Kudos to Hilary Franz, Washington’s commissioner of public lands, 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 to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, Franz explained that this plan is a costly, unworkable and far-fetched strategy to protect threatened spotted owls from interspecies competition in old-growth forests.
The kill-plan has a price tag of nearly a quarter-billion dollars; 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 Commissioner Franz notes, “there is no precedent for a successful wildlife-control program of this scale.”
Commissioner 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.
