There is no way for the Fish and Wildlife Service to prevent in-migration of barred owls from the control area or adjacent areas where the forest owls are established.
Washington, D.C. — Key animal welfare groups today charged that the Biden Administration plan to kill upwards of 450,00 barred owls, a species native to North America and protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, will put the federal government on a never-ending treadmill of killing forest owls and it is doomed to fail.
Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, speaking on behalf of a growing coalition of organizations, reacted harshly to the expedited release of a barred owl killing plan that omits any price tag and that failed to consider alternative strategies to protect spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest.
“The Biden Administration’s barred-owl kill-plan is the largest-ever scheme to slaughter raptors in any nation in the world by a country mile,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. “The Fish and Wildlife Service is turning from protector to persecutor of American wildlife. Its plan is wildly expensive without protecting a single acre of forest habitat, and it is doomed to fail because there’s no way for the agency to prevent surviving owls from recolonizing nest sites.”
Those two organizations led a sign-on letter to U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland with concerns about the impracticality of the plan, its price tag of nearly a quarter-billion dollars, and their moral concerns about amassing an enormous body count of a look-alike species protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act as a North American native species. The list of organizations signing that letter has now swelled to 135 and now includes 20 local Audubon society chapters, including several in Washington State.
Recently, the two-term Public Lands Commissioner of Washington state came out in opposition to the plan. “I don’t believe that a decades-long plan to kill nearly half-a-million barred owls across 14 million acres of land represents a solution that is absolutely viable, affordable or capable Secretary Haaland in fact it raises an enormous amount of questions,” said Hilary Franz in a video that was part of a June 20, 2024, webinar for Animal Wellness Action. “How can we prevent the surviving barred owls from simply recolonizing and repopulating the very areas we are trying to preserve? I think we can do better, and we have too many questions that need to be answered.” The video of the complete statement by Commissioner Franz can be viewed here and her letter is posted here.
On a recent webinar about the barred owl kill plan, former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wildlife biologist Kent Livezey estimated the cost of the barred owl kill plan at $235,000,000 — making it one of the most expensive endangered species management projects ever. He noted in one of his dozen peer-reviewed publications concerning the competition between these two species, that no more than about 40 raptors had been killed annually to address negative effects between raptors and other native birds in the United States. But that was in 2010, before the Service started killing Barred Owls. The EIS proposes to kill nearly a half a million Barred Owls, which is 12,000 times more than that. “To say that this is unprecedented is an understatement,” said Livezey, who is extensively published on spotted owls, barred owls, and range expansion of native bird species in the United States.
The video of the full Claudia Miller Ignite Series on Animal Welfare by Animal Wellness Action featuring Kent Livezey and Hilary Franz can be found here.
“Every sensible person wants to save spotted owls from extinction, but strategies that kill a half-million look-alike forest owls must be taken off the table in violating our norms about proper treatment of any native owl species in North America,” Pacelle added.
Susceptible to Legal Challenge
The USFWS’s Final EIS suffers from several defects which make it susceptible to a legal challenge. As part of its “reasonable alternatives” analysis, FWS was required to take a “hard look” at alternatives to the approach it ultimately decided to take. Instead, FWS unreasonably and summarily rejected several alternatives that did not involve the mass killing of barred owls—options like nonlethal barred owl population control, species relocation, and spotted owl breeding programs. For example, FWS rejected a barred owl reproduction interference alternative because it “could require well over a decade” while ultimately adopting one that will take 30 years.
“The Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan also does not rest on a sound science-based foundation; there is little technical support for the agency’s decision that the killing of 500,000 barred owls will achieve its goal of saving the spotted owl,” said Scott Edwards, general counsel of the Center for a Humane Economy. “And following the Supreme Court’s recent decision striking down Chevron deference to an agency’s determinations, the courts will not be bound by the scant justification it does offer to carry out its plan.”
“We don’t hunt orcas in Puget Sound when they predate on struggling salmon populations,” said Jennifer McCausland, senior vice president of the Center for a Humane Economy who is based in Seattle. “There are limits on our playing God with our native wildlife, and we’ve got to find way to address conflicts without resorting to mass slaughter.”