KATU has run a story on spotted owls. Bring it on, rednecks.
The article discusses how wildlife managers are considering removing some barred owls to help the spotted.

jetmet was the first to respond.

If barred and spotted owls can mate and produce offspring, it seems to me quite questionable that we should be playing God and killing off one to, maybe, save the other. This sounds like natural selection, survival of the fittest, evolution, or whatever you wish to call it. It doesn't seem to me that man, with all his arrogance, should be interfering. Had we totally banned logging, the barred owl would still have expanded into the area and the result would have been the same. There would just have been more spotted owls to mate with. The spotted own has become so finicky about what it eats that it is probably doomed on its own. Interbreeding sounds like nature's smartest move.

Not a horrible post, at least the person shows some signs of reasoning, which is more than I can say for most of the people on the forums.

Me:

Interbreeding = hybridization = loss of a unique species.

This is one thing we might WANT to interfere with. Goodness knows we've interfered with the ecology and fates of plenty of other species, to their detriment. Comments like that just get me every time. It's like "well, if it benefits us to wipe out this habitat, let's play God. If it costs us money or has anything to do with parts of government we don't like, let's not interfere."

Also, we have no idea if the results would have been the same had we banned logging altogether. There are too many variables to be able to come to that conclusion

Oh, SmileBiger, how I hate thee -

Before the environmentalists used the spotted owl is a ploy to stop logging I never heard of one and still have never seen a real one so I don't believe my life would be affected if all spotted owls died out, how would it affect your life? Probably not at all. Other than the spotted owl who or what does it affect? My guess is nothing.

What has been affected is school funding, jobs and the cost of lumber. All of that affects my pocket and I say let the spotted owl go extinct and then do a study on who care. Hire me to do this study because I know the answer already.

Me:

"Other than the spotted owl who or what does it affect?"

Please read a basic ecology textbook.

SmileBiger:

oh the basic ecology textbooks has been forced down schoolchildren throats through generations and I was one of those unfortunate victims of brainwashing however I learned to think on my own.

Common sense tells you there's been species going extinct or nearly throughout history and yet the world is getting along just fine. Has your life been affected by anything that's gone extinct tell me how.

Wacko environmentalists try to tell us there's a huge number of species going extinct every day and yet I don't know how anybody's life has been affected by it.

However I do know what it has cost us to try to save this one species of owl and with all of our efforts nature is killing them off anyway.

Me:

If you have ever spent any meaningful time in the wilderness, or anywhere that hasn't been completely taken over by our efforts at civilization, the teachings of an ecology textbook suddenly become very real. It is easy to see, after observing and being in nature, the truth. That truth is, fortunately, high above and unrelated to any brainwashing efforts, and immune to any man's dismissal of its importance.

It does not matter whether or not a human being is affected by an extinction. To gauge whether or not a human-caused or otherwise extinction is important, one should never attempt to link its immediate relevancy to our day-to-day lives. Doing so only shows your ignorance.

To answer your question, yes, my life has been affected. The animal that really spurred my interest in wildlife was the thylacine. Due to human ignorance, it is gone. It was the last large marsupial predator on the planet, and we willingly and knowingly destroyed it. It outlived all its prehistoric relatives to be shot and poisoned to death by ill-informed sheep farmers and the public of Tasmania.