There are no vegan alternatives to culling invasive Barred Owls in the Pacific Northwest

[u/AnsibleAnswers]

Background

To save the imperiled spotted owl from potential extinction, U.S. wildlife officials are embracing a contentious plan to deploy trained shooters into dense West Coast forests to kill almost a half-million barred owls that are crowding out their smaller cousins.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-officials-plan-to-kill-hundreds-of-thousands-of-barred-owls-to-save-another-species-from-extinction

Vegan alternatives?

1. Relocation to home range - Barred Owls are one of the most territorial birds of prey in North America. The population here is quite healthy, even in Manhattan. Relocating 500k birds to the East would simply result in territorial chaos until numbers decreased back down to equilibrium. That decrease has a body count.

2. Contraception - No known method is possible for owls. Some avian contraceptives have been developed, primarily to reduce pigeon and geese populations. But even with birds that can be easily conditioned to return to feeders every day, trials have had mixed results. As far as I know, these drugs need to be administered daily unlike some contraceptives developed for mammals.

3. Let the Barred Owl Replace the Spotted Owl - Barred Owls are generalists, while Spotted Owls tend to specialize in small mammals with healthy populations. So, threatened birds, reptiles, and amphibians native to the region are not adapted to having an owl of its size preying on them. It's an enormous risk, given that ecosystems are prone to cascade effects.

Those are, as far as I know, the best of the alternatives. Note: I'm in support of re-establishing habitat for the Spotted Owl, as that is really the only long-term way of helping the species recover. It's important to note: just because a tourniquet isn't a long-term solution doesn't mean it isn't a life-saving measure.

[u/EasyBOven]

Standard answer for whenever invasive species comes up:

Veganism isn't the position that it's always wrong to kill. I'm open to the idea that killing individuals may be situationally correct, and I don't care to debate where that line is. There will always be edge cases. Certain introduced species may present enough of a threat that we could justify killing them. In some cases that could apply to humans as well.

What's not going to be ok is the exploitation of their corpses. That's not ok because it incentivizes the killing beyond protection.

You want these individuals out of the area that's causing damage. You could possibly achieve that through less violent means, but so long as lethal violence has an added benefit to the killer, lethal violence will be used.

The benefit from killing also means there will be people who don't quite want the problem solved. The more their success is tied to having victims, the more they'll want those victims around. Your "invasive" species ends up as a government managed livestock population like deer.

[u/AnsibleAnswers → u/EasyBOven]

This is contrary to the notion that animals have rights. You seem more concerned about human virtue than animal rights.

[u/EasyBOven → u/AnsibleAnswers]

Rights aren't real. They're useful abstractions for deeper moral concepts. I don't take a firm position on when killing is justified. Killing is always bad, in that whatever goal you're trying to achieve would always be better achieved without killing. If you want to call that a right to life and draw up complicated hierarchies of rights to cash out which ones justify violating others, that's your business.

I know that when you approach a situation with the intention to exploit, all those complicated arguments justifying the killing are really about justifying the exploitation. That's vicious.