Dear friend,

Imagine if, because of climate change and other human impacts on the environment, orcas began migrating to Hawaii’s coastal regions. There, to meet their caloric needs, they started eating highly endangered Hawaiian monk seals.

It wouldn’t be a good outcome. And if we could manage the conflict without bloodshed, we would want to do so to protect the seals. But would it be right for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or some other agency to gin up a plan to start shooting and killing the migrating whales to prevent occasional seal predation?

Would we massacre orcas because they were adapting to temperature changes in the oceans that we humans caused?

These conflicts are not just far-fetched musings in a world where climate change is at work.

Late last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cooked up a very ugly scheme to spend a quarter billion dollars over the next three decades to kill half a million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest. Why? Because climate change is the likely cause of barred owls moving into the same forests where Northern spotted owls live, and the Administration doesn’t want barred owls to compete with the threatened spotted owls for food and other resources.

Any day now, the agency may announce that it’s indeed embarking on the plan to kill 500,000 barred owls to protect 4,000 or so spotted owls.

Barred Owls and Spotted Owls Are Look-Alikes

Yes, North America’s barred owls, over decades, have expanded their range. But range expansion by species is as natural as the sun rising or the clouds forming. That’s how ecological systems work, and it’s occurring every day, with hundreds of species. Barred owls and spotted owls are already interbreeding and producing hybrid offspring that will be more adaptable to a changing ecosystem. That, again, is nature at work.

To me, our own government issuing kill orders for a North American species seems like a mighty dangerous path to head down. Do we want agency personnel knee-deep in the business of killing native species to protect other native species, in a world where we’ve scrambled the workings of land and ocean ecosystems?

Sure, let’s intervene where we can and when there is a helpful way forward. But not this way.

If the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service goes down this road of managing social interactions between animals, where will it end? There are more than 1,300 federally listed threatened and endangered species, and you can be sure that there are thousands of other species competing with them every day in our nation.

Biden Administration Must Abandon This Killing Plan

The Biden Administration hasn’t lifted a finger to stop state-run wolf massacres in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. The Administration has been opening more and more national wildlife refuges to sport hunting and is even allowing continued use of toxic lead ammunition for hunting on hundreds of refuges, poisoning countless owls, eagles, foxes, and other scavengers that consume the spent lead. And it’s been rounding up wild horses and burros at a break-neck pace on our federal lands even though there’s a law that calls for their protection in the West.

Recently, we stopped the National Park Service from rounding up wild horses at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. We’re fighting in the courts and in Congress to protect wolves. And now we must stop the Fish and Wildlife Service from massacring barred owls.

But we need your help.

A generous donor has agreed to donate up to $25,000 for a matching gift to step up our campaign to stop a forest-owl killing plan that is unworkable, inhumane, and certain to deliver a range of adverse collateral impacts to wildlife in the control area.

Will you help us get there so that we can save the forest owls? Your investment in protecting forest owls will get doubled overnight.

We have built a coalition of 125 groups to stop this plan. But we need to implement a multi-pronged national media and persuasion campaign so that the forest-owl shooting program does not begin in earnest this year. That plan, according to the agency, will continue for at least 30 years if it’s started!

We don’t want to be on duty and stand aside when our own federal government begins the largest raptor slaughter plan the world has ever known.

The Vancouver Columbian, a newspaper in the heart of forest owl habitat in southwest Washington state, also opposes the owl-killing plan, noting “officials would trigger a never-ending cycle” of barred owls “moving into new habitat.” It will be impossible to stop in-migration of barred owls living in adjacent habitats.

In a recent editorial, The Los Angeles Times also urged the agency to scrap the plan: “Maybe the government should consider what one biologist who has long studied spotted owls has suggested: Let nature take its course and leave it to the owls.”

Not a Capital Crime for a Native Species to Find Suitable Habitat

We cannot victimize animals for adapting to human disturbances of the environment. Smarter, more strategic, less violent uses of the agency’s limited time and resources are what’s needed.

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

Please donate to our campaign so we don’t see owls dropping from the sky in an arrogant attempt by humans to manage the forces of nature in the most heavy-handed of ways.

For all animals,

Wayne Pacelle President Center for a Humane Economy