Dear friend,

We cannot stand aside as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans the largest-ever massacre of raptors ever proposed in any country in the world.

Let me give you the details.

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 barred owls are moving into the same forests where Northern spotted owls live, likely owing to climate change, and the Administration doesn’t want barred owls to compete with the threatened spotted owls for food and other resources.

Please, donate any amount you can to help us move forward with our campaign to stop this raptor massacre.

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

Barred owls are protected as a North American native species under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act. We cannot allow this to happen.

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.

Our own government is creating a dangerous and ugly precedent by planning a mass killing of a North American native species. 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?

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. 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?

Sure, let’s intervene where we can and when there is a helpful way forward to protect threatened spotted owls and other species at risk. But not this way. Mass killing of North American native species should be off the table.

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.

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 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 also must let your lawmakers in Congress know about this Fish and Wildlife Service plan and call on them to halt it! Please write to your federal lawmakers today and urge them to speak up and oppose the “barred owl massacre.”

The plan to kill forest owls is doomed to fail. It’s too expensive and happens over too wide an area. The agency plans to conduct the killing every year for each of the next 30 years and in a physical geography stretching from Marin County to the border with British Columbia.

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.

For all animals,

Wayne Pacelle President Center for a Humane Economy