The meeting was humming along until a county commissioner asked the question he’d been “biting his tongue” trying not to ask.
On Dec. 3, Gov. Jared Polis had wrapped up his opening remarks during the 2024 Winter Conference of Colorado Counties Inc. and was fielding questions from the audience full of leaders from the organization’s member counties.
Most were focused around the newly announced state budget that goes into effect July 1, and how the projected $750 million shortfall could impact rural communities.
That back-and-forth between Polis and CCI members was respectful, said Kelly Flenniken, executive director.
But when Grand County Commissioner Merrit Linke asked why Colorado was continuing to push forward with its wolf reintroduction program, which has cost $4.8 million since voters approved it in 2020 and has another $2.1 million allocated to it for the remainder of fiscal year 2025, the “vibe” of the meeting turned adversarial, Flenniken said. “And it didn’t need to be like that. I think our members walked away feeling kind of bruised after that. And I’ve been scratching my head wondering, ‘How did we get here? Why did it end like that?’”
Colorado’s reintroduction of grey wolves has been rocky since mostly urban voters in 2020 chose to bring them back through Proposition 114, which passed by a razor-thin margin. Ten wolves were released in Summit and Grand counties last December with what leaders there have called a lack of warning and transparency.
In spring, a pair of wolves that established a home range near Kremmling – where they denned and had five pups – killed a confirmed 18 sheep and cattle, and rather than euthanize the adults, as ranchers requested, CPW trapped all but one pup and moved them to an undisclosed location, where the adult male died. The agency says they will rerelease the wolves, known as the Copper Creek pack, in January.
CPW has since been working overtime with Colorado Department of Agriculture ahead of the next release of 10 to 15 wolves starting in January to beef up communications, training and resources for ranchers to prevent future livestock attacks. But in September, ranching groups petitioned the CPW commission for a “pause” in the program, which CPW staff on Dec. 21 recommended the commission deny.
What Linke, who is also vice president of the Middle Park Stock Growers Association, wanted during the CCI meeting was more intel on why CPW was pushing ahead to get its next round of wolves from British Columbia, when it was surely going to cost a bundle.
Polis said Colorado will continue gray wolf restoration because it is the will of the voters, and that CPW wouldn’t have had to go Canada for the next round of wolves “if ranchers wouldn’t have said, ‘Oh, don’t get them from Wyoming, don’t get them from Idaho.’
“I mean, if their organizations – Middle Park and those guys – say to Wyoming ‘give Colorado wolves’ they probably would,” he added. “The only reason they’re not is they hear from ranchers that they shouldn’t, so that drives up the cost.”
But statements from Wyoming and Idaho officials suggest that’s not true, and it has ranchers, rural leaders and lawmakers calling Polis an adversary of agricultural producers, the only population negatively impacted by wolves since the first 10 were released last year.
In a Dec. 16 email to The Colorado Sun, Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon said, “Wyoming’s position hasn’t changed (on giving Colorado wolves) since the question first arose back in 2021.”
At the time, Gordon told news outlets Wyoming’s wolf management plan was working “because it’s designed to manage wolves in biologically and socially suitable habitats and to keep wolves out of areas of the state where conflicts would be highest.”
His statement acknowledged Wyoming’s “predator zone,” which comprises all land outside of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, where anyone can kill an unlimited number of wolves on site, without a license. The predator zone extends to Colorado’s northern border along which real estate broker Ken Mirr, founder of Mirr Ranch Group, says there are a lot of big ranches. And Gordon reasoned that if transplanted wolves traveled back into Wyoming, it would lead to conflicts with humans, “and resolution of conflicts with humans are almost always deadly to wolves.”
In his Dec. 16 email, Gordon wrote: “It’s important to reiterate that Colorado’s approach to wolf management is completely different from Wyoming’s. Here, we remain committed to maintaining populations in suitable habitat and managing for social acceptance in other parts of the state.”
Meanwhile, Idaho leaders had other concerns when they discovered Colorado was considering asking for gray wolves in the spring of 2023.
In a June 6 letter to Davis, Idaho Fish and Game Director Jim Fredericks wrote that although he appreciated the working relationship between Idaho and Colorado fish and wildlife management agencies, he was declining CPW’s request because “Idaho’s experience leads us to conclude that negative impacts of wolves sent to Colorado will not stay in Colorado.”
Included in that experience was the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s inability “to live up to its assurances about delisting the Northern Rocky Mountain (wolves) when criteria were achieved and surpassed because of multiple lawsuits” that continue today, Fredericks wrote.
Ten years after Idaho’s reintroduction, delisting litigation involving Idaho wolves continued “despite populations that remain robust and resilient,” he added, creating concern “that the implications of ESA-litigation related to the translocation of wolves into Colorado will not be isolated to Colorado.”
And Fredericks told Davis “the prolonged inability to delist wolves under the ESA (Endangered Species Act) and strong disagreements over how they should be managed have fostered mistrust and social conflict among our rural communities, hunters, trappers, other outdoor recreation users, agricultural interests, wolf advocates, conservation organizations, and governmental entities. The result is a strain on many of the very relationships that are critical to future conservation efforts.”
“The challenge of coexistence is a daily affair forever,” says Mike Phillips, a longtime wolf advocate and wildlife biologist who advises Rocky Mountain Wolf Project. “But the question we really should be asking Idaho is can you really give me the facts of the problems? There’s no dead people, no demonstrable impact on the big game or the recreational killing industry, and no demonstrable impact on the livestock industry.”
Phillips was one of the architects of Colorado’s wolf restoration plan, leading CPW’s technical Wolf Technical Working Group on restoration from its inception.
He also served in Montana’s Legislature from 2013 to 2021. And though he can’t prove Colorado ranchers badgered Idaho, Wyoming and Montana into withholding wolves, he’s adamant that Western lawmakers “wanted to make things difficult.”
“You’ve got conservative lawmakers in Montana saying, ‘Oh my gosh, we can’t saddle our brothers and sisters in Colorado with the mess that is coexisting with gray wolves. So we’re going to make things as difficult as possible’” by saying, “‘sorry, governor, but we’re not going to be part of the problem.’”
And when it came to Gordon expressing concern for the wolves if they wandered back over the border, Phillips said, “We kill all kinds of gray wolves in Montana. In Wyoming, it’s even worse. And the same in Idaho. Clearly, so many decision makers in the three states don’t value wolves. So (their decisions) had everything to do with them standing in solidarity with the brothers and sisters of Colorado that were bothered by the very idea of wolves being restored via reintroductions.”
Neither Linke nor Tom Harrington, president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, have heard of individual ranchers or members of the association pressuring the three states to withhold wolves from CPW.
However, Harrington told The Sun some Wyoming lawmakers, “being stockmen themselves,” aren’t going to want to send wolves to Colorado, “knowing the havoc they’re going to wreak in areas where livestock is pretty naive to wolves.”
That said, he acknowledged CPW has been working to educate ranchers on a multitude of nonlethal techniques to haze them away from livestock.
When asked about Polis’ comments at the CCI meeting, Harrington said he would tell the governor: “The failure of this program and the cost of these programs are due entirely to your impatience, to not being prepared. CPW has told people for years that the science is not right. Introducing wolves in Colorado is not a good fit. Yet they chose to defy that scientific knowledge.”
Phillips says no one should underestimate the ecological importance of bringing wolves back to western Colorado because, with it, there will be a “hemispheric distribution” of wolves stretching from the Arctic into Mexico and “if that gap can be filled by restoring gray wolves … it would be restoration of the finest kind, rooted in science, rooted in law and rooted in morality.”
Days after his comments at the CCI meeting, Polis’ office released a statement acknowledging the significance of the ranching industry in Colorado and the friction that sometimes arises in the state’s attempts to support agriculture while also executing the will of voters. The state also cited recent legislative actions that support the industry, including expanding Colorado’s agricultural exports, new laws that deploy ag-related bipartisan tax credits and a nation-leading right-to-repair law, which gives consumers the right to repair their own products instead of going back to the original manufacturer for service.
But, the statement said, “the reality is the state initially attempted to source wolves from Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho but these common sense requests were denied following special interest, lobbying, and political games by certain organizations.
“As a result, CPW sourced wolves from Oregon to continue to implement the Colorado voter-approved wolf introduction plan,” the statement from Polis’ office said. “The Colorado Department of Agriculture and Colorado Parks and Wildlife just released more information about how they are effectively managing the mandated wolf reintroduction including grant funding, site assessments, conflict specialist efforts, range rider initiatives, carcass management and depredation response, and the governor is proud of the work the CDA and CPW are doing to implement the will of the voters in a way that addresses the concerns of ranchers.”
