains low.
The current outbreak of highly…
Read More: Emmanuel, famous emu, sick with avian flu at Knuckle Bump Farms
