Save the Owls!
Jay Odenbaugh, Yasha Rohwer, and I published a piece in the New York Times today about US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) management policy for owls in the Pacific Northwest. I think it will probably, ahem, ruffle some feathers.
In this post I’ll say a few more things about the issue. I should note that what I say here are my own thoughts and don’t necessarily reflect the views of my co-authors. (That said, my co-authors don’t necessarily reject what I say here, either, and in fact I owe credit to them for some of these ideas. Thank you Jay and Yasha!)
UPDATE 4/25/2025: A bunch of things have happened since we first published the NYT piece. Jay has discussed owls on quite a number of radio programs, including NPR’s On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti. I’ve been invited to speak on a couple occasions about owls, including at the 2025 Public Interest Environmental Law Conference, where our session was attended by over 150 people. Lots and lots of people are interested in owls.
After our paper came out, and after his radio interviews, Jay has changed his view about the issue. He now supports some limited culling of barred owls over the next few years. Because Jay was always the main owl expert among us, his change of mind has made me much less confident in my own views.
However, I am still a consultant on an active lawsuit against the USFWS policy. I support the suit because the USFWS environmental impact statement makes no mention of the welfare of individual owls, and this is in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, I hope that in the future, governmental agencies give due attention to the welfare of individual animals in their environmental impact statements. END UPDATE.
I’ll be explicit at the start: We shouldn’t kill 470,900 barred owls. If you happen to be someone who likes, or thinks they would like, to shoot owls, and are tempted to get a permit to do it, please don’t. And if you feel like writing your political representative to get the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to stop issuing permits, then please do so.
That said, the situation is incredibly complicated. I think that the issues raised here are philosophically important and deserve attention, even from philosophers and others whose interest in owls is not particularly high. You should, ahem, give a hoot.1
Barred Owl, Gabriel Park, Portland. Photo by Avram Hiller, Creative Commons License CC BY-NC4.0.
What is happening?
I won’t repeat what we say in the piece, but the short story is that the USFWS has plans to approve permits for people, over the next 30 years, to kill nearly half a million barred owls who now live in old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, and who are out-competing the native and threatened northern spotted owl.
As we discuss, there are a bunch of problems with this.
(1) It probably won’t work. The best evidence indicates that killing barred owls will help delay the decline of the northern spotted owl, but their numbers will still decline. And to have any chance for it to be effective in the long-term, barred owls would have to be killed each and every year moving forward - not just the next 30 years.
(3) It is unclear what our conservation aims should be. Trying to restore a forest to how it was 150 years ago is something of an arbitrary goal.
(4) The USFWS’s conservation plan, as is typical, failed to consider harms to the individual animals, and instead focused on purely ecological issues. But individual sentient animals really do matter, and harm to them as individuals must be weighed against other environmental goods.
What’s the deeper story?
As you may know, the northern spotted owl has been the subject of controversy for decades. After it was listed at “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, habitats across the Pacific Northwest were closed to logging and other forms of development. While there are many causes of job loss for loggers and millworkers, the habitat protection most likely made things economically worse for rural communities who were already struggling.
My own sense is that the USFWS has in mind that if they expended so much effort to prevent logging from making the northern spotted owl go extinct, then they darn well aren’t going to let the hoot owl2 cause that to happen just a few decades later. What message would that convey to people who lost their livelihoods?
Of course, backlash against letting the northern spotted owl go unprotected would come from more than logging communities. The USFWS is obligated under law to implement the ESA, and if they fail to do so properly, they are subject to lawsuits from environmental groups. So the USFWS is in a real bind.
I should note that this is far from the first time that conservationists have planned to kill individuals of one kind of organism to save another kind of organism. (For instance, goats were eradicated from Santa Catalina Island.) I don’t think that there should always be a blanket prohibition on this kind of policy, and each case requires consideration of all the contextual details. So I’ll restrict my attention to the case of owls in the Pacific Northwest.
One might point out that in the US, 6 million deer and 10 million ducks are killed by hunters every year. What’s just ~16,000 barred owls/year compared to that? I should say that I’m not happy about those situations, either! They do differ from the northern spotted owl issue in that the hunting is done within what is considered to be the animals’ own habitats, and not because they are invasive. And, nominally, it is done for the aim (in part) of not having a population spike and crash. And the lives of 470 thousand owls is not a drop in a bucket. It is 470 thousand owls’ worth of killing.
What should happen?
In the piece, we argue that:
(A) Killing half a million birds for only a very small chance at succeeding at some questionable conservation goals is a bad - dystopian - idea.
(B) In addition to the ESA, there should be other laws to protect old-growth forests from destruction, in part because they are excellent carbon sinks.
I’ll say a few more things beyond what we say in the piece.
How much harm there will be in shooting the barred owls? I’m a consequentialist, and so I think our decisions should (ideally) consider all the expected consequences of the decision. And this can get really tricky. If we don’t kill the barred owls, and they do take over the forests, how much other damage will occur? The science on this is, at this point, inconclusive. There is some evidence that there will be trophic cascades from the expansion of the range of the barred owl. But this raises the question (which I won’t try to answer here) about what our goals ought to be for environmental systems. Even if there is some loss of other forest-dwelling organisms, how bad would that be?
One might also wonder: how bad is killing the individual hoot owls, really? They are going to die anyway, as all living things do! So shooting them will merely speed up the inevitable. This seems like a grotesque way to put it - especially for someone like me who really wants to minimize harm to sentient beings. Owls are complex and smart. They are not social birds, but do caringly look after their offspring. (I can relate.) Killing such creatures is bound to be bad. But how bad, exactly?
The issue of what makes the death of any animal (human or non-human) bad is a really difficult, longstanding one. Is it the pain of the dying itself? Is it the loss of the animal’s life-projects, like raising young? Is it whatever role the animal plays in a larger ecological system?
Further, because owls are high-level predators, the death of an individual owl may mean less death among prey like forest-dwelling rodents. That might be a good thing, at least from a utilitarian perspective! Except if the lower-level animals population has a boom, then an ensuing bust. But preventing bad ecosystemic cycles is part of the USFWS’s very aim: the northern spotted owl has already been helping keep the population of other animals in check, and the USFWS wants to prevent the barred owl from going overboard in predating on these other organisms (since they outcompete the northern spotted owl).
However, it is highly unclear that the USFWS’s plan will actually succeed at these goals. As we suggest in the piece, ecological history has already been a history of a lack of stability of biological communities. It is doubtful that the USFWS’s plan will produce the kinds of long-term ecological benefits that it is intended to promote.
Summing up
All this raises a very deep philosophical question: What are the basic units of value? Is it human goods, sentience, ecosystemic goods, biodiversity of species, relationships, and/or something else? Further, if we hold that there is more than one kind of good, how can we weigh the goods against each other? These very large questions have occupied my own thinking for a long time, and I’ll be writing about it more in the future. Hopefully, the owl of Minerva can wait.
In our piece, we call the USFWS’s project dystopian, but I confess that there are other things that some people might characterize as dystopian that I don’t actually oppose! (I’ll save discussion that for another time.) Nonetheless, the plan will do a lot of direct harm, and even though there is some evidence that the plan will have some ecological benefits, there is not much reason to think that it will do enough good to outweigh the harm.
A friend who looked over the piece asked when “feathers will fly” in the forest. The opportunity for puns here is huge, and I can’t tell you how hard I worked to suppress some of the most groanworthy ones that came to me.
“Hoot owl” is another term for the barred owl. Referring to them this way, I think, makes them seem cuter, like a critter that annoys the old-timey locals, but they still put up with the critter because they are OK with having some weirdos in their community.