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Barred Owl Kill Plan Never Made Sense.
But with Budget Cuts Looming, It Is Folly Now
Dear friend,
You’d have to be deep in a wilderness area in a national forest to not know that the Trump Administration is cutting staff and grants at many federal agencies.
And with the inevitable budget cuts coming to the Department of the Interior, it’s plain to see that the $1.35 billion Biden Administration’s plan to massacre 450,000 barred owls from northern California to the Canadian border — “the hoot and shoot,” as it’s locally known — is a bad idea whose days are numbered.
From the get-go, we’ve said that these night-time owl shoots would invariably fall short of the goal of protecting spotted owls because the control area is a staggering 24 million acres. Not only would the plan require a small army of sharpshooters to find and shoot these nocturnal birds, but nothing would stop surviving owls in the surrounding area from flying in and replacing them. The plan would put the federal government on a never-ending owl-killing treadmill.
Our government should never have taken aim at a North American native owl species in the first place. Yes, they are competing with spotted owls, Great horned owls, and other species. That’s what happens in nature.
Now with the Trump Administration cutting programs, this plan should itself be a high-priority targeting for sidelining. Conducting a scaled-down kill will be even more futile. It will be that much easier for surviving owls to replace the owls shot by the hunters. There’ll be no value to spotted owls, and only costs in the form of dead owls and wasted taxpayer dollars.
The American public doesn’t want its own government to conduct the world’s largest-ever raptor slaughter. It doesn’t want owl shooting in 14 units of the National Park Service in the Pacific Northwest. It doesn’t want the Endangered Species Act to be used as a sword to allow an assault on a North American native species. And it doesn’t want to spend a billion dollars of taxpayer money on a scheme that cannot work.
We are rallying support in Congress to halt the plan.
Will you call your U.S. Representative today at 202-225-3121 and urge him or her to sign a bipartisan letter to the Interior Secretary urging him to halt the barred owl kill plan?
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.
Will you donate now to help us continue to fight this plan and make sure the forests of the Pacific Northwest don’t turn into killing forests for innocent owls?
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