30 years after banning logging in Pacific Northwest forests to save the endangered spotted owl, federal officials are now shooting thousands of competing owls to save the still-declining bird.
As part of a highly-coordinated 1990s public campaign to ban many timber jobs environmentalists blamed “habitat loss” for the decline of the spotted owl, leading to congressional action to “save the spotted owl.”
Logging in the area was banned and thousands lost their jobs. Coastal elites openly mocked the unemployed.
“Loggers losing their jobs because of spotted owl legislation is no different than people being out of work after the furnaces of Dachau shut down,” smirked “Friends of the Earth founder David Brower.
But it failed to save the spotted owl, as actual experts pointed out the spotted owl was in decline because it is smaller, breeds less and doesn’t hunt as well as other owl species. They explained how natural selection was phasing out the less capable species.
In an apparent admission environmentalists were lying, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is now paying biologists to shoot barred owls in a desperate bid to save the spotted owl.
“We knew that barred owls were outcompeting spotted owls and their populations were going haywire,” biologist Dave Weins now tells the Associated Press, while out shooting barred owls.
“Humans, by stepping in and taking that role in nature, we may be able to achieve more biodiversity in the environment, rather than just having barred owls take over and wipe out all the prey species,” he tells the AP, not realizing the irony of claiming Man knows Nature better than Nature.
So far Weins and the USFWS have killed 2,435 barred owls. Weins uses a digital bird call to lure owls to their deaths.
While the logging ban failed to protect the spotted owl, there are no plans to restore timber jobs.
It’s not the first time environmentalists have slaughtered animals to stop Mother Nature from phasing out animals they feel are cuter.
“Federal and state officials, for example, have broken the necks of thousands of cowbirds to save the warbler, a songbird once on the brink of extinction,” the AP reports. “To preserve salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest and perch and other fish in the Midwest, federal and state agencies kill thousands of large seabirds called double-crested cormorants. And last year, Congress passed a law making it easier for Oregon, Washington, Idaho and American Indian tribes to kill sea lions that gobble imperiled salmon runs in the Columbia River.”