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A domestic animal health inspectors, from Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, right, approaches a truck arriving arriving with a pair of turkeys for the auction at Roots Tuesday, April 26, 2022. Inspectors were giving people information about the avian flu and turning away poultry from farms within a control zone. Control zones are the area within a 10-kilometer radius around a farm infected with the avian flu.

A domestic animal health inspectors, from Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, right, approaches a truck arriving arriving with a pair of turkeys for the auction at Roots Tuesday, April 26, 2022. Inspectors were giving people information about the avian flu and turning away poultry from farms within a control zone. Control zones are the area within a 10-kilometer radius around a farm infected with the avian flu.

A popular weekly livestock auction was disrupted Tuesday when government regulators discovered about 20 chickens had been transported to the sale from within an avian influenza quarantine zone.

East Hempfield Township police were called to Gray Stone Animal Sale at Root’s Country Market in East Hempfield Township around 5:30 p.m. Tuesday to mediate a dispute between auction workers and federal regulators who insisted the birds in question be tested for avian flu before buyers removed any birds from the auction.

Regulators called in testing officials, who concluded the birds were not infected and could be taken from the auction, but exactly who shoulders responsibility for allowing the chickens to cross the auction block in the first place is a matter of dispute, according to Gray Stone co-owner Dale Nolt.

“Sure, we are partly responsible,” Nolt said Wednesday, but he noted regulators also were on hand checking sellers as they registered. Regulators didn’t discover the problem birds until the sale was nearly over, he said.

Shannon Powers, a spokesperson for the state Department of Agriculture, did not place blame on regulators. “Meeting quarantine requirements is the responsibility of the producers and the market,” Powers said. “Requirements have been extensively communicated to both throughout and prior to Pennsylvania’s avian influenza outbreak.”

According to Nolt, the birds came from a backyard chicken grower who lives in a part of Lancaster County quarantined by state and federal regulators due to its proximity to one of eight local farms that were infected with the deadly, highly contagious virus beginning in mid-April. No new cases of the virus have been confirmed on a county poultry farm since May 10.

Within quarantine zones, rules restrict the movement of poultry and related materials to prevent transmission of the flu. Birds grown within a quarantine zone cannot be sold without special permission, Powers said.

“Birds sold at the Root’s market yesterday, bantam chickens from a producer within an active control area, were mingled with other birds in the market before they could be properly checked in by the department,” Powers said. “These birds had not been tested and the producer did not have a movement permit to transport them, as required by the quarantine. Markets are prohibited from selling birds from inside a control zone without these permits.”

At Root’s, dozens of birds of multiple species are kept in stacked in cages before they are purchased and taken home by buyers, some of whom live out of the state. More than 300 birds were at Tuesday’s sale, Powers said.

The Root’s auction site sits just outside the quarantine zones, but still falls within a designated surveillance area where greater scrutiny applies, according to the state Department of Agriculture.

Nolt said he suspects the person selling the prohibited chickens wasn’t aware of the rules. Someone should have noticed the problem long before the seller’s birds were permitted into the auction barn, he said, but the issue was discovered well after the prohibited chickens’ arrival, when a regulator found a document showing they were grown within a quarantine area, Nolt said. By that time, the auction had nearly reached its conclusion, he said.

Regulators reacted quickly, calling on auctioneers to cease operations for the evening and telling buyers that no birds could be removed from the barn until the issue was resolved, he said.

At first, Nolt said, it felt a bit overly aggressive, and auction workers protested, asking regulators to slow their response until higher-ranking officials could weigh in.

That’s when police were called, according to East Hempfield Lt. Matthew Pohle.

“Our officers were able to mediate, and an agreement was reached … in which none of the birds in question would be taken from the auction until they were tested,” he said.

Regulators had sent testers to the auction by early Tuesday evening, Pohle said.

“Buyers whose birds were delayed until cleared were cooperative. The market is not equipped to safely house birds overnight, so PA Department of Agriculture and USDA staff on site and in the labs worked overtime to complete testing,” she said. “All birds tested negative and were cleared at 12:25 a.m. today and buyers took their birds home.”

In a normal week, buyers would have been on their way home by about 9 p.m., Nolt said.

Sales of nonpoultry livestock at the auction were not delayed, Powers said.

No charges were filed by police, but agriculture officials are investigating whether to take legal action, Powers said.

Though conversations were occasionally tense Tuesday evening, Nolt said he harbors no ill feelings toward state or federal agriculture regulators, with whom he has long collaborated. He described the incident simply as an amateur poultry grower’s mistake.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before. We want to run a good auction,” Nolt said, noting that millions of birds have been sold through his auction over the past two decades. “We want people to feel comfortable.”

The quarantine order and information regarding the responsibilities of poultry owners and sellers can be found at agriculture.pa.gov/avianinfluenza and on the PA Veterinary Diagnostic Lab System website, padls.agriculture.pa.gov.

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