The northern spotted owl, which depends entirely on the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, has been losing its habitat to logging for well over a century. After being both ennobled and vilified during the fight to protect the region’s remaining old-growth in the 1990s, this threatened subspecies, along with the closely related California spotted owl, now faces another problem: fierce competition.
The more aggressive and adaptable barred owl has spread westward over the past century, a range expansion that may have been facilitated by fire suppression in the Northern Great Plains. In the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, barred owls now compete with their spotted kin for food, disrupt their nesting and occasionally mate with them, producing a hybrid “sparred” owl. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has concluded that, without human intervention, the northern spotted owl is likely to go extinct.
This fall, the agency proposed a radical solution: killing nearly half a million barred owls in Oregon, Washington and Northern California over the next 30 years. The plan has divided conservationists; some say it is the only way to save the northern spotted owl, while others question both its ethics and its effectiveness. For some perspective, High Country News spoke to William Lynn of Clark University and his colleague Francisco Santiago-Ávila of Project Coyote. Specialists in animal ethics, both Lynn and Santiago-Avila have followed the controversy closely, and Lynn led the ethics review for a barred owl removal experiment that the Fish and Wildlife Service conducted from 2013 to 2020. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
High Country News: Dr. Lynn, I understand that the experience of designing and leading the ethics review for the initial barred-owl experiment persuaded you to support it.
William Lynn: I must admit, I was skeptical about the original experiment. But the conversations we had about the experiments, the evidence that was presented, and the thoughtfulness about how and why the experiment was going to be done eventually convinced me. I became a strong proponent, even though it made me very, very morally uncomfortable.
HCN: What was said during the process that persuaded you?
WL: There was no doubt that the incurring barred owl — and I’m not saying that the barred owl is native or non-native, because frankly, no one really knows — was having real and negative impacts on the spotted owls. We knew the harm that had already been done to the spotted owls, especially through deforestation, and we wanted to try to help them.
There was an effort to design the best killing protocol. That’s not the easiest way to say it, but it’s the most honest way to say it. The killing was done by professionals, not amateur hunters.
And then there was the harm-benefit ratio. About 4,000 barred owls were going to be killed. That’s a harm. They don’t deserve that harm. But when that harm was balanced against the extinction of the spotted owl in the wild, it seemed to be a reasonable moral trade-off.
I came to see it as a good-faith effort to help the remaining spotted owls develop their own refugia where they could hang on, expand, perhaps even thrive.
“When that harm was balanced against the extinction of the spotted owl in the wild, it seemed to be a reasonable moral trade-off.”
HCN: So there was a hoped-for endpoint.
WL: Oh, there was absolutely a hoped-for endpoint. And that’s key to understanding what’s going on now.
HCN: So now, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed to kill almost half a million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest and California over the next 30 years. It sounds like you feel very differently about this plan than you did about the initial experiment.
WL: The experiment showed that killing barred owls reduced the decline of the spotted owl, but it did not stop the decline. And it didn’t allow the spotted owl to create refugia. So instead of having limited harm for a limited amount of time to prevent a species from going extinct, we now have a plan with an unlimited amount of harm for an unlimited amount of time. The plan is for the killing to last 30 years, but nothing’s going to fundamentally change in 30 years — except maybe worsening global climate change and continued forest destruction.
HCN: Dr. Santiago-Ávila, it sounds like your thinking about the barred owl issue is a little different than Bill’s.
Francisco Santiago-Ávila: In bioethics, you’re generally encouraged to do everything you can to save an individual — up to the point where you start causing harm to others. If I’m responsible for someone and they’re dying because they need a heart transplant, for instance, I don’t go out and kill someone else so that I can take their heart. And that’s usually the way I think about these situations.
We’re, of course, largely responsible for the decline of the spotted owl, because we’ve transformed the habitat through logging, so I would say humans are responsible for reversing its decline. If we can’t do that by protecting habitat, though, I don’t think we should harm other species that are simply fulfilling their ecological role. There’s some nuance here, in that we may also be partly responsible for the changes that are allowing barred owls to move from east to west. But to some extent, there’s been a natural expansion of the barred owl range, and now there’s an interaction between the two species. And we’re not going to be able to stop that, no matter how many owls are killed.
HCN: Both of you have written that ethical conservation requires both compassion and justice. Is there a compassionate and just approach that we can take in the barred owl case? Or is it too late for that?
FSA: We’re past the point of being able to be just to spotted owls, but we still have that chance with barred owls. It is certainly not just or compassionate to kill barred owls because they are outcompeting another owl species. With spotted owls, I think there is still a compassionate approach. We can acknowledge that there is a point where we’re going to be doing more harm than good when intervening in nature. And then we can honor the lives of spotted owls by not allowing these situations to happen to other species.
Maybe I think this way because my wife is a paramedic, but sometimes the best we can do is offer a sort of hospice care and commit to doing better next time. We should question our right to harm other beings based on human ideas of who belongs or how nature should be.
HCN: How much of the determination to move forward with the current plan has to do with the enormous effort to protect the spotted owl in the 1990s — either for its own sake or as a proxy for the remaining old-growth forests? People paid huge political and personal prices.
WL: Yes, there are personal investments in terms of professional reputations, and there are political investments, too, especially for the larger environmental groups. If this fails, if the spotted owl goes extinct, then it is going to be used as an excuse to push back against other environmental concerns. And we know there are strong forces in industry and politics that are working against those concerns. So I think that’s probably a very, very large background consideration.
FSA: A lot of what comes out in discussions about the barred owl is, “How can we not do anything when we’ve already put years and years of effort into this mission?” And I would say that, unfortunately, what we did just wasn’t enough to save the spotted owl. It wasn’t enough for many reasons, but I think one reason is that there was always the option to kill animals. It was on the table because it’s always been on the table within wildlife management and conservation. So I think it’s important to question that type of approach, and for folks to see that values are changing. We know so much more about animals than we used to — about their cognition, their sentience and their sociability. These things need to be considered a lot more seriously.
HCN: So one thing we can do is to keep these kinds of situations from developing in the future. What are some practical ways that we can do that, especially in cases like the barred owl, where choices we made a generation ago, or a century ago, may have led to the current situation?
FSA: We choose to ignore these situations because more often than not, there is some economic impact that we don’t want to deal with. So we don’t do enough, because the sacrifice seems too much, and, again, because we always know that if push comes to shove, we’re going to be able to use lethal control. If we took that off the table, perhaps we would be willing to sacrifice more — since it is our fault — and perhaps we would incentivize more serious thinking and more effective interventions.
WL: We have processes for scientific review, as much as they can fail and be abused. We have no formal processes for ethical review. So there’s this lack of reflection about the value presuppositions and value commitments — like the assumption that lethal control will be effective — that can drive the science in unproductive, sometimes immoral directions. By taking a step back and thinking about the ethics, you can get to a larger worldview. Science and ethics are partners, and you’ve got to have a robust system of both that is engaged in these issues, looking over the horizon, and trying to anticipate how we ought to live as people with animals in nature.
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, funded by the BAND Foundation.
