Animal Sacrifice: How the U.S. Government Tolerates the Ritual Killing of Eagles and Hawks

Our federal government is abetting and enabling animal sacrifice.

You read that right.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is providing “take” permits for Hopi and Jemez Pueblo tribal members to capture, torment, and then smother and kill golden eagles and red-tailed hawks.

And now, for the first time and in a derogation of its commitment to protecting the wild inhabitants soaring over public lands, the National Park Service has provided a take permit to the Jemez Pueblos (for the same cruel ritual) from an NPS unit (the Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico) for a bald or golden eagle.

For decades, the NPS forbade taking raptors for sacrifice in tribal rituals. But in the waning hours of the Clinton administration, Interior officials wrote a rule to permit it. That rule, however, was never implemented by the George W. Bush administration. Finally, in 2023, the Biden administration implemented the rule.

With that scheme in motion, there’s been plenty of carnage owing to the moral cave-in by the leaders of the USFWS and NPS.

We are now blowing the whistle, with special disgust for the trapping, torture, and sacrifice of eagles and hawks on our public lands.

We are joining with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility — whose ranks include former professional staff from the USFWS and NPS — to throw open the curtain and call out cruelty masquerading as religious ceremony.

Nature Writer Ted Williams Exposes Animal Torture and Sacrifice

Award-winning nature and outdoors writer Ted Williams breaks the story today on the Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy websites, in a new platform called In Depth — a section of our websites that will feature stories and investigations that expose major problems for animals.

Here are some of the findings from Ted Williams’ news report, broken first on our website:

• In 2022, the USFWS issued a yearly take permit to the Hopis for 50 red-tailed hawks until March 31, 2026. And it issued them a take permit for 40 golden eagles.
  
  
• In 2023, the USFWS issued a take permit to the Jemez Pueblos for eight eagles (an undisclosed mix of bald and golden eagles).
  
  
• In 2023, the NPS issued a take permit to the Jemez Pueblos for one eagle (bald or golden) from the Valles Caldera National Preserve (from the eight authorized by USFWS).
  
  
• In 2024, the USFWS issued another Hopi take permit for 40 golden eagles and a new take permit to the Jemez Pueblos for eight more eagles (an undisclosed mix of balds and goldens).
  
  
• In 2025, USFWS will apparently issue a new take permit to the Jemez Pueblos for eight more eagles (an undisclosed mix of balds and goldens).

Williams reports that “[f]ledgling eagles and hawks are taken from their nests in spring, tied to adobe rooftops, fed bits of rabbits and mice, presented with children’s toys, and told how honored they should feel to be chosen for the ritual.” He goes on to describe how the birds are “restrained under the hot sun for almost three months,” and sometimes, “their eyelids are sewn shut, and straps around their feet wear away skin and sinew.” Eventually, “they are smothered with blankets or cornmeal so they may travel to the ‘other world’ and tell the gods about their kind and generous treatment.”

These practices not only sound a dissonant note with our norms on the treatment of animals, but also with our laws protecting migratory birds — notably the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940.

It’s Animal Sacrifice by Any Name

The USFWS is the same agency we are battling over its overreaching, unworkable, and costly plan to massacre 470,000 barred owls to reduce competition with spotted owls. But in the case of raptor torture and sacrifice, there’s no ecological or species protection rationale for killing. It’s conducted as religious ritual, with no other practical grounding.

As Williams reports, another reason the tribes kill raptors is to collect their feathers. It’s not done for anything resembling a human necessity.

Williams reports that there are plenty of Native American tribes that are critical of these practices, including Navajo Nation, which “keeps complaining about trespassing Hopis depleting its eagle population.” He notes that “the Eastern Shoshones, who revere free, living eagles as messengers to the creator and are adamant about protecting them, sued the Interior Department for denying their fundamental religious rights by permitting the Arapaho to kill bald eagles on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, shared by the two tribes.”

Indeed, animal sacrifice as a form of religious practice has long been a part of the human story. But it’s waned over two thousand years in all religious traditions across the East and the West, unable to withstand evolving norms of proper animal treatment and easily replaced with cruelty-free symbolic acts. One of the best-known examples comes from Christianity, whose adherents interpret Jesus’ crucifixion as the ultimate sacrifice, eliminating the need for further animal offerings.

Invoking animal sacrifice as a matter of religious freedom is increasingly a settled issue, no matter the geography, ethnicity, or duration of experience with animal killing as an offering to the gods. Animals matter, and their well-being is worth more to us as a society than the invoking of practices that can be very substantially preserved by squeezing out the cruelty and the killing.

I hope today you’ll read the exposé from Ted Williams on our websites. We’ll be announcing our new campaign to the nation in the coming days.

And I hope you’ll support our work that makes these investigations and reporting possible.

We are not afraid to confront inhumane treatment of animals, whether the conduct involves privations on a factory farm in Iowa or China, staged fights of dogs or birds in Peoria or the Philippines, or the ritualistic suffocation of eagles in the desert Southwest or low country of South Carolina.

Whether the excuse is economic motives or cultural or religious prerogative, nobody should get a pass on cruelty. Nobody.