We’re Taking the Fight for America’s Owls to the American People
Our new billboard campaign exposes a plan to shoot forest owls, while we also call out related schemes to destroy their habitats.
- Wayne Pacelle
I just finished reading “The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds,” which chronicles the extraordinary assault on all manner of birds in the United States a century ago: waterfowl, seabirds, songbirds, birds of prey, pigeons, and others. In a killing frenzy, several species were wiped off the planet, including the passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, heath hen, and Labrador duck. No birds were spared the onslaught.
In response to that massacre came the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, to stop the harassment, egg collecting, and killing of more than 1,000 bird species in America, including all 19 species of owls.
The federal government, pushed by people of conscience who were jolted by the bloodbath, became the protector of birds.
Now our government has flipped the script.
It’s now waging an assault on owls, against both the northern spotted owl and, through a shooting plan to massacre 450,000 of them, the North American barred owl. It’s a habitat destruction scheme that will leave the animals bereft of the arboreal homes they must have.
As crusaders did more than a century ago, we are sounding the alarm today.
We’ve been doing this work for the last two years, but now we are elevating our voice and also the images. We will not be bystanders.
We’ve put up 17 billboards in Los Angeles and Sacramento, California; in Eugene, Springfield, and Portland in Oregon; in Seattle and Tacoma in Washington; and in Idaho Falls and Pocatello in Idaho. It’s in California and the Pacific Northwest where this government attack on wildlife is occurring.
These boards will be seen nearly 40 million times by Americans to let them know that our government has run amok when it comes to the protection of these birds.
Forest Owls Need Your Help
We’ve built a coalition of more than 450 organizations fighting the original barred owl kill plan; we’re fighting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in court, and we’ve delivered our critique to both chambers of Congress.
But we’ve decided that we must engage the American people — the ultimate decision-makers in our democratic republic — on this issue.
Our billboards are asking a simple question: Why is the federal government planning to kill as many as 450,000 owls over 30 years — potentially spending $1.35 billion in taxpayer money to do it? And why are they unshackling the timber industry to lay waste to the forests that these owls call home?
The Barred Owl Kill Plan is a Scam
The government’s stated rationale is that barred owls compete with northern spotted owls, and that shooting barred owls will help threatened spotted owls.
But if protecting threatened spotted owls is its purpose, why would the same agency, in a separate rulemaking action, take away vital habitat-protection safeguards in the Endangered Species Act?
That latter rule is called the “Rescinding the Definition of ‘Harm’ Under the Endangered Species Act” (July 2026).
On top of that, federal agencies are demanding the ramp-up of timber cutting on our public lands by 60%! And they want to open protected national forests to roadbuilding – to allow for first cutting and then transporting the trees — on 58 million acres of protected federal lands.
The confluence of these government actions tells us what we need to know: the original barred owl kill plan is a con job. It’s a plan to target the old-growth trees that all forest owls need to survive.
If the two plans are not derailed, the body count of barred owls and spotted owls will be staggering. And the harvest of Douglas firs and other giant trees in the Pacific Coast states will occur at levels not seen in four decades.
We Want to Promote Moral Road Rage
Barred owls and spotted owls are under siege.
We could issue another press release. File another brief. Send another demand to Congress.
Our billboards, dotting the busiest highways in the West, boil down the matter to two closely related truths: the government is waging war on owls, and it’s spending more than a billion of your tax dollars on the scam.
Our Hoot Don’t Shoot landing page helps tell the story for Americans who want to know more about these schemes.
We are taking a set of interlocking rulemakings and legislative actions and boiling it down to the basics.
While 40 million Americans becoming alert to this crisis is an extraordinary start, it is not an endpoint.
We want, at the very least, to double the number of eyeballs on the toplines of our critique of ruthless, unworkable, and inhumane plans cooked up by some segments of the timber industry and their handmaidens in government.
This is why we need you today. I’m serious. We really need you.
Whether you can give $1, $100, $1,000, or $100,000, this is the time to step off the sidelines.
Your support will raise more billboards and help us put the headlines in front of millions more Americans. And if they are curious, they can go to HootDontShoot.org, learn the facts, and join our cause.
The reason the slaughter of countless bird species stopped a century ago was that Americans said: “We’re tired and we’re not going to take it anymore.”
And what came of it was one of America’s most important animal protection laws.
Now our government is taking a firearm and a chainsaw to those protections.
This is what we do at Animal Wellness Action: we take on powerful interests, expose government wrongdoing, build coalitions, and fight.
We do not favor left or right. Only right and wrong. We call out government actors and special interests when they betray our values.
Please give what you can today to reach the American people.
If lawmakers a century ago could decide to protect 1,000 bird species, then surely, in an era when we have such a keener appreciation of avian life in our nation, we can help two forest owls today.
Look up and see the glory of birds sitting in the trees or gliding on air currents. Then decide to fight for them.
Wayne Pacelle, president of the Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action, is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, “The Bond” and “The Humane Economy.”
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