It's an interesting story, but I think in practice the best way to learn to control owls would be to precommit to kill the young owl before it got too large, experiment with it, and through experimenting with and killing many young owls, learn how to tame and control owls reliably. Doing owl control research in the absence of a young owl to experiment on seems unlikely to yield much of use--imagine trying to study zoology without having any animals or botany without having any plants.