US Government Proposes Killing 450,000 Owls Using Taxpayer Dollars

Barred owl, the species targeted for "lethal removals"Photo byGado Images

In a new proposal released by the United States Fish and Wildfire Service, a division of the Federal government, the agency would kill approximately 450,000 barred owls on the West Coast over three decades.

The deliberate killing of the barred owls, the agency says, protects a native population of spotted owls, which are currently near extinction. The agency is called the proposed owl killings "lethal removals."

There are approximately 3.5 million barred owls in the world today, but only around 3,000-15,000 spotted owls. The goal of the agency's proposed plan would be to bring down the population of one type of owl in order to increase the population of the other.

As with many activities of the Federal Government, the killing of the owls would be funded by taxpayer dollars.

As the Washington Post reports, the methods for killing the barred owls would be fairly primitive. Trained people with guns would walk through the woods at night, playing the sounds of a barred owl call.

If a barred owl landed within 100 feet of the hunters, they would be authorized to identify and then shoot it. The owls would be buried in the woods, or their bodies would be used for research.

A plan to kill hundreds of thousands of animals in order to save a few thousand others might make sense to a population ecologist. But it's unclear whether the proposal will sit well with ordinary people.

People are likely to focus on the 450,000 dead animals, not the smaller population that the plan could potentially save.

Because the Federal government is funded by taxpayers nationwide, people in states like Texas or Alabama might object to their money being used to kill owls in Oregon and California.

There's also no guarantee that the plan will work. Although initial experiments with "lethal removals" proved promising, spotted owl populations have been declining for decades.

The biggest cause is a loss of habitat, the American Bird Conservancy says. Competition from other species is just one factor, and even if hundreds of thousands of barred owls are killed, spotted owls might still decline.

What do you think about the government's plan? Let us know in the comments.