Mass Killing of Owls for Direct Mail Lies

I wish Perry Plumart were still alive.

Back when I worked at the National Audubon Society, Perry — the Legislative Director — came down the hall to bust my balls for heresy.

Moi?  Heresy?  

Pray tell what had I said?  

Well, it seems I was breaking a lot of begging bowls, and not just at Audubon, but at a few other Big Green groups?

What had I said?  

Simply this:  a subspecies is not a species.  

“Sonoran Proghorns” are just Pronghorns, the “Florida Panther” is just a Mountain Lion, and there is no such thing as a “Northern Spotted Owl”, there is only the Spotted Owl and it is not endangered and lives in varied habitat from Mexican desert into old growth British Columbia.

Perry was not going to argue the science with me because he couldn’t.  

Instead he argued that the lie was convenient and that a lot of direct mail and inter-organizational relationships were in conflict with the truth. “Cut it out” was his bottom line. I agreed, but not before noting that in this instance bad science was going to bite us in the ass.

Now it has.  

See >>> https://www.opb.org/article/2024/04/08/government-proposal-to-kill-a-half-million-owls-sparks-controversy/?

“A proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to kill roughly half a million barred owls to protect the spotted owl has conservationists and animal welfare advocates debating the moral issue of killing one species to protect another.…

“But the USFWS says if no action is taken to cull the barred owl population, the northern spotted owl faces extinction.

“The barred owl is crowding out its less aggressive relative, the northern spotted owl, in the Northwestern states, according to the USFWS. To ensure the survival of the northern spotted owl, a threatened species, the service is proposing the mass removal of over 470,000 barred owls across California, Washington and Oregon over a three-decade span.“

Which is why I wish Perry Plumart was alive.  

I would never ask Perry to eat crow.  But owl?  

Maybe.

I kid, I kid!  

Perry was a good guy; he was just trying to negotiate the lie factory that is the bread and butter of so many direct mail organizations on every side in every debate.  I was making his “relationships” job harder.  He knew that was not my intent, and we both knew I was right on substance. 

But… as Bob Dylan so dryly observed… everybody is “going to have to serve somebody” some day and some way.  

Bending the truth? << shrug >> One man’s “stress position,” is another man’s torture.  

So long as we agreed on where truth was, I was not going to alert the Geneva Convention.

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