Editor:
It’s a good thing to want to protect spotted owls. It’s a bad thing to massacre North American barred owls to achieve the former objective. And it’s foolish to attempt this maneuver if the kill plan is futile.
There were compelling reasons for 20 Republicans and 20 Democrats in Congress to sign letters to the Interior Secretary to nix the plan to shoot half a million owls at a possible cost of a billion dollars. Now, U.S. Senators are weighing in, too, with budget hawks joining with animal-welfare doves to introduce formal resolutions to scrap the plan.
Even if shooters could amass a big body count, surviving barred owls would fill the void. Colonizing vacant forests is a core behavior of barred owls.
Subtracting owls by shooting and then adding them back, due to compensatory reproduction and juvenile survivorship, leaves the project with no net effect. Barred owls are not eradicable, and the plan doesn’t even aspire to such an objective.
“As soon as you stop, barred owls will be back, and you will be back to square one,” said Dr. Eric Forsman, the dean of forest owl biologists who has studied these owls for 50 years. The United States would be stepping onto a break-the-bank, never-ending killing treadmill.
The prospects for success are nil: (1) Barred owls are abundant. (2) There are no geographical barriers preventing colonization of purged areas. (3) The control area spans across an unmanageable patchwork of 17 national forests and 14 National Park Service units, covering 24 million acres. (4) Hunters have no interest in shooting barred owls, requiring the government to pay shooters to slay owls.
We can put conservation dollars for owls to better use. The Endangered Species Act was imagined as a shield for native wildlife, not a sword.
Wayne Pacelle, PresidentCenter for a Humane Economy, Animal Wellness Action
This article appears in Global Solidarity at the Mouth of the Klamath.