EDITORIAL: Killing barred owls waste of money, bad policy

A misguided plan to kill up to 450,000 owls in Northwest forests apparently is underway. The issue highlights the desire of humans to control their environment and raises ethical and practical questions.

For decades, the aggressive, invasive barred owl has increasingly threatened the northern spotted owl along the West Coast. The spotted owl long has been a lightning rod for environmental policy in this part of the country. In the 1980s and 1990s, logging restrictions were imposed to preserve the owl's habitat in old-growth forests, generating strident debates and altering the economies of logging communities.

Since then, the invasive barred owl has added to the spotted owl's troubles. Barred owls are native to eastern North America and started appearing in the Northwest in the 1970s, displacing their smaller rivals. As the Associated Press has explained: "Barred owls arrived in the Pacific Northwest via the Great Plains, where trees planted by settlers gave them a foothold, or via Canada's boreal forests, which have become warmer and more hospitable as the climate changes, researchers said."

That led to a convoluted plan to kill large numbers of barred owls. Under the Biden administration, the U.S. Forest Service approved a proposal to have trained shooters target barred owls for 30 years over more than 20,000 square miles of forest in Washington, Oregon and California.

Now, according to The (Tacoma) News Tribune, the plan is being carried out. The newspaper reports that the Yakama Nation in south-central Washington "has initiated barred owl management on reservation lands and is actively killing the once-protected species. They are the first and currently the only group in Washington to do so."

Shooting one species of owl to supposedly protect another is just as fruitless as it sounds. Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action, told The News Tribune: "All species are range-expanding. And birds have greater range expansion potential because they fly. Moving from the Dakotas to Washington state is not that far." In other words, federal environment policy is targeting owls for acting like owls.

Pacelle added: "If you shoot barred owls out of a particular area, you will have the juveniles move in and take it back over. So, it'll just be a treadmill. They're going to start shooting owls, and they're never going to be able to stop."

Critics warn that the action is part of a broader plan to resume clear-cutting in old-growth forests, a desire detailed in last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But regardless of the motivation, it represents decades of mismanagement in Northwest forests, where well-meaning projects have routinely resulted in unintended consequences.

As a bipartisan group of congressional representatives wrote last year of the owl proposal: "This is an inappropriate and inefficient use of U.S. taxpayer dollars. This latest plan is an example of our federal government attempting to supersede nature and control environmental outcomes at great cost."

Humans long have sought to supersede nature. But a plan to kill 450,000 owls over a 30-year period exceeds our ability to bend the environment to our will.

Meanwhile, the health of our nation's forests continues to demand scrutiny, particularly as the climate changes. Rather than focusing on a proposal that might or might not work, policymakers should work on restoring healthy forests and building lush habitat for whichever species reside there.

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This story was originally published June 16, 2026 at 7:33 AM.