J.K. Rowling may have never intended for owls to become household pets when she gave Harry Potter Hedwig the snowy owl.

Twenty years after the first book “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was published, Harry and his friends along with all the fantastic beasts are still well remembered. Some seem to be clinging to the magic world of Harry Potter by keeping an owl as a pet, which has, however, triggered concern.

A recent report from Global Ecology and Conservation indicated that the demand for pet owls on Indonesian markets has spiked sharply in the past two decades. Wildlife researchers found the number of owls for sale in Bali and Java was 13,000 in 2016, but the annual sales were only a few hundred before 2001. Owl sales made up 1.5 percent of all sales in 2016, up from less than 0.1 percent.

Although it’s difficult to prove a direct link the fictional phenomenon to rising owl sales, “Harry Potter normalized keeping owls as pets,” Vincent Nijman, a coauthor of the study and a wildlife-trade researcher at Oxford Brookes University, was quoted as saying by Nature.

Owls are called Burung Hantu in Malay but are now colloquially known as Burung Harry Potter, meaning “Harry Potter birds,” Nijman said, adding that owls are affordable for almost anybody with a job.

Comparing the owls to cut flowers, Nijman said, “They are alive and cute when you see them on the market, but realistically they are already dead.”

According to Nature, almost all owls on sales in Indonesia were caught in the wild and Indonesian law forbids the trade of wildlife.

China also bans the sales of owls, which are listed as protected animals, but the bird is no luckier in China than in Indonesia.

Not only featuring Hedwig, pet owls are also popular stars on Chinese social networks, usually for their cute-looking videos – when their wide-open eyes and feathery but stiff bodies indicate fear instead.

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On Baidu Tieba, an online forum in China themed on owls, knowhow on caring for a pet owl remain posted at the top of the forum, calling owls “beautiful but hard to tame.” One netizen provides instructions on how to properly feed a pet owl raw meat and warned that a large space is needed so they can fly for exercise, adding in large red fonts: “Owls are protected animals. People who keep one for personal use without approval is at risk for arrest.”

In fact, it is already difficult to find online stores selling owls, but many netizens still claim that pet owls are available online and even in pet shops.

A search on Taobao just yields pages of toys and furnishings only. But the door to the illegal owl trade remains open to people in the know or who can find their way to the hidden gray market on social networking app WeChat.

In 2015, a man was found selling “cute birds” on China’s version of Craigslist, 58.com, which turned out to be collared scops owls. The man was placed on a police wanted list for selling protected animals and 58.com removed the post and argued that the man used "cute birds" instead of blocked keywords such as “owls” to avoid detection. 

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