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, ongoing, for the next 30 years. Please read that slaughter number again: an estimated 450,000 wild owls, by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services (USFWS) own (conservative) estimates.
A brutal, bloody, destructive (and also pointless) slaughter of wild animals on this massive a scale is unprecedented. The USFWS) has never before targeted for death this many wild animals who are protected — in this case by the USFWS’s own Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.
The real reason for mass-killing owls
To cut to the chase, here’s the real reason driving the owl massacre: logging (timber) companies are disallowed from logging some forests where another owl species lives, the northern spotted owl, lives. This includes the precious few remaining old-growth forests which sequester more carbon and harbor more wild animals then logging (aka, timber) company-recovering second-growth forests. Because the northern spotted owl has even greater protection than the barred owl. Because logging has destroyed so much spotted owl habitat, and it’s being harmed by the heating climate (in large part by logging too), the spotted owl, at least as of today, still has protection under the Endangered Species Act, with endangered status.
An end run that ends all owls
But even still, timber companies, sadly, can be given special permission to the endangered spotted owl — so-called “incidental take permits” — if timber companies can claim they’re taking measures to protect or help spotted owls overall. So they’ve concocted the false narrative that killing 1/2-million barred owls will benefit the spotted owl by reducing “competition” for habitat. They’ve dropped the BOMS – Barred Owl Management Strategy. And the “strategy” is mass-killing.
The ‘competitors’ narrative isn’t entirely true, but it contains some truth, which is enough to get more conservative self-described “conservationist” and the bigger, more conservative (i.e., corporate partnering) orgs like the venerable Audubon Society to buy in to the BOMS. (Especially since Audubon has for years been corrupted by corporate dollars. No sense in putting a stop to serving corporate interests here, to prevent wild owls from being hunted and shot!) So the pro-bird org is pro killing 1/2-million barred owls — and the inevitable thousands of spotted owls that will be mistakenly shot in the dead of night
Simple corporate lies sell better than complex truths of Mother Nature
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. Futile. 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 only chance now is to cut the BOMS killing program’s funding. More on this in the near future…