To Kill or Not to Kill? The Controversial Plan to Kill Half a Million Barred Owls
By San Kwon and Joyce Fang
In November 2023, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) published a proposal to kill roughly half a million barred owls to protect a species that barred owls outcompete—the endangered spotted owl.
Since then, the USFWS finalized its strategy to manage the barred owls and plans to begin implementation as soon as spring of 2025. The plan to kill barred owls has sparked controversy, with proponents and opponents both advocating fiercely for their positions.
In this blog post, we investigate: What has led to the present moral crisis at hand? Why does the USFWS argue that the killing of barred owls is necessary and justified? And what is an Earth law perspective on this issue?
The Decline of the Spotted Owl in the Pacific Northwest
Spotted Owl, Hollingsworth, John and Karen, Public Domain, https://www.fws.gov/media/spotted-owl
The spotted owl has been listed in the IUCN red list of threatened species since 1990, designated as “near threatened.” Spotted owls, however, are divided into three subspecies, and the USFWS plan concerns the survival of two of the three subspecies––namely, the northern spotted owls, which span a range from northern California to British Columbia, and the California spotted owls, which live solely in California. Both the northern and California spotted owls have been listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act since 1990.
Northern spotted owls can only live in old growth forests, which used to be abundant in the Cascadia Bioregion but have been reduced to tiny fractions of their former extent through extensive logging and deforestation over the past century and more.
The USFWS explains that the biggest cause of the rapid and ongoing decline of northern spotted owls is competition from barred owls, a species that is invasive to the American Northwest. The barred owl is larger and more aggressive than the spotted owl, meaning that it can outcompete the spotted owl for food and other resources in the spotted owls’ habitat. Moreover, the spotted owl’s only preferred habitat is old-growth forests, while barred owls can survive outside them. This has led to the ongoing displacement of the spotted owl from its dwindling habitat by the spread of the beard owl.
The USFWS points out that barred owl competition similarly threatens the population of California spotted owls. As of now, across the Northwest and California, there has been a decline of at least half of spotted owls, with a decline of up to 75% in some areas. The USFWS argues that if nothing is done to limit the domination of barred owls in the natural habitats of spotted owls, the latter will eventually face extinction.
The USFWS Proposal: Killing Barred Owls to Save Spotted Owls
Juvenile barred owl in Poulsbo, Washington, USA. Photo credit: Erica Gordon, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
The USFWS proposes to kill 470,000 owls over the span of three decades in the states of Washington, Oregon, and California. The killing of barred owls would not be conducted as a free-for-all. Rather, the USFWS would designate government agencies, landowners, Indigenous Nations, or companies to carry out the killings. Such agents would have to provide adequate documentation of training or experience in identifying owls and using firearms to kill them.
As noted above, the barred owls are not native to the West. As the Cornell Lab of Ornithology details, barred owls originally belong to the East coast of the US and in the twentieth century spread to the Pacific Northwest and down to California. But why did barred owls, a “sedentary” creature that does not migrate, end up on the other side of North America? As with most other instances of invasive species, the invasion of barred owls in the American West is primarily human caused. Along these lines, the Klamath Siskiyou Wildlands Center notes that it is human driven destruction of the owls’ habitat, tracing all the way to European settlement and colonization, that has displaced the barred owls.
Oregon state USFWS supervisor Kessina Lee has been very clear in public with regards to the necessity for a plan to kill the barred owls. For instance, she argues in an NPR interview, “Without actively managing barred owls, northern spotted owls will likely go extinct in all or the majority of their range, despite decades of collaborative conservation efforts.” In the Oregon Capital, she explains, “Spotted owls are at a crossroads, and we need to manage both barred owls and habitat to save them. This isn’t about choosing one owl over the other. . . . If we act now, future generations will be able to see both owls in our Western forests.”
Barred Owl at Malheur NWR Ray Bosch USFWS.jpg, Ray Bosch/USFWS, Public Domain, https://www.fws.gov/media/barred-owl-malheur-nwr-ray-bosch-usfwsjpg
Although Lee and other proponents of the plan envision a future in which both species continue to co-exist, they carry an underlying assumption that a mass killing of barred owls will indeed succeed in protecting spotted owls and restoring ecological balance. But as opponents of the plan point out, past government efforts have suggested quite the opposite.
In March 2024, a coalition of over 40 animal rights organizations and animal shelters wrote a letter to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland urging the Department of the Interior to halt the plan. As they explain, lethal control strategies have been attempted on several species populations in the past, but without significant results that would justify such killing. For instance, the US Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division has attempted to control coyote populations through lethal management to protect agricultural livestock from predation, yet this has failed to address the problem and has come at substantial ecological cost. Domestic dogs, wild animals, and birds have become “collateral damage” in these efforts, yet coyote predation has inadvertently increased following human attempts at lethal control. The fear with the prospective attempt to kill barred owls in mass is that it will similarly fail or even backfire.
The current barred owl lethal management plan is based on a prior test study wherein the USFWS killed nearly 2,500 barred owls in areas along the West Coast. The study found that the spotted owl population still decreased, albeit at a slower rate, in the management areas compared to others. Yet the study also showed that once lethal management stopped, the population of spotted owls continued to decline. Even if we believe that the slowing or halting of spotted owl declines could be achieved through a long-term and extensive lethal management plan, this finding suggests the killing would have to continue indefinitely, and so the USFWS plan remains an unproven solution to restore the spotted owl population.
In an op-ed published in the New York Times, philosophers of science Avram Hiller, Jay Odenbaugh, and Yasha Rohwer commented, “It is unclear that killing barred owls will do anything but merely slow the northern spotted owl’s eventual extinction.” For these philosophers, the human-caused problem of barred owls is “here to stay”––and to attempt to fix that with brute human force would only cause more harm and animal suffering.
An Earth Law Approach to the Plight of the Spotted Owls
What would it look like if the legal system took the interests of barred owls, spotted owls, and their shared ecosystems into account, with appropriate human guardians or proxies representing those interests?
Rather than forcing the barred owl to bear the burden of our own practices of habitat destruction, we must explore solutions that address the root causes of the spotted owl’s population decline.
For instance, we note again that the loss of old growth forests is the other major factor in the decline of spotted owl populations. Legal mechanisms to protect old growth forests, which serve as the favored habitat of the spotted owl, must be strengthened. Currently, old growth forests are protected primarily through the Endangered Species Act, which protects them so long as the spotted owl and other species that rely on these forests as habitat remain endangered. However, in areas where spotted owls are extinct, these protections are no longer maintained. In fact, if the spotted owl were to no longer be considered a threatened or endangered species, the protections would not exist either. The protection of old growth forests cannot be tied to the fate of other species. Current laws fail to proactively prevent logging before a species becomes endangered in the first place, leading to the continual destruction of the spotted owl’s habitat along the West Coast. To protect old growth and legacy forests independently from the endangered status of spotted owls would be a starting point to address the root causes of the spotted owl’s endangerment.
To really get at the heart of this current moral crisis concerning barred owls, we need to sit with the grave prospect that half a million living owls could be killed in an effort with no guarantee of success, many possible unintended consequences, and no parallel responsibility for humans to stop degrading and destroying owl habitats. Yes, the invasion of barred owls is a human caused problem, and that means that with it, there come human responsibilities. But to recognize this also means that we must be even more cautious in our approach to intervening in Nature, to prevent further exacerbation of environmental harm.
Ultimately, the current crisis concerning the barred owl and spotted owl reflects what happens when humans come to a crossroads confronting our own ongoing impact on the environment. The USFWS believes it has made a difficult yet necessary decision. Yet the current USFWS lethal management plan is a solution that causes unjustifiable harm to barred owls, at an unclear benefit to spotted owls. An ecocentric perspective that recognizes the rights and dignity of barred owls prevents us from making a decision so destructive to the fate of the barred owl, in favor of long-term, sustainable solutions that do not require other species to bear the burden of our failure.
