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Dear friend,

This week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service gave final administrative approval of a plan to set loose shooters and hunters to kill 450,000 barred owls in the Pacific Northwest.

That’s 15,000 North American forest owls a year.

It’s 42 a day. Every day. For 30 years.

And most experts, including our own, don’t believe the USFWS will be able put a stop to the killing at that time because more barred owls will migrate into the control areas. The kill plan could go on indefinitely.

Let me tell you the truth about this mad plan: It’s costly, inhumane, and doomed to fail.

It is the largest-ever massacre of raptors ever proposed in any country in the world.

The plan is in motion because barred owls, who for eons have occupied enormous portions of the North American continent, have over the last century moved into the same forests where northern spotted owls live.

The barred owls, driven by land management actions by people and also by the effects of climate change, have adapted and expanded their range.

Barred owls are protected as a North American native species under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act. They are being scapegoated because human-driven habitat loss has had adverse effects on spotted owl communities.

Barred Owls and Spotted Owls Are Look-Alikes

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 all manner of land and ocean ecosystems?

Imagine if, because of climate change and other human impacts on the environment, orcas off the Pacific Northwest coast 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, or to enlist whaling ships to send explosive harpoons at the killer whales?

Sure, let’s intervene where we can and when there is a helpful way forward to protect threatened spotted owls and other species in peril. 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.

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.

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.

We’re not the only ones who consider the plan overreaching and unworkable. 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. And in an editorial [[link removed]] , 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 [[link removed]] : Let nature take its course and leave it to the owls.”

But we need your help. We need your support to fund a legal action in federal court to stop this kill plan in its tracks.

We need you to ask Congress to defund the Fish and Wildlife Service from conducting this slaughter.

Contact your U.S. Representative and two U.S. Senators today using the form below to ask them to write to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to abandon this forest-owl killing plan. [[link removed]]

CONTACT YOUR LEGISLATORS [[link removed]]

We have built a coalition of 166 groups to stop this plan. But we need to implement a multi-pronged national media and persuasion campaign so that we don’t, overnight, see the landscape of the Pacific North turn into killing fields and forests.

If this owl-killing escapade gets momentum, it might persist for decades. And remember, it’s 42 owls a day, every day, well into the second half of the 21st century.

There’s never been a more apt invoking of the long-used phrase that “this plan is unprecedented.” It’s also cruel and unworkable, and it must not proceed.


For the animals,

Wayne Pacelle [[link removed]] Wayne Pacelle
President
Animal Wellness Action
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