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Barred Owl ‘ Hoot and Shoot ’ Collapses Under the Weight When It’s Properly Examined
House and Senate may take up a resolution in September to scuttle a billion-dollar plan to kill half a million North American forest owls
By Wayne Pacelle
The handful of federal wildlife managers who proposed killing long-protected forest owls, year after year and for decades to come, cannot be surprised to learn that more than 400 animal welfare, bird rehabilitation, and birding groups are opposed to their plan to kill upwards of 450,000 owls. The “hoot and shoot,” as it’s known—where the federal government would pay people to play recorded calls of owls and then blast away at the duped birds—has been unpopular from the start.
Proponents of the kill plan argue that “conservation science” compels this action. They point to one core finding: barred owls outcompete their look-alike cousins—northern and California spotted owls. If enough barred owls are killed, they reason, this competition will be reduced in certain areas, improving survival prospects for the long-declining spotted owls.
But that argument is incomplete at its core. Undertaking this radical scheme to massacre long-protected birds of prey—and this would be about 1,000 times larger than any raptor-killing plan ever conducted by any government—requires a more rigorous, textured, and multidimensional analysis. Decision-makers and the public need to view the plan through a wider scientific lens, including the disciplines of ecology, animal behavior, and animal welfare. Then there are the matters of economics, ethics, and political feasibility that must be factored in, too.
When that more serious-minded and comprehensive examination is undertaken, the case for a mass killing program of barred owls collapses.
Barred Owls Are a Native Range-Expanding Species, Not an Introduced Exotic
In a letter to Congress [[link removed]] , Kent Livezey, a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist with 14 peer-reviewed publications on barred and spotted owls, explains that the barred owl’s westward expansion is a human-caused phenomenon. For many thousands of years, Native Americans shaped the flora of the Great Plains largely through the use of fire, stimulating grasslands to improve habitats for bison.
With the post-Columbian exchange, European settlers reversed that pattern by suppressing fires and planting trees, erasing the barrier and opening corridors for a range expansion that would have occurred naturally thousands of years earlier. Barred owls did what many other forest-bird species did: they expanded their range using trees as cover and as new areas to live and breed.
N ow well established in California, Oregon, and Washington, barred owls are there to stay. Barred owls are slightly larger than spotted owls and produce more young. If the government orchestrates shooting them in some patches of forests, surviving owls will rush in and fill the void, especially the juveniles, who disperse once they leave the nest.
As Dr. Eric Forsman, whom Livezey notes is the dean of forest owl biologists, states: “Control across a large region would be incredibly expensive, and you’d have to keep doing it forever because if you ever stopped, they would begin to come back.” Livezey calls the plan a “never-ending, bloody game of Whack-a-Mole.”
Unscalable Economics
The economic assessment also proves to be a barrier to success for proponents of mass killing. Livezey observes that “a $4.5 million grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to the Hoopa Valley Tribe to kill 1,500 barred owls places the cost at $3,000 per owl,” translating into an overall project cost of $1.35 billion to kill the 450,000 owls as proposed. And that figure assumes costs don’t rise as owls become warier over time. “Costs would increase due to artificial selection because some barred owls may witness the shooting of their mate, escape, learn to stay away, and teach their young to do so,” he notes.
As stated in the government’s plan, “barred owls would remain unmanaged on approximately 72 percent of the northern spotted owl range, and barred owl populations would continue to remain stable or increase in these areas” (p. 77). Livezey notes that barred owls typically leave their natal range at about four months of age and routinely disperse about 30 miles. “Virtually all occupied spotted owl territories include and are surrounded by many pairs of barred owls,” he wrote. “If barred owls were shot in one area, other barred owls would move in and replace them.”
Political Science, Animal Welfare Science, and Other Reality Checks
Wildlife management projects cannot proceed unless they can attract and sustain funding. With presidential power and congressional control shifting between the two parties, political science must also be considered when evaluating a 30-year project to kill hundreds of thousands of forest owls. The plan approved in the waning months of the Biden administration now appears to be opposed by the Trump administration, which has canceled “bridge grants” to the broader Barred Owl Management Strategy. That nixing of localized shoots signals that sustained funding simply isn’t in the cards.
Without government funding, few contract shooters would be hired for a project requiring tens of thousands of hours of labor, given that the “control area” covers 14 National Park Service units, 17 national forests, and other lands. With no American cultural tradition of owl hunting, there is no built-in volunteer labor pool. Shooters will almost invariably require pay. Attracting labor and funding over three decades—including as many as seven potential presidential administrations—seems more than far-fetched. It is politically unachievable.
And then there is the science that rarely gets mentioned: animal welfare. Barred owls would be lured in by recordings of their calls, then shot. Animal welfare science tells us that these animals would feel pain. Nestlings and recently fledged owls would starve without parental care. There is also the risk of mistaken-identity kills of spotted owls by shooters, since the species are similar in size, silhouette, and coloring.
Thirty years of killing as many as 450,000 owls would create extensive suffering. That’s a moral concern that cannot be sidestepped, especially in a nation that loves owls and long ago established legal protection for all 19 species under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
A Misguided Diversion of Funds
For decades, the debate over spotted owls focused on conserving old-growth forests. Now we are talking about shooting look-alike owls. As Livezey puts it, “spending more than $1 billion to kill almost one-half million barred owls is not worth the carnage, expense, precedents, and distraction from what is the more important issue: protection of biodiverse old-growth forests.”
Killing barred owls is action. But it is not progress. It is a diversion—neither economically nor politically sustainable, and morally indefensible.
The misguided barred owl scheme reminds us that conservation challenges are never solved by cherry-picking one “scientific” metric. They require grappling with complexity, bringing into the analysis the full spectrum of science, ethics, and political reality. Here the proponents of the plan lost the forest for the trees.
TAKE ACTION [[link removed]]
Reps. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, Josh Harder, D-Calif., Scott Perry, R-Pa., and Adam Gray, D-Calif., have introduced H.J. Res. 111 to nullify the barred owl kill plan, while Sens. John Kennedy, R-La., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., have introduced the companion measure, S.J. Res. 69. Please write and call your two U.S. senators and representative in Congress (202-225-3121) and urge them to cosponsor these resolutions. [[link removed]]
Wayne Pacelle is president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy and a two-time New York Times best-selling author.
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