We’re thrilled Newsweek magazine reached out to Friends of Animals to weigh in on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s planned barred owl massacre.

In 2024, the agency approved a senseless plan to save Northern spotted owls that allows the mass slaughter of 450,000 barred owls over the next 30 years in California, Washington and Oregon, and FoA filed a lawsuit to stop it.

All parties involved in the suit are working out the briefing schedule, and FoA anticipates filing its legal motion to stop the lethal plan within the next couple months.

In the meantime, on July 24, members of Congress leveraged the Congressional Review Act and introduced a resolution to stop the killing of barred owls, but recently the Senate shot down the resolution with 25 senators voting in favor of it and 72 voting against it.

“We are disappointed that the government is proceeding with the reckless plan to kill hundreds of thousands of owls,” Jennifer Best, the director of Friends of Animals’ Wildlife Law Program, told Newsweek. “This is both shortsighted and cruel. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to use taxpayer money to continually kill federally protected owls for decades with no end in sight. Meanwhile the government continues to fall short when it comes to ethical and meaningful protection for northern spotted owls, such as listing the species as endangered and protecting sufficient habitat,” she added.

The truth is logging companies’ economic interests in old-growth forests has historically been, and still is, the northern spotted owl’s greatest threat to survival, not barred owls.

FoA has been in court trying to protect barred owls since the summer of 2013 when FWS started shooting barred owls as part of an “experiment” to save Northern spotted owls.

Since then, the agency has gone from sticking its head in the sand about why Northern spotted owls are threatened—humans logging the forests they call home—to full-blown insanity. They’ve even given timber companies and the Oregon Department of Forestry the green light to harass and destroy the habitat of Northern spotted owls, the same birds who it claims to be “protecting.”

WHY FIGHTING THIS PLAN MATTERS

The reason for Friends of Animals continued legal efforts is because we want to establish a model to decommodify public lands and the animals who make these habitats their home, and to ensure that wildlife is not managed, but left to be wild.

Our concern is that humans will continue to “manage” species who migrate to new habitats as a result of human development and climate change, such as the barred owl, in a way that is intended to protect only the species who had previously lived there. This will mean a lot of killing of those “migratory” species.

It is a human decision to involve itself in nature, to choose a side, and to potentially set in motion a program of killing one species for an indefinite period of time to help protect another. What we fear most is the public becoming numb to the use of killing animals as a tool to “manage” nature, and equally numb to humans overall being involved in every aspect of the lives of wild animals.