Wild animal slaughter on an unprecedented scale
Bluntly put, the public is being misled (aka, lied to) about why 450,000 magnificent, wild, American-born barred owls are now being hunted and killed in the forests of California, Oregon and Washington State. This massive, slaughter, unprecedented in scope, is now ongoing, and will continue for the next 30 years.
Please read that first paragraph again. By the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services’ (USFWS) own conservative, bureaucratic estimates, approximately 450,000 wild owls will be hunted and shot to death in the forests of theses three western U.S. states over the next three decades.
This brutal, bloody, destructive campaign is the largest slaughter of a single species of wild animals conducted by a government agency in the modern era. Nor has the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service ever before targeted for death this many wild animals who are protected — in this case by the agency’s own Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. That protection is being ignored, overridden.
The real reason for a mass killing of owls
To cut to the chase: logging (timber) companies are disallowed from logging some forests where another owl species, the northern spotted owl, lives. This includes the precious few remaining old-growth forests which sequester more carbon and harbor more wild animals then logged-and-replanted timber company forests, those man-made, timber company planted, artificial, tree ‘re-plantations’ which are relatively sterile of life.
The northern spotted owl has greater protection than the barred owl, with Endangered Species status under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Decades of logging has destroyed so much dense, old-growth, healthy forest. Additional forest habitat has been lost due to the anthropogenically heating climate, which is an indirect result of logging in the U.S. and globally. So the spotted owl, at least as of 2025, still has the additional protection granted it under the ESA, (Back before an entirely anti-nature Administration changed the game completely, tossing out all the old rules which were already compromised and corrupted by big business.)
All of which means spotted owl habitat forests can’t be logged, unless…
An end run that ends all owls
But even under the Endangered Species protection, timber companies can be given special permission to the harm Endangered spotted owls — so-called “incidental take permits” — if timber companies can claim they’re taking measures to protect or help spotted owls overall.
And so, timber companies have concocted this false narrative: that killing 1/2-million barred owls will benefit the spotted owl by reducing “competition” for the spotted owl’s habitat. Which is killing approximately 1/2-million barred owls over 30 years. This is the so-called “Barred Owl Management Strategy,” or “BOMS” for acronym-addicted agency short.
Typical of most, if not all, wildlife killing campaigns done in the name of “restoration” or “protection,” the BOMS is a gross oversimplification of the complex interactions between owl species and their habitats, their predation habits, even their natural hybridization — the two owl species are known to mate, producing what we grossly ignorant, label-happy humans label, “sparred” owls.
The spotted-vs-barred owls ‘competitors’ narrative isn’t entirely true, but it contains some truth, which is enough to get many self-described “conservationists” especially large, venerated non-profits with massive corporate funding, like The Audubon Society and The Nature Conservancy, which for years been corrupted by corporate dollars.
There are financial counter-incentives to speaking out against BOMS and preventing hundreds of thousands of wild owls from being hunted down and shot. So much for the large nature-protecting and bird-loving non-profits. The prestigious pro-bird Audubon Society is onboard with the slaughter, is in favor of killing 1/2-million wild barred owls in forests across three western states for 30 years — and also incidentally, accidentally killing thousands of spotted owls, too, who will be mistakenly shot in the dead of night by barred owl hunter-killers.
Simple corporate lies sell better than complex Nature truths.
For one, barred and spotted owls also mate; interbreed. They’re not just competitors. They produce what some humans label “sparred” owls; a natural, healthy hybrid owl from the two species. So killing barred owls to “protect” spotted owls is a simplistic, incomplete, inaccurate narrative.
For two, barred owls have migrated from eastern states to western states over decades because of, yup, that’s right, deforestation by the logging industry. Owl homes and entire habitats have been obliterated by the same profit-driven, environment-destroying for-profit, nature-pillaging forces which will now hunt them down and kill owls in wilder western forests. The USFWS, acting per usual as a corporate proxy-partner, will issue “take (capture, kill, hunt, pursue) permits” for hundreds of yahoo hunters out for a buck — called “professional” hunters by the USFW, of course — to hunt and shoot hundreds of thousands of barred owls at night, in their peaceful forest homes.
Grisly. Pointless. Endless.
Even though 450,000+ owls is a huge, chilling, killing tally, it will not kill all barred owls. It is not a total extermination of the species. That’s the ‘good’ news. But the accompanying ‘bad’ news is that these killer vacancies mean other barred owls from outside the huge killing zones within CA, OR and WA will fly in to take the place of their slain brothers and sisters.
Inevitably, the industry will want to kill those owls in the future, too, for some same similar fabricated pretext. But the real reason is getting at the trees, the board feet, the dollars. This is is modern, industry-driven, and once again Orwellian “wildlife “management.”
The big picture culprit: the ideology of Invasion Biology
All this endless, monstrous killing is the typical result of the simplistic, pseudo-scientific — and tragically widespread, widely believed — ideology of Invasion Biology, which has humans playing God, deciding which animals are Good and which are Bad — and which should live or die. In almost all cases, animals labeled “invasive” — a popular but entirely non-scientific term — are targeted for death or in many cases actually targeted for extermination.
But this ideology is only rarely seen for what it is, when the target is universally beloved, as is the owl, who is harmless to humans. And when the death toll of “native” species “restoration” is so gargantuan as to be seen for what it is: brutal and insane.
With the owls, so much so, that conservative Louisiana Senator John Kennedy even spoke about the insanity of the Invasion Biology philosophy — even though he never mentioned it, and likely doesn’t know what it is. But the mass-killing under the USFWS’ so-called Barred Owl Management Strategy (BOMS) caught even his attention. And he’s a duck hunter. He took the issue onto he floor of the Senate, even though his bid to stop the slaughter was unsuccessful: READ MORE.
Stop the killing, cut the funding
The most immediate way to save thousands of wild, innocent owls from this senseless USF&WS slaughter is to cut the BOMS killing program’s funding. Subscribe to the TreeSpirit Project to receive occasional updates and new blogs on this topic.