A federal government plan for hunters to kill thousands of invasive owls to protect the rapidly declining northern spotted owl has ruffled the feathers of dozens of animal advocacy groups.
On Monday, a coalition of 75 animal rights and wildlife protection organizations sent a letter to U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland asking her to scrap what they describe as a “reckless plan” to wipe out half a million barred owls in West Coast states over the next three decades.
The letter, spearheaded by the Animal Wellness Action group and the Center for a Humane Economy, lambastes the plan for being unworkable and short-sighted, arguing that it will lead to the wrong owls being shot and disruption to nesting behavior.
“Implementing a decades-long plan to unleash untold numbers of ‘hunters’ in sensitive forest ecosystems is a case of single-species myopia regarding wildlife control,” states the letter, signed by Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action, and Scott Edwards, general counsel for the Center for a Humane Economy.
Federal wildlife officials believe the action is necessary to control the population of the barred owl — which they consider invasive — and give the threatened northern spotted owls a fighting chance on their home turf.
Why don’t they just trap the barred owls and place them in zoos, aviaries, and other protected places. Why do they need to be killed?
Barred Owls are very successful owls and there is no shortage of them. That’s why they can kill so many of them and it won’t hurt the population as a whole. Anyone who wants a Barred Owl already has one. It’s like how you would immediately overload regular animal shelters if you collected every stray dog or cat and asked them to feed and home them on their own dime. Zoos are a bit different I believe, but raptor shelters are all privately funded and in most states you can count one one hand the number of people licensed to properly care for them. There is a ton of bureaucracy in place, designed to protect these animals, that limits greatly who can do what with them. It’s technically a felony for a person to have a single owl feather.
The real problem is humans have destroyed the environment where these much less aggressive and adaptable Spotted Owls live, and we expect them to survive in a niche that doesn’t work for them. The Barred Owls are the unfortunate scapegoat here.
Without the US and Canada willing to say no to their respective timber industries, I say let them hybridize. Otherwise I’m afraid the Spotted Owl will be gone from the wild in my lifetime. Raising them captive and releasing them has not been working well either. See the article in the edit of my big post.
It’s like if we cloned a mammoth. We can make more, but the environment they lived in doesn’t really exist anymore.