The owl was found dead (Picture: RSPCA)

This is why you should think twice about letting off sky lanterns.

They look beautiful and seem harmless when you light the flame that lifts them into the air, with around 200,000 sold in the UK every year.

But they have a deadly effect on animals and the environment, as this picture of a barn owl trapped in the wire and paper shows.

It couldn’t get out and was found dead on the ground.


The lanterns, sometimes called Chinese lanterns, can also cause wildfires if they land while still burning and the RSPCA warned people not to use them.

Why are they damaging? They harm animals because they may eat parts of them or become tangled or trapped in them. Sharp parts of them can tear and puncture an animal’s throat or stomach causing internal bleeding. Animals can become entangled in fallen lantern frames and suffer from injury and stress struggling to get free, or starve to death. Marine life is endangered by lanterns falling into the sea. People releasing a sky lantern (Picture: Martin Dimitrov/Getty) They can also cause fires, and litter wherever they land as even so-called ‘biodegradeable’ bamboo lanterns take decades to degrade. Some countries have already banned them and there are calls for the UK to do the same. Landowners have called for a ban following cases of livestock injured or killed from eating lantern parts accidentally chopped into animal feed during harvest, or getting caught in wire frames that have landed in fields.

The RSPCA listed some of the other animals killed by sky lanterns:



A foal had to be put to sleep after his legs were so badly injured from bolting through a fence having been terrified by a lantern.

Holly, a nine-month-old goat died after the frame of a lantern punctured her throat.

A farmer in Chester told how a cow died when the wire from a sky lantern punctured her oesophagus after ingestion, saying ‘in effect she spent a long, painful 48 hours suffocating on her own feed.’