A plan to shoot and kill up to 450,000 barred owls on the West Coast of the United States as a method to protect the northern spotted owl has been challenged in court. In the summer of 2024, the federal government finalised the plan.
Barred owls are native to the woodlands of the eastern US, but they began to move west in the early 1900s. Now, some conservationists have labelled them as an “invasive species” and they arrived in a big swath of the Northwest, from Northern California up to British Columbia.
Animal Wellness Action Group and the Center for a Humane Economy filed lawsuits in autumn 2024 challenging the plan. They argue that the barred owls have been wrongly designated as invasive by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Wayne Pacelle, head of Animal Wellness Action, said to WUSF, “We’re going to unleash an unprecedented assault on a North American native owl, and we shouldn’t do it… If we want to define range expansion as creating invasive animals, I mean, where does that end? I mean, the reason that we have animals that populate this Earth is that they expanded in range.”
On the 25th of March 2024, a coalition of 75 US animal rights and wildlife protection organisations sent a letter to US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland asking her to scrap a federal government plan for hunters to kill thousands of barred owls. The letter said “Implementing a decades-long plan to unleash untold numbers of ‘hunters’ in sensitive forest ecosystems is a case of single-species myopia regarding wildlife control…The plan to kill barred owls is a colossally reckless action … 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.”
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