Can you imagine what it would be like to kill an owl? To look down the barrel of a rifle or shotgun, pull the trigger, and watch a feathery body fall to the ground with a dull thud? Probably not. Owls are fascinating, beautiful creatures, and they’ve done nothing to harm humans, so the thought of murdering one in cold blood is repellent. But not, apparently, to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. More than just the killing of a single owl, the agency has proposed a mass slaughter, laying out a plan to shoot at least 450,000 of the birds over the next 30 years—and all with the stated goal of protecting other, slightly different owls. It’s one of the most misguided and destructive ideas ever put forward by a government conservation agency, and it shouldn’t be allowed to move forward. 

The background is simple enough. The two different species involved are the barred owl (Strix varia) and the spotted owl (Strix occidentalis). They’re close evolutionary cousins, and strikingly similar to each other. Both have blotchy brown-and-white feathers, round faces, small beaks, and weigh roughly a pound and a half. But the two species’ population figures are moving in opposite directions. The number of spotted owls is declining at a rate of roughly 2.9 percent per year, while barred owls are flourishing and even expanding into new territories. That, in a nutshell, is the problem. The barred owls used to live exclusively in the eastern half of North America, but starting in the early 1900s they started moving west into central Canada, and by 1979 they’d reached the Pacific Northwest—exactly where their relatives, the spotted owls, live. This places the two species in competition for things like prey and nesting sites, and because the barred owls are slightly larger, more aggressive, and less picky about what they eat, they tend to get the upper hand. (Er, wing.) So the barred owls’ success is a contributing factor to the spotted owls’ decline. This, in turn, has led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to develop a brutally simple plan: kill the barred owls on the West Coast. 

The agency’s officials have thought this out in some detail. As the Seattle Times reported in 2023, “an initial cull of about 20,000 barred owls would occur in the first year” of the program, followed by further killings: “13,397 birds a year in the first decade of the program; 16,303 a year in the second decade and 17,390 birds each year in the third decade.” That’s a lot of blood-sodden owl corpses, and there aren’t enough Fish and Wildlife agents to shoot them all. So “any landowner or land manager” could apply for a permit to start blasting, after a little training. The procedure would be to lure the birds in using a recording of their distinctive call—it sounds a bit like the owl is saying “Who cooks for you?”—and then shoot them down with a large-bore shotgun as soon as they stand still. 

The first problem with this is obvious. Because the two species of owls are so similar, and the Fish and Wildlife Service would be deputizing landowners to shoot them in the middle of the night, the likelihood of the owl-killers misidentifying their quarry and accidentally killing the spotted owls is high. For reference, these are the two birds side-by-side: 

Could you tell the difference between them in the dark? I couldn’t, and I’m not confident that the average Oregon farmer or rancher could. (The spotted owl is the one on the right.) When so-called “lethal removal” practices like this have been tried elsewhere in the world, the results have been disastrous. In New Zealand, for instance, deer hunters were enlisted to protect the critically endangered takahē bird—which is flightless, bright blue, and very round—by killing off the similar-looking pūkeko. But in practice, they ended up shooting takahēs as well. There’s every possibility the same thing would happen if the owl massacre is allowed to proceed. 

Another problem is that the 30-year time frame the Fish and Wildlife Service has named is arbitrary. In reality, humans have no way of preventing more barred owls from multiplying and moving west to replace the ones that would be killed. So in order to keep them away from the Pacific Northwest and its forests, the killing process would have to be open-ended and perpetual. This is the main factor that led Animal Wellness Action, the Center for a Humane Economy, and more than 100 other animal rights groups to issue an open letter to Deb Haaland—the former Secretary of the Interior under the Biden administration—condemning the plan as a “colossally reckless action.” In her own statement of opposition, Washington state’s Public Lands Commissioner asked how the Service would “prevent the surviving barred owls from simply recolonizing and repopulating the very areas we are trying to preserve,” and it’s a good question. So far, nobody has given an adequate answer. 

A third problem is that, even if you can get over the ethical issue of killing all those barred owls for all those years, there’s no guarantee it would help the spotted owls enough to justify it. Proponents of the plan, including the Fish and Wildlife Service itself, point to a 2019 study that “removed” (that is, killed) 2,066 barred owls from three study areas in Washington and Oregon. In that study, the spotted owls’ population declined more slowly in areas where the barred owls had been “removed”—but it still declined, not increased. So even in a best-case scenario, the evidence suggests that killing off barred owls would only make spotted owls become more scarce at a slower rate, not prevent it from happening. Meanwhile, the cost in animal suffering and death would be enormous. 

Apart from these issues, though, there’s just a huge degree of arrogance and cruelty involved in proposing mass killing as a solution for any ecological issue. The underlying assumption is that, in a complex ecosystem where two animal species find themselves in competition with each other, humans know best and should get to decide the outcome. Humans have a right to say which owl “belongs” and which owl does not, or so the idea goes. This is the assumption the Fish and Wildlife Service makes in its planning documents, referring to “the invasive barred owl” throughout. But as Marina Bolotnikova has written, the whole concept of “invasiveness” as a framework for understanding animals and their migration patterns is questionable at best. Among other things, it assumes that nature should exist in a state of stasis—that animals “belong” wherever they currently are, and shouldn’t move to a different area. But this isn’t necessarily true. 

In some cases, like the one where rats from Europe show up on ships and threaten to drive New Zealand’s unique birds to extinction, the “invasive” dynamic is relatively clear-cut. But in others, what’s deemed “invasive” behavior is really just an animal’s natural response to changes in its environment, including human-caused climate change. Armadillos are currently expanding their range to the northeast as temperatures rise, and are starting to establish a population in North Carolina. If it turns out that they’re eating an insect some other North Carolina mammal also needs to eat, should they all be killed on sight too? And where the barred owls are concerned, this isn’t a pattern of a few individuals turning up on a boat from far away to cause ecological havoc, like the New Zealand rats. It’s a matter of slow growth and migration over decades, which is essentially a natural phenomenon. The question any proponent of killing them off will have to face is this: how can the ends of saving around 15,000 spotted owls—which might or might not even work—possibly justify the means of shooting many more barred owls, just because one owl has lived in the area longer? And what on Earth makes us primates think we have the right to make that call in the first place?

Obviously, nobody wants the spotted owl to go extinct. But there are better ways of protecting it than killing barred owls. While the barred owl’s expansion is a factor in the spotted owl’s woes, it’s far from the only factor. As the Seattle Times notes, the spotted owl also “faces continued habitat loss from wildfire and logging on unprotected lands.” In other words, they don’t just happen to be “declining,” the way it’s often described.  Spotted owls need old-growth forests to thrive, and humans have destroyed vast swathes of them for profit—whether directly, by cutting the trees down to make houses and toilet paper, or indirectly by burning fossil fuels and making wildfires worse and more frequent. This resource-extracting activity is what’s really driving them to extinction, as it is with up to a million other plant and animal species around the world. The owls are just one small part of a mass extinction event, the world’s sixth. It’s commonly known as the “anthropocene” extinction, but—as the Marxist scholar Daniel Hartley has written for Salvage—is more accurately dubbed the capitalocene. And so, it follows that a true solution for animals facing extinction will require addressing, not other types of animals caught up in the same global crisis, but humans and their concentrated wealth. 

In one of his rare good decisions, President Bill Clinton set aside 24 million acres of those forests to protect the owl under the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994. But it wouldn’t be a Clinton policy without a fatal compromise, so logging was only fully banned on 18.8 million of those acres—something environmental advocates condemned at the time as an unacceptable concession to the timber industry. The plan also did nothing to protect similar forests on privately owned land. The other means of protecting old-growth forests comes from the Endangered Species Act, which lists spotted owls as “threatened.” But the Act offers only “habitat protections,” meaning that forests are protected only if spotted owls currently live in them, while forests where they could potentially live (but don’t yet) are vulnerable to being chopped down. There is ample room to expand all of these protections. A responsible government, whether at the state or federal level, would increase the amount of public land set aside for spotted owls, tighten the restrictions on logging activity in the Pacific Northwest, and expand those restrictions to cover private as well as public land. But those measures would require a politically difficult confrontation with the timber companies, their wealthy owners, and the politicians who serve their interests. So instead, the Fish and Wildlife Service opts to kill owls—and, as the Earth Law Center puts it, is “forcing the barred owl to bear the burden of our own practices of habitat destruction.”

Fortunately, there is now a concerted effort in Congress to stop the owl-killing project in its tracks. Less fortunately, the legislators involved don’t particularly object to the plan on ethical or ecological grounds. They just think it would cost too much. Earlier this month, Representatives Troy Nehls (R-TX) and Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) issued a letter to Doug Burgum—the new Secretary of the Interior—opposing the plan, which was signed by a total of 19 legislators from both of the major parties. They call the proposed owl shootings “grossly expensive,” citing estimates that they may cost around $3,000 per bird for a total of $1.3 billion across the entire program, and call this an “inappropriate and inefficient use of U.S. taxpayer dollars.” They’re right about one thing: the current plan really would be expensive. But that wouldn’t be so bad if,  instead of killing, the same funds were dedicated to increasing protections for spotted owls’ forest habitats, or for captive breeding programs designed to increase the number of spotted owls in the world. These representatives have fallen into an unfortunate pattern, in which humans tend to think of the natural world in terms of their own economic self-interest—does it make money or lose it?—rather than as something worth protecting in and of itself, regardless of the cost. Still, the conclusion that this plan should be put on hold is basically the right one, even if the lawmakers have arrived at it for the wrong reasons. 

When they consider issues involving animals and their wellbeing, U.S. policymakers would do well to take a note from the medical profession and its Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm. The killing of any animal should only be considered in moments of grave emergency, when there is no possible alternative.  Ultimately, every animal is a unique being who has a right to live, and they shouldn’t lose their lives because some humans reckon that’s what effective management looks like. The spotted owl’s dwindling numbers are certainly an emergency—in fact, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service itself said in 2020 that there’s a case for moving it from “threatened” to the more severe “endangered” status. But there are alternatives that do not involve mass death, and those should be given priority. The current plan would do a lot of harm, for an uncertain gain at best. The concept of exterminating one species of owl from a region to benefit another is deeply suspect, and the problems only become more obvious the further you look into them. Let’s return this one to the drawing board, and set down the shotguns.