Plan to kill 500,000 owls to save owls

By Taxpayers Association of Oregon
OregonWatchdog.com

Three Northwest states prepare to shoot 500,000 barred owls to save the spotted owl.   This will happen over the next few decades.

As people know, the spotted owl a generation ago was disappearing, and politicians blamed the timber industry and began regulating timber companies which contributed to a loss of nearly 30,000 jobs.   Timber revenue that funded schools and police plummeted.

We now know that one of the biggest factors in spotted owl decline was the barred owl which must be eradicated.

Daily Mail reports, “To save the imperiled spotted owl from potential extinction, US wildlife officials are embracing a contentious plan: hire trained sharp-shooters to assassinate its rivals. The US Fish and Wildlife Service strategy released Wednesday is meant to prop up declining spotted owl populations in Oregon, Washington state and California. Trained shooters will be deployed to the dense forests of the West Coast forests to kill almost a half-million barred owls that are crowding out their endangered cousins. Documents released by the agency show up to about 450,000 barred owls would be shot over three decades — a solution designed to level the playing field after this invasive species of owl from the eastern US encroached into western territory.Both of the Pacific coast’s smaller native owls, the northern spotted owls and California spotted owls, have proven unable to compete with the invading barred owls, which breed in larger numbers and need less room to survive.”

The Federalists stated on this subject, “Concerns over the spotted owl, Pendley explained, were used as a political instrument to terminate timber contracts throughout the Pacific Northwest. “So-called experts had to shut down timber harvesting,” Pendley said, and they “killed all those communities” as a result. A 2013 article in National Public Radio (NPR) titled, “Loss Of Timber Payments Cuts Deep In Oregon,” chronicled the hardships faced by residents of hollowed-out timber towns. In Josephine County, the sheriff, who was forced to lay off 80 percent of deputies, warned victims of domestic violence in a press release to “consider relocating to an area with adequate law enforcement services.” Now, bureaucrats in the Biden administration have pivoted from blaming the timber industry on the “threatened” status of the spotted owl to pointing the finger at a rival species. “A few years ago, these experts were saying ‘it’s logging,’” Pendley said. “Nobody was saying ‘maybe it was logging’ or ‘maybe it was the barred owl.’ Now they’re saying ‘oh sorry, my bad.’“It’s so unnecessary what they did to the logging industry,” Pendley said.”

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