Kudos to Hilary Franz, Commissioner of Public Lands for Washington state, for speaking out against a federal scheme to kill up to 500,000 barred owls in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, in a letter she sent this week to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, explaining this plan is a costly, unworkable and a far-fetched strategy to protect threatened spotted owls from inter-species competition in old-growth forests.
The kill-plan has a price tag of nearly $250 million; it will swallow up funds for workable endangered species recovery programs.
Covering a physical geography of perhaps 20 million acres, including 17 national forests, the plan devised by U.S. Fish & Wildlife is a pipe dream. Nothing will stop surviving owls from recolonizing open nesting sites. The government will be on a forest-owl-shooting treadmill that never slows down. As Franz notes, “there is no precedent for a successful wildlife-control program of this scale.”
Franz notes the barred owl “cull” will be the largest-ever raptor slaughter the world has ever known. Our federal wildlife agency must abandon this ill-conceived scheme
Jennifer McCausland
Center for a Humane Economy
Seattle
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