Dear friend,

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is strong-arming the National Park Service to open up some of our most iconic parks to owl hunting. Many of the units are household names and lifelong destinations for so many of us — Crater Lake National Park in Oregon, Olympic National Park in Washington, Redwoods National Park in California.

Beyond the invasion of our national parks by shooters, the whole scheme is unworkable and it simply won’t succeed, even if we were not standing in the way.

The control area is a staggering 24 million acres! Shooters cannot cover that terrain, and nothing can stop surviving barred owls from recolonizing nesting sites from where they had been temporarily eliminated.

And let me give you the kicker: it has a potential price tag of $1.35 billion.

At a time when there is so much talk of cutting government waste, here is a government program run amok. A colossal waste of money and life. A government assault on a forest owl species protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act for a century.

USFWS Plan Is Largest-Ever Raptor Killing Plan in the World

Late last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cooked up this plan to kill nearly half a million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest. There are some “research” projects where hunters are killing owls right now!

A recent grant by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation — whose largest donor is the FWS — provided a benchmark cost-estimate for the program. The foundation funded a $4.5 million grant request by the Hoopa Valley Tribe to kill up to 1,500 owls. Taking the total grant cost and applying it to the number of owls to be killed, the cost estimate per owl is $3,000. With this investment-to-cost ratio as a new baseline for an economic analysis, the cost of killing 450,000 owls across the Northwest over 30 years, as the FEIS details, would be $1.35 billion.

Act now! Contact your legislators and tell them NO to killing barred owls.

That’s a budget buster, since the annual budget for recovering 1,300 listed threatened and endangered species is $82 million. Funding a doomed plan may doom dozens of other species.

And what’s the offense of the barred owls? They moved from the range that some scientists affixed to them at one point in history.

In truth, they are a range-expanding native raptor. And range expansion by species is as natural as the sun rising or the clouds forming. It happens with all species. And it’s the explanation for the wide distribution of animals across the continent and across the world.

Our own government sanctioning this attack on 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?

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.

Turning Our National Parks into Killing Fields

Most national parks and national monuments in the United States forbid sport hunting and commercial trapping of wildlife. That’s done to protect wildlife but also to enhance the visitor experience. Unhunted wildlife populations are easier to see.

To kill 450,000 owls will require an invasion of iconic parks throughout the Pacific Northwest.

More than a month ago, we filed a federal lawsuit to sidetrack this raptor- killing plan. And we now have a coalition of more than 250 organizations who’ve joined us in this fight. Our ranks will grow even faster now that people understand that the superintendents of our national parks have been hoodwinked into participating in this strategy, which, according to the agency, could 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 designs the largest intentional raptor slaughter project the world has ever known.

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.

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.

Please donate to our campaign to stop a heavy-handed, unworkable plan that will have the effect of opening up owl “hunting” in a set of our country’s national parks.

For all animals,

Wayne Pacelle President Center for a Humane Economy