By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for California News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
In 2023, UC Berkeley student and activist Zoe Rosenberg removed four severely ill chickens from a slaughterhouse truck in Petaluma, California, and brought them to an animal sanctuary. Now, she's facing over five years in prison. Rosenberg's trial is scheduled for later this year, and her allegations tell a story of horrific conditions at ostensibly "free-range" chicken farms, as well as the steep uphill battle activists face in convincing law enforcement to even investigate allegations of animal cruelty on factory farms.
Rosenberg is an activist with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), a Bay Area-based animal rights organization. In addition to supporting ballot propositions and hosting conferences, DxE carries out undercover investigations of slaughterhouses and factory farms. In some cases, its activists rescue ill and imperiled animals from such facilities; this is what's known as "open rescue," a popular tactic among some animal rights activists.
The prospect of risking prison time for saving a few chickens, who are routinely sold for less than $20 apiece, may seem outlandish. But DxE activists like Rosenberg see it as a necessary risk to accomplish their ultimate goal: the complete abolition of slaughterhouses and factory farms.
"I think that if people don't take action and don't risk their freedom to create change, nothing will ever change," Rosenberg, who's currently wearing an ankle monitor while out on bail, tells Sentient. "We've seen time and time throughout history that it has been the sacrifices of the very few that have changed the world."
Petaluma Poultry did not respond to Sentient's request for comment on this story, but a company spokesperson denied DxE's claims to the San Francisco Chronicle, characterizing the group as "extremist" and its efforts as "theft."
What Is Open Rescue?
In essence, open rescue is the act of removing animals from dangerous or harmful environments without permission from the person, company or facility that oversees said animals. Those who carry out open rescues don't hide what they are doing, and often publicize their actions. Animals that are removed via open rescue are typically provided with medical care and/or taken to animal sanctuaries.
The goal of open rescues, which date back to at least the early 1980s, is not only to provide relief for the animals in question, but also to highlight the conditions in which farm animals are held, and to normalize the act of rescuing them. But it's a controversial practice, even among activists, and law enforcement officials generally treat open rescues as acts of theft, trespassing or other crimes.
This often leads to prosecution, but in the eyes of open rescue advocates, this isn't entirely a bad thing. Prosecutions often bring media attention and publicity to both the topic in question and the relevant laws surrounding that topic. Rosenberg's case, for instance, draws attention not only to the conditions of factory farms, but also to the fact that removing a few sick animals from a slaughterhouse can get you a half a decade in prison.
Do People Usually Go to Prison for Open Rescue?
Although charges are often brought in open rescue cases, they're frequently reduced or, in some cases, dropped entirely before trial. It's not uncommon for open rescuers to be acquitted, either; in a verdict that drew international headlines, DxE founder Wayne Hsiung and another defendant were facing 60 years in prison for rescuing two sick piglets from a Smithfield Farms facility in Utah, only to be acquitted of all charges.
That said, Hsiung did recently spend 38 days in Sonoma County jail for an open rescue in which he participated, so it's not unheard of for activists like Rosenberg to serve time for carrying out open rescues.
The Incident in Question
On June 13, 2023, Rosenberg entered a Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse partially disguised as an employee. A truck delivering chickens to the facility was parked outside, and Rosenberg spotted four chickens in the back of the truck who she says were "covered in scratches and bruises." She took them from the truck, left the slaughterhouse and both she and DxE publicized her actions on social media.
Rosenberg says that she intentionally took the chickens that "seemed like they most needed medical attention." Subsequent examinations found that all four birds were infected with Coccidia parasites; one of them also had a respiratory infection and an injured toe, while a third had a foot infection.
Five months later, Rosenberg was arrested and charged with five felonies relating to the June 13 rescue. These charges were later reduced, and as of this writing, she faces one felony conspiracy charge, two forms of misdemeanor trespassing charges, one misdemeanor theft charge and one misdemeanor charge of tampering with a vehicle. Her trial is scheduled for September 15, 2025.
The chickens she rescued were all treated for their illnesses, and are now living at an animal sanctuary.
A History of Animal Neglect At Petaluma Poultry
Petaluma Poultry, a subsidiary of the chicken giant Perdue, presents itself as a humane operation where, in the words of its website, "chickens are free to be chickens."
"Our houses are spacious, with room for birds to move about and exhibit normal behaviors in a low-stress environment open to fresh air," the company's website says. "Our outdoor spaces are at least half the size of the poultry house, and typically as big as the barn itself."
But Petaluma Poultry's advertising is a classic example of humane-washing, when companies try to appeal to animal welfare-minded consumers by depicting their products as more humanely produced than they actually are.
Petaluma Poultry and its contractors have been accused of criminal animal cruelty on a number of occasions, and footage filmed by undercover investigators in the company's farms and slaughterhouse paints a much different picture than the company's marketing.
In 2018, a whistleblower provided DxE with footage from McCoy's Poultry, a factory farm contracted by Petaluma Poultry, that showed chickens collapsed on the ground, unable to stand or walk and surrounded by the corpses of other chickens. Shortly thereafter, Sonoma County Animal Services seized 15 chickens from McCoy's Poultry; six were already dead, while the other nine were injured, malnourished, unable to stand and exhibited signs of distress, according to a subsequent medical report. The facility was later shut down.
In 2023, another activist who infiltrated Petaluma Poultry's slaughterhouse said that she saw workers cutting into chickens while they were still alive, as well as evidence that chickens had been abused, tortured and boiled alive during the slaughter process. They also obtained documents showing that, on a single day in April, over 1,000 chickens were deemed unfit for human consumption after they were slaughtered due to suspicion that they had blood poisoning.
Prior to her arrest for the June incident, Rosenberg herself was involved in a separate DxE investigation of a Petaluma Poultry facility in 2023, where she recorded footage of more chickens suffering in the facility.
"I documented chickens who were collapsed on the floor of their factory farms, too weak to stand, unable to get to food and water, and slowly dying of starvation and dehydration," Rosenberg says. She ended up rescuing two of those chickens as well, both of whom required extensive medical care.
It remains unclear whether authorities prosecuting or investigating these allegations of criminal animal cruelty? And if not, how come?
Rosenberg Raised Allegations of Animal Welfare Abuses
Poultry is the most widely consumed meat in the U.S. and the world, yet there are no federal laws that protect livestock chickens from mistreatment on the farm. The Humane Slaughter Act establishes some baseline requirements for the treatment of livestock, but it specifically exempts chickens from these protections.
In California, however, livestock chickens are protected under a number of different laws. In addition to Proposition 12, which requires poultry producers to give egg-laying hens a specific amount of living space, Section 597(b) of California's penal code makes it a felony to subject an animal to "needless suffering" or deprive them of access to sufficient food or water, among other things.
This law would appear to be relevant in the context of Petaluma Poultry. If a chicken at a factory farm is physically unable to stand (let alone walk), they will be unable to reach the feeding trays and water, and will eventually die of thirst or starvation. If a chicken is boiled alive because they were improperly stunned beforehand, it has suffered needlessly.
The aforementioned investigations uncovered evidence of both of these things happening at Petaluma Poultry and its contracted facilities. Both DxE and Rosenberg claim they've presented multiple law enforcement agencies with this evidence, only to be rebuffed or ignored.
"The most common thing we've had is agencies directing us to another agency, directing us to another agency, directing us back to the place where we started, and just kind of sending us around in circles," Rosenberg says. "We didn't get any helpful response. No one took action."
It was this inaction that led Rosenberg to take the four chickens from the back of the truck in June, she says. After doing so, she again presented her findings to law enforcement, specifically the Petaluma Police Department. This time, she got a response.
"They said they had a detective who wanted to have a call with me, and so I had like a 15-minute call with a detective from the Petaluma Police Department," Rosenberg says. "She very much approached the call from an angle of, you know, 'I'm concerned about the reports you are making.' And so I told her about the animal cruelty that has been documented there."
But Officer Corie Joerger, the detective in question, didn't follow up with her after their call, Rosenberg claims, and ignored her subsequent attempts at communication. A couple of weeks later, Joerger handed Rosenberg a warrant for her arrest regarding the June rescue.
In the preliminary hearing for Rosenberg's case, Joerger acknowledged that Rosenberg had made allegations of animal cruelty, but stated that she did not investigate the matter.
This inaction by law enforcement wasn't an isolated incident. When the investigation at McCoy's Poultry facility uncovered dead birds on the farm floor and others that were unable to move, Sonoma County Animal Services referred the matter to the county sheriff's office for potential prosecution. But no prosecution followed then, either.
Sentient has reached out to the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office, the Petaluma Police Department and Joerger for clarification on these reports, but as of this writing, none have offered any comments.
Petaluma Poultry Is More the Rule Than the Exception
The allegations against Petaluma Poultry might sound extreme. But in fact, many are par for the course on factory farms, and chicken farms in particular.
For instance, the USDA estimates that every year, around 825,000 chickens are boiled alive at slaughterhouses. This is not standard protocol, but rather, the result of standard protocol gone wrong.
At poultry slaughterhouses, chickens are typically hung upside down by their feet and pulled through an electrified pool of water, which is meant to stun them. After that, workers slit the chickens' throats, and after they've bled out, they're placed into boiling water. This is to soften the skin and make it easier to defeather them.
That's how it's supposed to work, at least. In actuality, though, one or both of those first two steps often fail; chickens are either inadequately stunned before their throats are cut, or their throats aren't fully slit, or both. When both of these processes fail, the chicken is inadvertently boiled alive, and feels every bit of pain associated with this.
Similarly, the fact that those chickens at Petaluma Poultry couldn't stand up or walk isn't an accident. Over the decades, farmers have selectively bred chickens to be as fat as possible, as this maximizes the amount of meat they can sell. According to the National Chicken Council, farmed chickens now grow to be over twice as large as they were 100 years ago in less than half the time.
This unnatural rate of growth has wrought havoc on their internal biology, however, and farm chickens now routinely suffer from a number of illnesses and adverse health conditions as a result, including bone deformities, heart attacks, chronic hunger, ruptured tendons and, most relevantly to Petaluma Poultry, difficulty standing up or walking.
Finally, Petaluma Poultry is far from the only chicken producer to make questionable use of the "free-range" label, which is ostensibly regulated by the USDA. In 2023, undercover footage taken from a Tyson Foods-contracted chicken farm in Virginia depicted employees of both the factory and Tyson freely acknowledging that the "free range" label doesn't actually mean anything, and that "free range" birds often "don't go outside."
Why Wasn't Petaluma Poultry Investigated by Law Enforcement?
Though it's unclear why local law enforcement hasn't pursued any investigations into the allegations against Petaluma Poultry, DxE's director of communications has some ideas.
"It would be a massive undertaking for any government agency, no matter how well-staffed they actually might be, to suddenly address the systemic animal cruelty that we know is happening in factory farms," Cassie King, director of communications at DxE tells Sentient. "If they put their foot in the door and acknowledge that it's their responsibility to address these crimes, then there's a landslide of new cases they need to take on, and it's just a huge amount of work."
It also bears mentioning that chicken farms are an enormous part of Petaluma's local economy, and have been for quite some time. Once referred to as "the egg basket of the world," Petaluma was the birthplace of several egg-related technologies at the turn of the century, and pumped out over a half a billion eggs every year at its peak in 1945.
Although the city isn't quite the egg powerhouse it once was, chickens are still big business in Petaluma. Though official estimates are difficult to come by, the city is home to at least seven chicken farms large enough to qualify as factory farms, and those facilities collectively house around 1.8 million chickens at any given time, according to a 2024 analysis by an activist group that opposes factory farms.
To be clear, there's no evidence that the poultry industry's strong presence in Petaluma has played any role in law enforcement's response to allegations of cruelty at the city's chicken farms. But the fact that the Petaluma Police Department publicly celebrates the city's poultry industry, and participates in the annual Butter and Eggs Day festival in a non-law enforcement capacity, is not lost on DxE activists.
Rosenberg Awaiting Trial
For her part, Rosenberg maintains that her actions were legal. She cites the doctrine of necessity, a legal theory holding that it's sometimes permissible to break a law if doing so prevents even greater harm from occurring.
"For example, if a kid is drowning in your neighbor's pool and no one is helping that kid, you have the right to trespass into your neighbor's yard to rescue the kid," Rosenberg says.
How this defense plays out in court remains to be seen, but it's essentially the same argument Hsiung's attorneys successfully used in the Utah case. In the meantime, Rosenberg says she's been encouraged by the public reaction to her case (Paris Hilton is a prominent supporter), and doesn't regret her actions even if they do land her in prison.
"A few years of my freedom is worth significantly less than even one animal's entire life, and certainly less than four animals' entire lives," Rosenberg says. "And so it's absolutely worth it to me on that level."
Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.
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By Amy McDermott for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Pulitzer Center-Public News Service Collaboration.
Wildlife biologist David Wiens was extremely nervous the first time he shot an owl. He steadied himself in the evening darkness of an Oregon fire road, pointed his shotgun at a big barred owl perched on a stump, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened; the gun's safety was still on. "I had to completely recollect myself," he recalls. "The bird just stayed there." Wiens thought back to the months of firearm training preparing him for this moment, resettled the gun's viewfinder on the owl, then pulled the trigger.
Wiens, who works for the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Corvallis, is head biologist of a six-year experiment culling barred owls from areas of Oregon, Washington, and Northern California. Researchers wanted to know if removing barred owls would help another species, the threatened spotted owl, survive.
Management methods that involve killing animals are called lethal control. It's often assumed that reducing the population of one species will help another survive-for instance, killing invasives to protect natives, or culling predators to benefit livestock. Millions of animals are destroyed by lethal control every year in the United States, including coyotes, raccoons, feral cats, prairie dogs, bears, and mountain lions.
Deciding which animals should live or die is not so clear-cut, and context matters. For example, the barred owl is native to North America but expanded beyond its historical range alongside human development. Are they invasive? It depends on whom you ask. Search the literature, and you'll see trade-offs and ethical distinctions between killing invasive species to protect natives and killing native predators, such as wolves and mountain lions, to benefit ranchers.
In general, the public is more comfortable killing exotic, invasive species (think: pythons in the Everglades) than with killing native predators, such as wolves or coyotes, explains wildlife biologist Rachael Urbanek at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Still, the core question is the same: Is there evidence that killing effectively manages populations? The answers differ case to case, she says.
And then there's the core ethical quandary: Even if lethal control can work, is it the right thing to do? What if you can only guarantee it will work for a few years? How do you value one animal over another? Those questions fuel a heated debate, which simmers ever hotter as public attitudes about animal welfare evolve. Values, as much as data, are likely to determine whether governments and communities abide lethal control as a policy.
Frontier Origins
Wiens had never fired a gun before training for this experiment. Killing any bird of prey ran counter to his ecology education before the study. "Every time I went out there to do it, it was extremely difficult," he says. But Wiens believes that to maintain biodiversity, lethal control has become "more and more necessary," particularly in the case of invasive species.
Others disagree. "I don't think you can find any research that does adequately demonstrate that lethal control works," says William Lynn, an ethicist in the Marsh Institute at Clark University in Massachusetts and the founder of PAN Works, an animal ethics think tank. The US Fish and Wildlife Service hired Lynn 15 years ago to lead a stakeholder group (which included conservation organizations and timber industry representatives) to discuss ethical concerns about the planned barred owl removal experiment in the Pacific Northwest (1, 2). Many participants said they valued the owls' lives and recoiled at the thought of routine killing.
The owl case is one of the most meticulously studied. Barred owls, native to eastern North America, have spread west over the last century (an expansion unintentionally facilitated by humans) and are now encroaching on the last western old-growth forests where threatened spotted owls roost. The hope is that by killing thousands of the encroachers, wildlife biologists can stabilize spotted owl populations.
The results of Wiens' experiment are promising. After removing about 3,000 barred owls over a six-year period, the USGS team found that spotted owl populations stabilized (3). The US Fish and Wildlife Service now plans to conduct a scaled-up 30-year cull of barred owls, starting this year, based largely on the results of the experiment. As of early March, a number of lawmakers from multiple states encouraged the Trump administration to scrap the plan, citing high costs and dubious success.
It's the latest salvo in a long history of efforts to kill in order to manage populations. The story of lethal control in the United States began on the Great Plains in the early 1800s, when European settlers decimated bison, elk, deer, and pronghorn populations, explains Brad Bergstrom, professor emeritus of vertebrate ecology at Valdosta State University in Georgia. Bergstrom chaired the Conservation Committee of the American Society of Mammalogists for nearly a decade. He authored a widely cited 2014 review on the history of lethal control in the United States, among other topical articles (4, 5).
What happened, Bergstrom says, is that starving wolves, bears, pumas, and other predators turned to cattle as prey. The US government responded with a program of shooting and trapping predators to protect livestock. Its modern incarnation is Wildlife Services, an agency within the US Department of Agriculture. "That's how it started, and we're still doing that," Bergstrom says.
Perception vs Reality
The Department of Wildlife Services is still the federal agency largely tasked with lethal control. In 2023, the agency killed 1,454,324 animals, according to their annual report (6), including 24,603 beavers, whose dams are blamed for flooding (7); 18,916 double-crested cormorant birds, whose eating habits are ostensibly pressuring fisheries (8); and 68,562 coyotes, which raise concerns about killing farm animals and pets, though there's little evidence that killing carnivores protects livestock (9).
"I think Wildlife Services has gotten a lot of negative media attention over many decades," Urbanek says. Much of it is undeserved, in her opinion. The agency's attitude certainly isn't "have at it-let's kill them all!" Wildlife Services studies nonlethal methods as well, she notes, whether directed at deer-car collisions or bird-airplane collisions.
Often, a government agency engages in lethal control-for instance, with coyotes-because of a public outcry, Urbanek says. "It's a social carrying capacity," she says. People start noticing more coyotes, eventually feel there are too many, and then complain to their local government, which can go to state agencies or Wildlife Services to intervene and neutralize the perceived threat. In Wilmington, where Urbanek lives, and where both human and coyote populations have grown in recent decades, "we don't want to get to that point," she says.
So, in 2023, she published survey results that gauged public attitudes toward the growing coyote population (10). The survey quizzed residents on their knowledge of normal coyote behavior and asked how the county should spend tax money-whether on coyote lethal control, public education about coyotes, or other measures. Only 11% of respondents said they'd had aggressive encounters with coyotes. Many of those stories came from wary people who saw a coyote nearby and felt threatened, Urbanek says. Most respondents supported spending tax dollars on public education over culling, except in cases of coyote attacks. Urbanek says the survey, by highlighting the role of education, is helping Wilmington get ahead of a widespread fearful response that might lead to lethal control.
Wilmington's parks and gardens have since begun a series of coyote education events. To keep humans and pets safe, Urbanek says she teaches hazing: "Getting an empty soda can, putting coins or rocks in it, taping it shut, and shaking it." Coyotes run off at the noise.
Silver Bullets
What does the science say? The answers and the caveats vary, case by case.
Consider the Blanding's turtle, a northeastern species that's endangered in some states due to habitat loss and the pet trade. "These guys are adorable and a really friendly turtle," Urbanek says. People tend to poach them as pets. In 2013, the Lake County Forest Preserve District was monitoring the turtles at two nature preserves on the Illinois-Wisconsin border and had two healthy populations left. The district was actively taking eggs from nests and hand-raising them, then releasing the young turtles back into the wild to give them a head start. But raccoons and other predators often discovered the nests and dug them up.
The district asked Urbanek's lab to see if culling raccoons before nesting season would help, by creating a window of time when the nests went undisturbed before the predators moved back in (11).
Her team trapped and killed 45 raccoons from the 2-square-kilometer study area in spring 2013, reducing raccoon population density by about 90%. Because raccoons can carry rabies, they couldn't legally be relocated. In the nesting season that followed, only one of seven, or 14%, of monitored Blanding's turtle nests was attacked and partially eaten.
The next year, though, the researchers repeated the experiment by culling 33 raccoons. This time, 9 of 15 turtle nests, or 60%, were attacked. Foxes, opossums, and skunks had likely moved in on the food source with the raccoons gone.
Urbanek's conclusion: Predator management, especially for threatened species, "can help to some degree"-after all, there was a boost for the Blanding's turtle nests in 2013. But in general, the two-year study showed that "predator management is not the panacea," she says. Killing the raccoons didn't save the turtles long-term.
Maybe if the team had killed foxes, skunks, opossums, and raccoons every year, they'd have seen a lasting impact. Then again, maybe not. There are communities on North Carolina's barrier islands that hire trappers to take foxes, raccoons, and coyotes, in hopes of helping endangered sea turtle nests. In those cases, Urbanek says, predators "move back quickly, even across the water."
Borne on Brown Wings
But it's the case of the barred and spotted owls that's received the most public attention of late-and spurred the most vocal controversy.
In this tale of two owls, the barred is larger, territorially competitive, and better at living alongside people. The northern spotted owl, by contrast, only lives in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest and northern California, roosting in the cracked trunks of old conifers. The northern spotted owl has been a fiercely beloved mascot of the Northwest since 1990, when its listing as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act gave teeth to forest protection efforts. These two owls have been on a collision course since around 1900, Wiens says, when European settlers planted trees on the Great Plains. Barred owls probably used those trees to hopscotch their way west from their native eastern forests. Since the 1960s, they've arrived in the Northwest, where they're outcompeting the spotted owls for nesting hollows and food.
In response, the US Fish and Wildlife Service developed the removal experiment, killing some 3,100 barred owls over six years in areas of Oregon, Washington, and Northern California, to test if their removal would slow, stop, or reverse spotted owl declines. It did seem to help. Spotted owl numbers stopped crashing at the treatment sites-though, notably, their populations didn't grow either. Populations leveled out at a 0% rate of change. In control areas, spotted owls declined by an average of 12% per year. At one control site, there was a single owl left by the end of the study (3). Since those results were published in 2021, Fish and Wildlife has unveiled a strategy of more widespread barred owl killing to be deployed, up to the next 30 years, across Oregon, Washington, and California.
Although Wiens thinks the plan is necessary to save the spotted owl, he also sees potential issues. It's been five years since his experiment, and at a decline rate of 12% annually, that leaves few spotted owls to save in places that already had small populations, such as Washington and northern Oregon. The larger spotted owl populations in Northern California and southern Oregon have been impacted heavily by barred owls recently, in the last 5-10 years, and culls should be effective there, he says.
Without implementing the strategy, and conserving old growth forest, Wiens says we'll eventually see extinction of the northern spotted owl. But barred owls have wider impacts on other species as well. He found the bones of smaller pygmy and screech owls in the stomachs of barred owls during the experiment. And many of these smaller native owls are also competing with barred owls for the same small mammal prey. It's never been just about northern spotted owls, he says; it requires "a more holistic view."
Bergstrom calls the owl research "intricate" and "well-designed" and says those attributes make it "the exception, not the rule" for cases of predator lethal control. But he would argue that a scaled-up cull of barred owls only treats a symptom of habitat loss, not the habitat loss itself. "Extreme habitat specialists are in trouble everywhere," he says, "and the only long-term solution is to restore their habitat."
Even if thousands of barred owls are shot, that won't suddenly free spotted owls to expand beyond the tiny islands of habitat left to them. "I hate to say it, but I think the spotted owl is doomed," Bergstrom says. "Because even if barred owl removal works, is it really going to be funded forever? Or for as long as it takes for the old-growth forests to grow back?"
Toward Value and Virtue
Some argue that lethal control has become so polarizing because it's really more of a values debate than a scientific one. When is it OK to take the life of an animal, especially an intelligent one? "While there are scientific questions in play...there is a more deep-seated controversy that stems from value differences," which often go unacknowledged or underacknowledged, says interdisciplinary scientist Jeremy Bruskotter at The Ohio State University in Columbus. Questions about lethal control's effectiveness are rarely separate from the more emotional quandary: Even if it works, "should we do it?" he says.
Bruskotter coauthored several recent studies suggesting that opinions on lethal control-and how we value wildlife in general-are changing. In a survey of 43,949 people across all 50 states, published in a series of papers (12-14), Bruskotter posed 19 questions about ideal relationships with wildlife and dozens of other questions to gauge public perceptions of wildlife-related issues.
For each question, participants read a statement, such as "the needs of humans should take priority over fish and wildlife protection," and then indicated their alignment on a scale from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree."
Comparing those results to similar questions from earlier studies, as far back as 2004 and in 19 western states, attitudes had significantly shifted toward viewing animals as "morally relevant," Bruskotter says, meaning deserving of care and compassion, as opposed to just a means to human ends. "People are demanding good answers for why animals should be killed," he says. However, the results were not uniform across the West. The values shift was most pronounced in Utah, Nevada, and California, where more sympathetic views of animals had spread since 2004. But in the same analysis, more traditional views of animals as resources had expanded in 2 of the 19 states, Wyoming and North Dakota. Increasing disparities in public values state to state suggest one reason why disagreements over lethal control are getting more polarizing.
"Science is the surrogate for what is actually a values debate," Bruskotter says. The relationships people wanted with wildlife even 10 years ago aren't the relationships they say they want today.
"In the majority of cases, lethal control doesn't do what people expect and want," says ecologist Adrian Treves at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The field has become so polarized that researchers are entrenched in camps, he adds. "People have forgotten the lesson that when those scientific debates get so hot, that's when we need more and better data," Treves says.
There are at least ways to make killing more humane. In the case of the owls, Wiens' study included protocols to take only clear shots at close range, using a special type of quiet gun barrel. "Usually, it was one shot, and that's it, so it was very quick," he says. The culled owls were physically intact and became museum specimens for future studies.
Ultimately, lethal control is a response to dilemmas humans have created-poaching, habitat destruction, the spread of invasive species. "In our history as humans, we've moved animals and plants around to hunt them and eat them, or because they look pretty," Urbanek says. "We are still playing that role and trying to fix that."
Amy McDermott wrote this article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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