To save spotted owls, US officials will kill hundreds of thousands of other owls | Hacker News Reader

To save spotted owls, US officials will kill hundreds of thousands of other owls

apnews.com

19 pointsrntn17 comments

> Public hunting of barred owls wouldn’t be allowed. The wildlife service would designate government agencies, landowners, American Indian tribes or companies to carry out the killings. Shooters would have to provide documentation of training or experience in owl identification and firearm skills.

This seems pork-barrel-y. It's reminiscent of the recent Canadian government plan to spend 12 million dollars to kill 900 non-native deer in BC, ignoring that locals would do it for free.

I know there are plenty of other examples of governments not trusting their constituents but it’s little stuff like this that really highlight that divide to me. Always go over the local populace and botches simple plans while overspending when many people are willing to solve the problems through volunteering but are never afforded the opportunity to.

Maybe tampering with evolution and natural selection isn't the greatest idea.

I've never understood the need for a distinction between artificial and natural selection. Humans have needs based on our genetics and environment interactions that lead to other selection pressures. Humans are of nature, it seems pointless to call it artificial.

Beavers modify their environment for their own benefit too, and subsequently create benefits/detriments to other species

Yeah, part of my point is that every living thing does this. It is a sort of dissonance to accept evolution and to also think you are somehow outside of it.

That's kind of human's modus operandi, whether it be breed favoring cows and chickens, modifying plants through grafting, building roads that impact natural boundaries and movements, the list is probably endless.

At my university, we had a nature preserve, but the deer were eating it to destruction. They had a plan to cull the population while the students were on break, using bows, but a small group somehow foiled the plan in the name of protecting the deer...

There are a bunch of competing interests about what conservation means and how we should go about it.

> Documents released by the agency show up to about 450,000 barred owls would be shot _over three decades_

15k animals per year doesn't sound like all that much.

I doubt it'll help. The spotted owls live in old growth forest, 90% of which has been torn down for farmland, lumber, and suburban sprawl. What's left is disconnected and vulnerable. Killing off some other owls won't change that.

> 90% of which has been torn down for...

Humans are the primary cause of the 6th great extinction event

Every time I hear people talking about invasive species I think, “have you looked in the mirror?”

Invasive species also were predominantly (and legislated as such) about how it affected economic (agricultural) growth over any sort of ecosystem effects.

It’s why some birds, despite not being harmful to humans, are considered invasive species because they’ll eat crops. It gets turned into a money situation, where their existence now has to be justified through the millions of dollars of “damaged crops”. They then are killed by the hundreds of thousands, and an agenda gets pushed with very little backing evidence to support the demand for their death (like common startling birds “killing other birds”, when there isn’t much supporting research about that).

What’s worse, there’s no global organization to tie countries together at least in terms of preservation. So in one country an animal could be considered endangered and in need of saving, and in another is treated as invasive and hunted down (often using brutal poisons from helicopters as it’s easier to spread). Imagine being killed because you and your family are doing better in another continent. It’s quite short term thinking.

Thankfully, this “invasive” perspective in science is slowly going out of style. It’s far too rigid to be a meaningful lens to study the world through.

I understand the motivation, but seems like there's no long-term plan here. Forever prop up the species by killing off competition? It doesn't seem like an efficient use of limited conservation resources to forever re-balance closely related subspecies filling similar ecological niches.

Rearranging deck chairs on the titanic much?

Wild idea that is absolutely not backed up by any science: Why not take the spotted owls to the east side? Just like how barred ones came to the west, the spotted owls might like it there. Who knows!

Amd why are the lives of spotted owls more valuable than those of barred owls? Just curious...

Because there are fewer of them. Scarcity is one of the qualities that gives things value.

You'd be surprised then how little I value tarantulas, yet I never see them...

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