"One day, while being shown off to an Ohio newspaper reporter, Owney bit the clerk who was handling him. The postmaster had Owney put down on June 11, 1897. Railway mail clerks chipped in money to have a taxidermist preserve Owney’s body, which then was sent to postal headquarters in Washington, DC, for exhibit. In 1911, the Post Office Department entrusted Owney to the Smithsonian Institution. Since 1993, Owney has been on display at the National Postal Museum in Washington, DC. In 2011, Owney was honored on a commemorative U.S. postage stamp."

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The exact details of the incident which led to Owney's death are unclear. Newspapers around the country carried the story of Owney's death. They reported that Owney had been ill and had become aggressive in his old age. In June 1897, after allegedly attacking a postal clerk and a U.S. Marshal in Toledo, Ohio, Owney was shot and killed on the orders of the local postmaster.[5][13][14] The Chicago Tribune termed it "an execution".[15] The contemporary accounts suggest that a postal clerk in Toledo chained Owney to a post in the corner of a basement at a post office in Toledo, which was not his normal treatment. That clerk then called in a reporter for the local paper to get a story. Owney may not have been used to that treatment and that may have contributed to his aggression. Whatever the reason, it is not disputed that Owney was put down in Toledo on 11 June 1897"