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The spotted owl has been categorized as threatened under the Endangered Species Act since the 1990s, due in large part to the encroachment of barred owls on their habitat. Now, ecologists are proposing a rather deadly solution: hunting close to 500,000 barred owls in order to restore the population of spotted owls. Proponents claim the action is necessary and will be beneficial to both species, while those in opposition consider the solution unethical and unsustainable. 

More owls, more problems

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) proposed a plan to kill approximately half a million barred owls in West Coast forests over the next 30 years in order to protect the spotted owl. “It’s not the barred owls’ fault. It’s our fault for bringing them out here. It’s not the spotted owls’ fault either,” Robin Brown, a biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service, said to NBC News. “The species’ future is extinction if we don’t manage barred owls. The writing is on the wall.”

Barred owls are not native to the U.S. west coast and are “crowding out its less aggressive relative, the northern spotted owl, in the Northwestern states,” said NPR. Spotted owl populations have steadily declined by “about 75% in the past two decades and continue to decline about 5% each year, largely because of barred owls,” NBC News said. This is also a largely human-made problem: “Human-driven habitat destruction spurred the barred owls to expand across the country” from the eastern U.S. where they are a native species, NPR said.

The USFWS’s proposal would allow for the hunting of barred owls in the western U.S. The agency conducted a similar experiment in 2013, where removing barred owls proved to be a successful method of sustaining the spotted owl population. “Rather than choosing to conserve one bird over the other, this is about conserving two species,” Kessina Lee, a supervisor of the USFWS office in Oregon, said to Oregon Public Broadcasting. “Spotted owls are fighting for their existence right now.”

A shot in the dark

Animal activists are not convinced that killing barred owls is the best way to go. “We don’t think it’s ethical to be going out and calling for barred owls and shooting them with a shotgun because they are currently doing better in the existing environment and outcompeting other species,” Jennifer Best, the director of the wildlife law program at the nonprofit Friends of Animals, said to NBC News. “Killing the species that are thriving is not a good solution.”

Ethics aside, the proposed solution may not even be sustainable long-term. The plan is likely to be “unworkable” because of its large timeframe and geographic region, Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Center for a Humane Economy and founder of Animal Wellness Action, said to NPR. “If you don’t do it dutifully and religiously every single year for 30 years, it has no chance of succeeding.” In a joint letter to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, activists said that the USFWS proposal was a “colossally reckless action, almost unprecedented in the history of American wildlife management,” and that it “should be sidelined with all deliberate speed, and non-lethal management actions to protect spotted owls and their habitats should be made the priority actions.”

Reversing habitat damage and deforestation could also help to restore the spotted owl species. “Protecting old-growth forests in areas where spotted owls do live and can live is the most important thing — and working to restore habitat that has been destroyed,” Best said. “It’s not an easy or quick fix, but that’s the potential long-term solution.”