Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert introduced a bill last week to remove wolves from the U.S. endangered species list, reviving an effort to strip federal protections for the predators in the lower 48 states and allow states to manage the species going forward.
The so-called Pet and Livestock Protection Act would require the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to reissue a rule from the first Trump administration to delist wolves across the country. The Biden administration defended the delisting effort in court. But in 2022, a U.S. district judge found the federal government had failed to prove wolf populations in the Midwest and parts of the West could sustain themselves without endangered species protections.
By passing a bill to mandate the delisting, Boebert said her legislation would prevent federal courts from scrapping the policy in the future.
“The gray wolf’s recovery has been a positive one, and it’s time for us to remove it from this list, which is something the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations all agreed on,” Boebert told CPR News. “It’s on us to take the next step through Congress.”
While Boebert thinks the legislation will likely land on President Donald Trump’s desk, she acknowledged it wouldn't end Colorado's voter-approved wolf program. That’s because the state already has federal permission to manage wolves under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. If the federal law no longer applied to wolves, Colorado would be free to manage and reintroduce the species as it sees fit.
Gray wolves initially gained endangered species protections across the lower 48 states in 1974.
Since then, the federal government has delisted the animals in specific regions, leading to protracted court battles following legal challenges from environmental advocates. Today, wolves are protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 44 states including Colorado. The rules prohibit anyone from killing or harassing the animals without explicit permission from the federal government.
Boebert led the push for an earlier bill to drop those protections during the Biden administration. While the legislation won approval in the U.S. House, it failed to advance in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
The latest bill faces better odds after Republicans won control of the White House and both chambers of Congress in the last election. Rep. Boebert is pushing the legislation along with Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany, who represents northern Wisconsin. Thirty other representatives have signed on as cosponsors.
While the proposal wouldn’t end Colorado’s wolf program, it would reshape the legal landscape around the controversial reintroduction effort. If signed into law, the bill would invalidate the permit – known as a 10(j) rule – allowing Colorado to manage the predators as an experimental population. The state would then become the top authority over the species, meaning Colorado Parks and Wildlife could continue its wolf restoration plans without the direct oversight of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The counterintuitive legal dynamic explains why Colorado wolf proponents weren’t worried about the first push to delist wolves. While wildlife advocates agreed dropping federal protections could hurt the species nationwide, it would have made it easier for Colorado to carry out the wolf restoration ballot initiative narrowly approved by voters in 2020.
Federally delisting wolves also wouldn’t make it legal to kill the predators in Colorado. Even if the federal government stopped protecting the predators, wolves would remain an endangered species under state law, according to Travis Duncan, a spokesperson for Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Under those protections, a convicted wolf poacher could face up to $100,000 in criminal fines, up to a year in prison and a lifetime suspension of hunting and fishing privileges.
If wolves were no longer protected at a federal level, Colorado would likely have to revisit the legal architecture behind its current wolf management effort, according to Mike Phillips, director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund and a leading advocate for Colorado wolf reintroduction.
The state, for example, might need to affirm a federal rule allowing people to kill wolves in defense of human life, Phillips said. He’s confident, however, those changes wouldn't upend the wolf program. “That’s probably relatively easy to do,” Phillips said.
While the legislation wouldn’t halt Colorado’s wolf program, Boebert pitched the bill as a “first step” to limit its potential impact.
Last month, Colorado captured 15 gray wolves from Canada and released them in Pitkin and Eagle counties, bringing the state’s total known population to 29 wolves. Boebert said delisting the wolves would help ensure other states can respond if those animals cross state boundaries.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife releases a map showing every watershed the state’s known wolves visit every month. The latest map indicated wolves had traveled as far west as Mesa County and as far south as Fremont County, suggesting the predators have inched closer to Colorado’s western and southern borders.
Boebert has also called on the executive branch to stop Colorado’s wolf reintroduction process. Last December, her office sent a letter demanding the former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Debra Haaland to halt further wolf releases until her department modified federal land management plans to account for the predators.
After the latest wolf release, Boebert also issued a press statement calling on the Trump administration to take immediate action to stop the “further importation of these foreign predators into the United States.”
It’s not the first time Boebert has drawn language from the national immigration debate into Colorado’s wolf battle. While she doesn’t want Colorado to release wolves from any location, she said their national origin matters since state wildlife managers didn’t list Canada as a potential wolf source in its original restoration and management plan.
The federal government reviewed that plan before giving Colorado permission to manage the animals. In the letter to former Sec. Haaland, Boebert wrote Colorado shouldn’t have been able to capture wolves in Canada without updating the federal government on its plans to handle the animals and test them for diseases.
Phillips doesn’t expect those objections hold enough merit to end Colorado’s wolf restoration effort. The wildlife advocate said wolf opponents can always raise legal objections in federal court, but those challenges haven’t proved successful in the past. He also noted Canadian wolves aren’t any different from wolves captured in the Pacific Northwest or Northern Rockies.
“This is a case where the congresswoman and her team are throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what might stick,” Phillips said. “It’s a shotgun approach to obstruction.”
Phillips acknowledged Congress could intervene to stop further wolf reintroductions. Boebert also suggested she’d be open to further legislation to stymie Colorado’s restoration program.
“If I need to have another bill saying that no wolves can come from British Columbia and just deport the wolves as well, then we can do that,” Boebert said in an interview.
To read more stories from Colorado Public Radio, visit www.cpr.org.
