GIVE A HOOT — DON’T SHOOT 1/2-MILLION OWLS
The most disturbing fact here is not that the USFWS (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service) wants to implement a program to kill over 470,000 wild owls in California, Oregon and Washington state, those magnificent, mesmerizing, magical, mystical and birds the vast majority of apex predators (humans) actually like (or love).
What’s most disturbing is that millions of nature-loving humans, birders, owl admirers and self-described environmentalists are going along with this extreme, brutal and tragically misguided mass-killing project.
Hear the call of the Barred owl…
…before the U.S. Fish & Wildlife “Service” of extermination begins.
And share this page with your friends who love owls.
The human ideology of “invasive species” always leads to killing.
Yet this is where the pseudo-scientific ideology of Invasion Biology inevitably leads: to killing millions — and listen up, people, I mean literally millions — of wild animals and plants which we oh-so-wise, apex predator humans who are actively decimating all life on Earth target for death. By concocting a convincing, fear-mongering science-sounding ideology (Invasion Biology) which picks Winners and Losers among complex, interdependent wild animals and plans — and then targets what we consider the Losers for mass deaths. The extermination or extirpation programs are carried out, brutally and often bloodily (in the case of owls) with either rifles or, for larger animals like wolves, coyotes, bear, deer, and so on, via even more brutal trapping, or with even MORE brutal, painful, chemical poisons — which are a (again literal) multi-billion dollar industry which now drives the Invasion Biology ideology and more mass killings.
The “service” that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service provides now is… death.
But owls will be spared the torture of death-by-poison (a killing method used more extensively by “Wildlife Services” the Orwellian division of the USDA (READ about Wildlife Services.). Instead, the hundreds of thousands of owls will be shot to death by hundreds of humans entering the woods and fields on a mission to “save” (The Good) Norther Spotted owls by killing all the (Bad) Barred owls they can spot — which necessitates also completely ignoring so-called “Sparred owls.” These are the offspring of Spotted and Barred owls mating, and the significance of their existence defies the invasion biology narrative of nature being in perpetual war (which humans excel at of course).
Nature, in her always greater-than-human wisdom, sees no divisions where we humans create them. We humans label living organisms, which usually reduces them to less than they are. Label and owl, or any plant or animal (or immigrant human) and “invader” and they are demeaned or worse, considered a threat to be contained. Or killed. The more aggressive Barred owl may displace or even kill Spotted owls – – but that’s not the whole story. Barred owls also mate with Spotted owls, creating new species — though, sadly, not as fast as we humans can concoct pseudo-scientific justifications for killing them. We humans label, negate, resist change even while paying lip service to the inevitability of change.
We also, in the case of this proposed USFWS massive owl extermination program, target the “symptom” of owls on the move, and ignore the “disease” of the anthropogenic climate crisis, which is likely in part why Barred owls are on the move. Habitat destruction, which includes deforestation likely plays a significant role too. (One example is the ongoing destruction of Southeast U.S. forests, to ship felled trees and forest shrubs overseas, to then burn in coal plants of Europe (since they’ve already destroyed most of their own forests). READ ABOUT the Orwellian named “biofuel” of the wood pellet industry, which is dirtier than burning coal.
WE HUMANS THINK WE’RE SMARTER THAN NATURE – – PROVING HOW STUPID WE ARE.
Nature’s animals, plants and complex interpenetrating, interdependent systems, with their own evolutionary intelligence, don’t label or categorize themselves. Nature isn’t static and unchanging, as culturally conditioned human minds often want the surrounding world to be. Nature adapts, migrates, expands and contracts, in its effortless effort to survive. Humans are also driven to survive, but we often choose self-destructive behavior out of ignorance and/or arrogance and/or fear. Hence the climate emergency of our making. And for those who insist on denying the reality of global heating which has been proven by our beloved science (and increasingly plain to see), willful ignorance is added to the mad mix, to resist societal change.
There is one more factor to add to the mix, to explain the push for mass-killing owls (or any wild animal): greed. Labeling a wild animal an “invasive species” requires ignorance of nature’s systems. And the commonly prescribed remedy for this imaginary problem is to kill them, kill them all! Greed is at play because the wild animal-killing, and wild plant-killing, has become a multi-billion dollar mulitnational corporations industry.
NOT JUST COMPETITORS; COLLABORATORS
Add another feather to our dunce’s cap of bureaucratic oversight and malfeasance — which locks killing in place as the “fix” for an imaginary problem: the so-called “Sparred owl” — which is a hybrid of the Barred and Spotted owl.
Barred owls are disparaged for being too aggressive (says us humans, based on nothing scientific). Yet both Barred and Spotted owl species, which we primarily consider competitors (in part a projection of our own human preoccupation with trouncing our own kind), are also collaborators. Together these two slightly different-sized birds produce a new mix of life. If we were actually intelligent, let alone wise, the existence of the Sparred owl — which, mind you, is not a static species either, just another change along the endless way — would snap us to attention, and stop us killing. We should stand back in awe; in appreciation of nature’s endless resilience and adaptation. Sadly, no, the USFWS service is not known for its flexibility, philosophy, or intelligence… so on with the mass owl killing!
Finally, cynics (or perhaps they’re just experienced observors) will accuse the USFWS of just looking for “things to do” to justify getting more funding. Just as the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) is on its own, additional War on Nature rampage of “vegetation management” and “forest thinning” with industrial machinery and herbicides, to denude millions of acres of wild forests to arrest another inevitable, necessary, healthy and natural phenomenon, wildfire. READ ABOUT wildfire.
It’s anybody’s guess whether or not the incoming Trump Administration will slash the USFWS and USFS budgets, since it’s unlikely to care about wildlife, or anything except corporate profits. And corporate profits typically hinge on increased destruction of the natural world, converting life into numbers in bank accounts. There are still large corporate profits to be made by mass nature-killing, even if not of Barred owls.
The existence of the so-called Sparred owl hybrid is also proof that nature is constantly adapting and changing and evolving. And that we humans, for all our smarts and research, remain either relatively clueless, or just hell-bent on controlling, managing and killing wild animals and plants with flimsy scientific evidence, and stronger scientific evidence for letting nature do its own, wiser thing.
As for common sense, that commodity is too often squeezed out of existence by the crushing weight of the bureaucracies, and the chilling effect bureaucracies have on dissenting opinions from the many well-meaning scientists and employees who must bite their tongues, or lose their jobs.
What would you do if you worked for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and you dared question the rationale for killing almost 1/2-million wild owls over decades — especially when the two species aren’t easy to tell apart, and have even mated to create hybrids. And the hybridization will continue. What percentage of “bad blood” of the we-say-too-aggressive Barred owl from preying on the less-aggressive-and-therefore-superior Northern Spotted owl? How much killing of wild animals could you tolerate before having had enough?
READ MORE about the Invasion Biology ideology that fuels this USFWS owls extermination project.
READ MORE about the chemical poisons industry which drives Invasion Biology and corrupts formerly legitimate “conservation” groups like Audubon and The Nature Conservancy which are all-in for killing hundreds of thousands of wild birds…
Dystopian Effort Underway in the Pacific Northwest to Pick Ecological Winners & Losers
The New York Times OPINION, August 4, 2024 – Avram Hiller Jay Odenbaugh and teach philosophy at universities in Oregon)
EXCERPT [edited for brevity]:
…there is genomic evidence that the barred owl has in fact resided in the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years. The recently described genetic and phenotypic difference between western & eastern barred owl populations suggest the western barred owl is a not a new arrival in the west.
This evidence throws a wrench in the rapidly spreading narrative that barred owls are newcomers to the west, and thus “invasive” — which itself is a term without scientific basis, like the word “weed” used to describe plants that humans also target for death. This genomic evidence is only mentioned in passing in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Environmental Impact Statement proposing the mass extermination program [470,000 owls, ongoing, for 30 years].
READ New York Times Opinion piece:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/08/opinion/owls-endangered-conservation-forests.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
