How ‘Harry Potter’ Accidentally Helped Create a Real-Life Owl Crisis - VICE

Evidently, the Harry Potter movies were far more influential than many of us in the U.S. realized.

As it turns out, fans in the UK were so enamored with Harry’s pet owl, Hedwig, that they decided to get owls of their own—because how could that possibly go wrong? By the time the final film in the series was released in 2011, however, the craze appeared to die down, as did part of the country’s owl population. You see, around then, many people got sick of their little feathered friends and started getting rid of them.

In May 2012, The Mirror reported that hundreds of owls had recently been abandoned in some way or another, with many believed to have been illegally released into the wild. “Before the films were out I had six owls, now it’s 100. It’s all down to Harry Potter,” said Pam Toothill of the North Wales Owl Sanctuary. “People saw Harry’s owl in the movies and thought how cute and cuddly they looked,” she continued. “Now they are bored and fed up with all the work involved in looking after an owl.”

‘Harry Potter’ Made Owls Trendy Pets, With Disastrous Results Toothill went on to explain that owls are very costly to take care of. Ideally, owners should have a 20-foot aviary to house them in, which could run as high as £900 (or $1,192). But according to Toothill, that wasn’t what everyone’s setup was like. In fact, one of the women Toothill dealt with was actually keeping two owls in a bedside cabinet in her bedroom. “And there was a chap with a European Eagle Owl, which has a five-foot wingspan, in his one-bedroom flat,” she revealed, adding, “It’s insane.”

Things got so bad that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling even pleaded with her fans not to keep owls as pets. “If anybody has been influenced by my books to think an owl would be happiest shut in a small cage and kept in a house, I would like to take this opportunity to say as forcefully as I can, ‘You are wrong,’” Rowling wrote in 2012.

“If your owl-mania seeks concrete expression, why not sponsor an owl at a bird sanctuary where you can visit and know that you have secured him or her a happy, healthy life?”