Senate Turns Back Sen. John Kennedy’s Heroic Plea for Sparing Owls

This week, a nation of owl lovers and animal advocates had a chance to grab a perch and behold the passion and wit and smarts of a very prominent defender of animals — U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. He stood on the Senate floor, with photos of owls and owlets on one side and a picture of Elmer Fudd on the other, to call out the absurdity of a scheme to slaughter 450,000 owls in the long-protected forests of California, Oregon, and Washington. His stem-winding speech pulled no punches, calling out Interior Secretary Doug Burgum as well as his predecessors in the Biden administration who hatched the plan to put nearly half a million owls on a government hit list.

“Barred owls are expanding their habitat because the forests in the East have been cut down,” thundered Sen. Kennedy on Wednesday night. “That’s called adaptive range expansion. And do you know what? Whether you believe in God or nature or whatever, that happens every single day in our ecosystem. It’s a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon. It’s a core behavioral characteristic of animals.”

The Biden administration finalized in September 2024 a plan to massacre barred owls, and it’s clear now that the whole scheme came at the urging of the West Coast timber industry. The timber companies decided to scapegoat barred owls and blame them for the decline of spotted owls, even though spotted owls have been in decline for decades before the two look-alikes even began competing for nesting cavities in Douglas firs or Sitka spruces. Most Americans over age 40 can remember the “timber wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, when environmentalists fought back against extensive logging in the West that accelerated thedownward population spiral of spotted owls.

But in this generation, many environmental organizations, such as the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, led the smear campaign against beautiful owls who for thousands of years have shared habitats with more than a dozen other owl species in North America. They called them “invaders,” “non-natives,” and even “bullies.” It’s the sort of verbal takedown that many animal-abuse industries use to hurt animals, whether they call them “brutes” or “vermin” or “cold-blooded killers.” Stripping them of their perfect designs in nature clears the path for exploitation. Always has been that way.

Sen. Kennedy described the barred owls’ “soulful eyes,” noting his backyard is home to a mating pair of barred owls. He loves seeing them and hearing their hoots.

In speaking about the supposed conflicts in the West, he noted that “the barred owls are not hurting anybody. They’re just doing what nature teaches them to do.”

He talked about how the government is planning to spend a billion dollars to hire people to take to the woods with weapons and kill the monogamous pairs and orphan the owlets. And we’re doing it because it’s our design “to change nature? We’re going to control our environment to this extent?” He described the scale: “They will kill 453,000 of them, dead as Jimmy Hoffa. Give me a break.”

C-SPAN may not have a big live audience, but I can tell you that millions of Americans willcatch the recorded version of his speech delivered in the ornate Senate chambers. Not a single senator stood up to speak against him. And who would get up and go into the annals of Senate history making a case for killing half a million birds? Orphaning their young. Shooting the mom or the dad in a mating pair. Leaving the widow in grief. Or perhaps finishing him or her off, too.

Nearly half of the other Republican senators voted with Sen. Kennedy — a more than respectable outcome from a group of lawmakers hailing from more rural states and not generally known as always having the perfect instincts when it comes to national policies on the humane treatment of animals.

But on the Democratic side, it’s something I don’t think I’ve ever seen in 30 years of working on animal welfare on Capitol Hill. On a major national policy issue — dead center when it comes to fundamental animal welfare matters — just three Democrats stood against needless and unprecedented slaughter of animals. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who is the leading animal welfare voice for Democrats in the Senate, stood tall and straight, as he always does. And the owls got support from two other champions for our cause — Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. My thanks to that humane trio. On that day, they were lonely supporters for animal welfare in Democratic ranks.

In the end, Sen. Kennedy’s Congressional Review Act resolution to nullify the barred owl kill plan, which he deftly shepherded to the Senate floor, was opposed by more than 40 other Democrats. Their collective action not only gives the green light for shooters to kill hundreds of thousands of barred owls, but also enables the killing of threatened spotted owls — who were, in the timber industry narrative, the animals that the barred owl “hoot-and-shoot” was supposed to help.

The barred owl kill plan, now backed by Doug Burgum’s Interior Department, will have the effect of pairing “incidental take permits” for spotted owls with corresponding shootings of barred owls as a “mitigation” strategy. The barred owl plan is being used as a key to unlock killing of spotted owls and the cutting down of their old growth forest habitat. Burgum wants to vastly expand logging in spotted owl habitat, with Section 50301 of H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, driving expanded timber cutting on federal lands — with the goal of increasing annual harvest from 3 billion board feet to 5 billion over the next eight years.

Let that sink in. Democratic lawmakers, who usually reflexively oppose any Trump Administration policy, sided with President Trump’s Interior Secretary and his perceived allies in the timber industry who want to cut down centuries-old forests, and don’t mind if they have to kill spotted owls to do it.

Yes, draw a straight line from barred owl killing to the plan to displace, wound, and kill the spotted owls who depend on those forests. The reason the Interior Secretary intervened to stop Sen. Kennedy’s resolution was because the loggers need a “mitigation” measure to legally permit “incidental take” of threatened spotted owls — and that mitigation measure is shooting barred owls.

It makes your head spin around quicker than an owl’s after seeing a vole.

Unprecedented Assault on Native Wildlife

North American forest owls have been federally protected for over a century under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. As Sen. Kennedy noted, they have had a modest range expansion over hundreds of years, not unlike hundreds of other bird species, from blue jays, bald eagles, red-shouldered hawks. The environmentalists and the timber industry want to call them trespassers because over the span of hundreds of years they fly and try out different parts of the country.

I’ve got news for them. That happens every day in nature. And heck, it’s how human beings spread across the New World after they crossed the Bering Sea land bridge. This is what species do. Like mating. Eating. Breathing. Birds in the wild aren’t tethered or caged. They’re free.

And think of the scale. The hoot-and-shoot is roughly 1,000 times larger than any previous government plan to kill off birds of prey, with a startling price tag of $1.35 billion. Described as an effort to save the threatened northern spotted owl, the plan will have exactly the opposite effect — resulting in the killing of spotted owls and the destruction of their habitats. The Endangered Species Act, designed as a shield to protect rare species, is now turned into a sword to hurt both rare and abundant species.

And it’s all a lot of activity with no reward. The government can pay contract shooters all day long to shoot barred owls, but it will make little difference according to wildlife scientists (see here, here, and here). Keeping spotted owls and barred owls away from each other is spitting in the ocean and trying to change the tides. Shooting projects for barred owls will have only the most fleeting effect, with surrounding barred owls replacing them and filling the void in short order. “As soon as you stop, barred owls will be back, and you will be back to square one,” Dr. Eric Forsman, dean of forest owl biologists who worked at U.S. Forest Service for decades, told the Seattle Times.

This plan will also divert scarce resources from endangered species protection. To fully implement the hoot-and-shoot may cost $1.35 billion over 30 years — perhaps as much as a third of the annual U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service endangered species recovery budget, which exists to protect over 1,300 species. “I do not believe that spending more than 1 billion dollars to kill almost one-half million barred owls is worth the carnage, expense, precedents, and distraction from what is the more-important issue: protection of biodiverse old-growth forests,” wrote Kent Livezey, former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, author of 14 peer-reviewed papers on barred and spotted owls.

And it explicitly allows shooting in 14 National Park Service units, including iconic sites like Yosemite, Olympic, Mount Rainier, and Sequoia. This conduct is at odds with the wildlife protection values of the National Park Service and its management of national parks. Dr. Elaine Leslie, former chief of the Biological Services for the National Park Service, wrote to lawmakers on behalf of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks and pleaded with the Interior Department not to open up the parks to owl hunting. “Barred owl reproduction and juvenile dispersal will negate any short-term reduction in lethal take of barred owls,” wrote Dr. Leslie. “Recolonization will occur rapidly.”

Democratic senators of the recent past, from California’s Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer to West Virginia’s Robert C. Byrd, fought to stop shooting wildlife in our national parks for the decades they served. Where were sensible Democratic voices like those this week? Do today’s Democrats care so little about animal welfare that they are willing to dismiss the unprecedented slaughter of federally protected birds, open up our national parks to hunting, and greenlight the destruction of spotted owl habitat? The answer seems to be yes, because they can’t say nobody told them. We’ve been telling them — and so have you — for most of this past year.

While yesterday was a shocker, it is not the end of the fight. We are already in federal court in Portland, Ore., to stop this kill plan. And we have other cards to play in Congress. And we have the fearless voices of Sens. Kennedy and Booker, who demand mercy and caring for owls and all of God’s creatures. We’re going to take our case to the American people and let the institutions of government catch up with their sensibilities.

Wayne Pacelle is president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy and a two-time New York Times best-selling author.