Dear Friend,

Yesterday, I appeared on FOX 13 in Seattle to expose one of the most reckless wildlife schemes in our nation’s history — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s callous plan to shoot, maim, and orphan nearly 500,000 barred owls over the next 30 years in the forests of California, Oregon, and Washington. (You can see the interview here.)

The price tag for this deadly plan will make your eyes as wide as an owl’s: $1.35 billion.

That’s about $3,000 for every owl the government plans to shoot. Putting aside the very compelling moral concerns about this plan, it makes me think of prior government misuses of our tax dollars on $600 toilet seats and $300 hammers.

Let me reiterate why I am so down on this scheme.

1. We should not play God in nature
Competition between native species is a natural ecological process — just as golden eagles compete with bald eagles or mountain lions compete with wolves. These interactions have shaped ecosystems for millennia, and conflict and competition are at the core of interspecies interactions.

Barred owls have simply expanded their range, adapting and surviving like countless other species. Attempting to police interspecies behavior is too complex and too big a charge for our federal wildlife agency to manage.

2. A “forever war” with no exit strategy
Even if hundreds of thousands of barred owls are killed, new ones will quickly move back in. There are no natural barriers to stop colonization of habitats “purged” of barred owls. Barred owls are adaptive and scientists tell us they’ll just fill the void — leaving us at net zero.

As Dr. Eric Forsman — the nation’s leading forest owl biologist — warns: “You’d have to keep doing it forever.” Implementing this plan puts our government on a killing treadmill it can never dismount.

3. Opening up our national parks to shooting of forest owls
This program would open up our most iconic national parks — including Olympic, Yosemite, Crater Lake, and Redwood — to nighttime shooting with shotguns, night scopes, and electronic calls. It would scatter wildlife, shatter the quiet of wilderness, and inevitably result in mistaken kills of protected spotted owls.

These species, both nocturnal, are lookalike cousins, and there’s no amount of “training” that can prevent novice shooters from picking off the wrong owls in the dark. This plan can boomerang against spotted owls very easily.

4. A massive diversion of finite conservation funds
This $1.35 billion boondoggle would siphon scarce Endangered Species Act resources away from other projects for dozens of other threatened and endangered species, including spotted owls. Our finite conservation dollars must be spent wisely and with beneficial effects.

Sparing Owls, Saving Tax Dollars

Lawmakers are weighing in and trying to stop this madcap plan.

U.S. Sens. John Kennedy, R-La., Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Katie Britt, R-Ala., have introduced Senate Joint Resolution (S.J. Res.) 69 to nullify the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s barred owl kill plan. And U.S. Reps. Troy Nehls, R- Texas, Josh Harder, D-Calif., Scott Perry, R-Pa., and Adam Gray, D-Calif., have introduced an identical companion measure as House Joint Resolution (H.J. Res.) 111.

Already, more than 400 organizations (including 30 local Audubon and Bird Alliance societies) are demanding action to stop this ill-conceived plan. Editorial boards from the Los Angeles Times to the Columbian in southern Washington agree: we can spend this money better and we must not go down the road of playing God in nature.

We’ve gotten the Trump Administration to nix several “bridge grants” to shoot owls. But the larger plan remains intact. We must nix the entire ghastly scheme. The Fish and Wildlife Service should protect owls, not persecute them.

Here’s How You Can Help Right Now

We are in a battle. There are groups fighting us — groups that have little compunction about sacrificing hundreds of thousands of one forest owl species on the fleetingly remote chance that it will help other, lookalike forest owls. That’s why federal lawmakers must hear from people who want to see S.J. Res. 69 and H.J. Res. 111 pass.

I ask you to call your two U.S. senators in support of S.J. Res. 69 and your one U.S. representative in support of H.J. Res. 111 and urge them to “cosponsor the resolution to stop the killing of barred owls and save taxpayer monies.”

You can call the congressional switchboard at 202-225-4131 to be connected to your two senators and your representative. Let them hear your passion on this issue.

And I’d like you to reinforce that by using our “contact Congress” tool to send a letter. We’ve given you a head start with a draft, but we’d be delighted if you adapted it to use your own voice.

Here’s another resource you can use to spread the word to friends and family: Share our video, with beautiful images of barred owls, that makes the case for action on S.J. Res. 69 and H.J. Res. 111. You can view it here. Only when tens of thousands of Americans let lawmakers know that this unprecedented assault on birds of prey is unacceptable will the plan be stopped.

This is the largest raptor-killing scheme ever contemplated by any government in the world. We can stop it. But we need your financial support and your voice as a concerned citizen.