Dear John,

It’s hard to imagine that the leaders of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have lost their way so badly that they have turned into persecutors rather than protectors of our native wildlife.

But that’s exactly what’s happening.

I am talking about a diabolical plan hatched by the Biden Administration’s wildlife agency to massacre half a million barred owls in the sacred forests of the Pacific Northwest.

The agency says it’s concerned that barred owls, native to vast reaches of the North American continent, have expanded their range into the Pacific Northwest and are now competing with threatened spotted owls.

We care about the spotted owls, too, as their old-growth habitats have been logged away tree by tree and ecosystem by ecosystem over the decades.

The movements of barred owls reflect adaptive behaviors to human disruptions of the natural environment. Indeed, climate change is triggering all sorts of species movements, and it’s not for us to judge if they’ve moved past the confines of their former range. Range expansion is a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon, a core behavioral characteristic of many species of birds and mammals.

The federal government cannot responsibly go down this road and turn hunters loose to shoot 500,000 barred owls just because human actions have imperiled spotted owls. Picking winners and losers among our native wildlife is not the job of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Owl Hunting is a Reckless and Self-Defeating Scheme

The whole plan is self-defeating given that it would inevitably produce incidental shootings of more than a dozen other owl species that inhabit the Pacific Northwest, including spotted owls.

Most nocturnal owls have never been “huntable” species in the United States, and there is no bank of practical experience in conducting such an immense and complicated killing plan over millions of forested habitats. And are we talking about hunting during the middle of the night?

Typically, bird hunting occurs with the flushing of upland game birds or shooting waterfowl in flight over marshlands, potholes, lakes, or coastal marshes, bays, or oceans. Here, we’re talking here about hunters shooting up into the trees and hoping they can get the right species of owl, in a habitat where there are 14 other species of them with similar hoots and features.

And let’s remember the plan will also poison countless owls and other species. While the USFWS has the authority to mandate the use of non-toxic ammunition, this is an agency that recognizes the threats of lead poisoning but has repeatedly refused to act to remediate its detrimental and wide-ranging effects across its own national wildlife refuge system.

How can they be hunted without disruption and death of all manner of species?

The Plan Is Unworkable and Cannot Be Scaled to Succeed

And what’s to stop barred owls from migrating in from Canada and other parts of the U.S. once their kin have been shot from tree branches and out of tree cavities in California, Oregon, and Washington? Will we develop a plan to kill 500,000 more of them once the one round of killing is done?

The whole plan is myopic. It looks narrowly on the movements of a single species, ignoring the root causes plaguing spotted owls. And it willfully ignores the cascade of adverse effects of turning tens of thousands of hunters loose in daytime and nighttime shoots of owls in deep forests that cover millions and millions of acres.

We can get a preview of the outcome of the barred owl hunt by reviewing what has happened with coyotes and the federal government’s war on them.

The federal government, through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has engaged in a decades-long massive plan to kill coyotes—annually taking 100,000 or so of the native and ecologically beneficial animals.

In spite of this sustained government-funded assault, coyotes have dramatically expanded their range and colonized parts of the United States where they’d been absent for decades. The federal government’s trapping, shooting, and poisoning plans have wasted hundreds of millions of tax dollars, dispersed more lead in the environment, and caused incredible cruelty to close kin of the domesticated dogs who share our homes.

We Must Stop This Owl Massacre

The plan to kill barred owls is a colossally reckless action, almost unprecedented in the history of American wildlife management. It should be sidelined with all deliberate speed, and non-lethal management actions to protect spotted owls and their habitats should be made the priority actions of the USFWS.

This is a case of the federal wildlife agency not seeing the forest for the trees.

Please write to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and tell her to bar the door on the barred owl killing plan.

And please donate to the Center for a Humane Economy so we can spread the word across the nation about this diabolical plan. WE are making stopping this plan a priority.

We know you’re with us in this fight.

Sincerely,

Wayne Pacelle President Center for a Humane Economy