Woman at Timberwolves game protests bird-flu deaths at Taylor company

A woman tried to glue herself to the basketball court at Tuesday night's Minnesota Timberwolves game to protest the bird-flu prevention killing of chickens at an Iowa egg company owned by Glen Taylor, who also co-owns the NBA team.

The woman, identified as Alicia Santurio by the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, was taken into custody by Target Center security officials. They gave her a trespassing notice that warned another infraction would lead to police involvement.

Direct Action Everywhere seeks to prevent what its members consider to be abusive treatment of animals by the food industry. Earlier Tuesday, the group released video that it said showed the aftermath of a "ventilation shut down plus," or VSD+, operation at the Rembrandt Enterprises facility in Spirit Lake, Iowa, last month.

Birds infected with and exposed to bird flu, which has now reached 24 million birds across the country, are required to be quarantined and killed to prevent further spread. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the VSD+ method is "permitted in constrained circumstances" to kill birds as quickly as possible.

Rembrandt killed 5.3 million birds over several days in late March after an outbreak was detected, the USDA said. Rembrandt did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

Animal rights activists oppose VSD+, which amounts to closing ventilation systems and suffocating animals. The group Veterinarians Against Ventilation Shutdown says the method is "a slow and arduous process that essentially amounts to baking animals to death."

Iowa has been hardest hit by the ongoing highly pathogenic bird-flu outbreak, the worst since 2015. More than 13 million birds in the state, mostly egg-laying chickens, have been killed by the virus or face euthanasia to prevent further spread.

About 1.7 million birds in Minnesota, nearly all of them turkeys, have been killed in the outbreak by either bird flu or measures to slow its spread.

Taylor, a Mankato-based billionaire who made his fortune in the printing industry, is best known as the leader of Taylor Corp., which has a number of subsidiaries. He also owns Rembrandt, the Timberwolves and Lynx pro basketball teams, and the Star Tribune.