People coming of political age in the last decade or so were no doubt shocked to learn of the Biden administration’s insane plan for saving the northern spotted owl from purported extinction. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for implementing the Endangered Species Act, preserving the owl requires slaughtering nearly half a million barred owls at a cost, opponents say, of $1.3 billion over the next 30 years. That is so, the FWS maintains, because the larger, aggressive barred owl is killing its cousin at a prodigious rate. 

Perhaps more stunning to these political newcomers is that the FWS made a similar prediction over 30 years ago regarding the northern spotted owl. In the early 1990s, the agency declared that logging in the Pacific Northwest, throughout Washington, Oregon, and northern California, was destroying the owl’s essential habitat and must end.