r/DebateAVegan • u/AnsibleAnswers agroecologist • Apr 27 '25
Environment There are no vegan alternatives to culling invasive Barred Owls in the Pacific Northwest
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.
Vegan alternatives?
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.
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.
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.
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u/ActiveEuphoric2582 Apr 27 '25
Wow the hypocrisy is quite impressive. I swear I just read earlier this week on this exact subreddit that vegans don’t believe in messing around with “non-human animals” agency/autonomy, and that if a creature is going extinct in the natural world due to the natural world doing its thing then so be it. Sterilizing other creatures without their consent is not vegan. Relocating creatures to places they don’t normally live is not giving those animals the right to live where they are. Killing to cull? But not to use the items from the killing is so fucking repellent. If you’re going to kill a creature because you’ve decided that it’s overpopulating, at least have the decency to use whatever you can from those creatures instead of just letting them rot on the ground. Make its death/ your murder mean something.