Friend of Animals sues FWS to stop the disastrous slaughter of 450.000 barred owls

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is scapegoating barred owls for its decades-long failure to better protect northern spotted owl habitat. Instead of admitting its mismanagement and coddling of the logging industry—the real reason northern spotted owls are threatened—and trying to restore habitat, the agency approved a senseless plan that allows the mass slaughter of 450,000 barred owls over the next 30 years.

That’s why Friends of Animals has filed a lawsuit to stop the insane plan to save spotted owls, which is slated to being as early as spring 2025 and would extend to California, Washington and Oregon.

“FWS’s disastrous plan proposes to manage natural competition with a shotgun rather than address the root cause for declining populations of wildlife, namely habitat destruction and climate change,” said Jennifer Best, Director of Friends of Animals Wildlife Law Program. “It’s downright cruel and unethical. It demonstrates a blatant disregard for the lives of individual owls, and it is particularly dangerous as it sets a precedent for labeling all species who migrate and adapt to a changing environment as invasive.”

FoA’s lawsuit argues that underlying FWS’s decision is the false premise that barred owls are an invasive species. Barred owls were not introduced to the Pacific Northwest by humans.  They are believed to have migrated from eastern United States in response to changing climatic and geographic conditions in the last hundred years.

Plus, there is new evidence that the barred owl has actually resided in the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years, calling into question FWS’s narrative that they are new arrivals, but this data is barely mentioned in the FWS’s Environmental Impact Statement.