SAN FRANCISCO 4.4.2024
I am totally appalled at the ceaseless cruelty of my fellow human beings.
The Federal government wants to shoot and kill more than 500,000 barred owls in Northern California, Oregon and Washington.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barred_owl
The callous murderous reasoning, which boggles my mind, is the slaughter is necessary to protect a closely related species of the barred owl. The northern spotted owl.
The word which comes to my mind is Eugenics. Rather than being practiced on humans as did the Aryan Nazis in Hitler’s Germany against Jews through genocide. The American government proposes to promote one animal species by eliminating another.
Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 3.26.2024
A collection of 75 animal rights and wildlife organizations sent a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Tuesday asking her to stop a plan by federal wildlife officials to shoot more than a half-million barred owls in Northern California, Oregon and Washington in an effort to protect a closely related species, the threatened northern spotted owl.
The plan to shoot the barred owls, the letter said, will result in accidental shootings of other native owls, the poisoning of habitat if lead ammunition is used, and the disruption of forest ecosystems. The letter also claims the plan is destined to fail because of its large scale, covering millions of acres, and the limited success of previous federal efforts at controlling species for conservation purposes.
“This plan will cause severe disruptions to wildlife from the forest floor to its canopies, producing an untold number of mistaken-identity kills of other native owl species (including spotted owls), disrupting nesting behavior for animals, poisoning wildlife from dispersed and fragmented lead, and causing rapid dispersal and social chaos among many other species inhabiting these forest ecosystems,” the letter said.
The letter was spearheaded by two animal-rights organizations, Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy. The other dozens of signers are mostly state and local animal-welfare groups.
They first appeared in the West in the 1970s, state wildlife officials said, but their numbers began increasing in the 1980s and 1990s and have continued to rise. Meanwhile, the less-aggressive spotted owls have seen their populations decline.
Federal wildlife officials last fall proposed hiring hunters with shotguns to kill barred owls in forests on public and private lands across the three states. They would shoot about 20,000 the first year, then continue killing them for the next 30 years. The plan has been studied and gone through a public comment period, according to the groups, but not yet approved. No firm timeline for the approval process exists, the groups said.
Lee's Perspective 