Opinion: With a Federal Plan to Kill 450,000 Owls, Are We Playing God?

Photo byIllustration by the author via Canva

The Federal government, working with states like California and Oregon, has launched a new plan which is sure to make animal lovers sick to their stomachs.

The Feds plan to kill 450,000 Barred owls over the next decade. The details are grisly. We're not talking about some humane plan to trap and euthanize the owls.

The plan involves armed people walking into the woods, playing Barred owl calls, waiting for the birds to arrive, and shooting them with high-powered rifles.

Why would the Feds do that? The plan is to save an endangered species, the Spotted Owl, by eliminating its competition.

There are only a few thousand Spotted Owls left, whereas there are millions of Barred Owls. Federal ecology agencies think that by killing hundreds of thousands of Barred Owls, they can save the few thousand Spotted Owls that are left.

Can they, though?

It all feels very speculative. And honestly, it all feels a bit like playing God.

It's nice to think that science is advanced enough to predict what will happen--over the span of 10 years--if you shoot almost half a million animals. But I fear that we'll run into unintended consequences.

What if the population of Barred Owls is eating lots of mice and vermin? Killing the owls would mean more mice. What effect would that have on farmers? What about on other animals?

And what impact does it have if hunters roam the woods of California and Oregon shooting birds for years on end? Assuming each hunter hits their target owl every time, that's still 450,000 pieces of lead spread around our forests that wouldn't be there otherwise.

What if there are accidents during the hunting process? What if the hunters mistakenly shoot other owl species?

And beyond that, what if the gamble doesn't work? What if we kill 450,000 Barred Owls, and the Spotted Owl dies out anyway, because of some other unrelated factor?

Is it really right to kill thousands of one type of owl to save a few of another type?

It feels like we're making a lot of predictions about the future--and putting hundreds of thousands of animals to death--with a lot of "what ifs" still on the table.

I'm not an ecologist. I don't know the science as well as an expert might. But I do know that intervening in this way assumes a lot of knowledge that humans often don't have.

Will this plan really help? Or are we just playing God--working with forces that we won't be able to fully manage or understand, with consequences that might be dire, for an uncertain outcome?

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