Wolves Make a Controversial Return to Colorado

On Monday, Colorado Parks and Wildlife released five gray wolves in Grand County. The move follows a ballot initiative that narrowly-passed in a statewide election in 2020 and adds to an existing population thought to number 10 to 20 individuals who have dispersed south from Wyoming in recent years. State officials plan to release 30 to 50 more wolves over the coming year.

“For the first time since the 1940s, the howl of wolves will officially return to western Colorado,” said Colorado Governor Jared Polis in a statement. “The return of wolves fulfills the will of voters who, in 2020, passed an initiative requiring the reintroduction of wolves starting by Dec. 31, 2023. What followed were three years of comprehensive listening and work by Colorado Parks and Wildlife to draft a plan to restore and manage wolves that included public meetings in every corner of the state and was inclusive of all points of view and weighed the needs of a wide range of communities with a deep interest in the thoughtful outcome of this effort. The shared efforts to reintroduce wolves are just getting started and wolves will rejoin a diverse ecosystem of Colorado wildlife.”

The two males and three females were captured Sunday in Oregon and flown to Colorado Monday morning. They spent less than a day in captivity and underwent health screenings during that time to ensure viability.

This is the first time a state, rather than the federal government, has released wolves into the wild. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service began restoring wolf populations to the northern Rockies in 1995 with the release of 14 individuals in Yellowstone National Park in 1995. Since that time, the total population of wolves in California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming has grown to between 2,000 and 3,000 individuals.

The goal of reintroducing the apex predator is to restore balance to ecosystems. Wolves can help manage populations of deer and elk, eliminating sick members of those herds and preventing them from remaining clustered in large groups. That helps mitigate the spread of disease and distributes grazing pressure created by the herbivores more broadly. Scientists believe that wolves can slow the spread of chronic wasting disease, which has recently been decimating Colorado’s mule deer population.

Wolves perform this work without much assistance in the form of human intervention or expenditure. Recent science has found that the presence of wolves in ecosystems like Colorado’s can boost biodiversity in flora and fauna, restore fish populations by repairing riparian habitat, and help offset the effects of climate change in forests. Wolves pose no studied threat to human life, cannot be demonstrated to reduce hunting opportunities for ungulates, and while they do sometimes prey on livestock, total depredations in areas with large wolf populations are so low they are statistically irrelevant.

Despite all available research pointing toward the fact that reintroducing wolves creates only positive impacts when studied in scale, the issue has nonetheless found itself caught up in the culture war. Lacking the consensus necessary to win elections on the objective merits of its policies, the Republican party is trying to convince rural Americans to vote against their own interests by manipulating them with fear and misinformation. What’s scarier than the big, bad wolf?

“Today, Colorado becomes the first state in the country to reintroduce gray wolves, despite rural America heavily opposing this measure,” Lauren Boebert, a Republican congressperson representing Colorado’s third district tweeted Monday. “This ill-advised decision puts ranchers’ and farmers’ livestock at risk. Instead of caving to radical environmental groups, we should be listening to our ranchers and farmers when they say this is bad for Colorado.”

In Idaho, where the wolf population has grown to about 1,500 individuals since the 1995 reintroduction, wolves kill on average 113 cows and sheep each year. But that’s out of a total inventory of 2.73 million head, so wolf losses amount to only 0.00428 percent of the state’s livestock. Every year, Idaho ranchers lose about 40,000 cattle alone to non-predator causes like bad weather. Ranchers are compensated for each confirmed loss to wolf predation.

Acknowledging this political reality, Colorado Parks and Wildlife understands that it must mitigate disinformation in order to make the re-introduction a success. The agency worked with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to establish a special “experimental population” carveout within the ESA, which will allow for lethal management as an option to resolve certain cases of wolf-human conflict. Addressing this, the state’s wolf management plan reads:

“If wolves are creating conflict, manage to resolve the problem. When conflicts occur, they should be addressed on a case-by-case basis using a combination of appropriate management tools, including education, non-lethal conflict minimization techniques, lethal take of wolves, and damage payments. Proactive and reactive non-lethal conflict minimization techniques should be encouraged and explored as a first line of defense, with consideration of individual and community-level approaches. Lethal management should not generally be the initial response to conflicts, however, there may be certain conditions under which lethal removal of wolves may be used first to support effective conflict management.”

The plan also treads carefully around the mistaken perception that wolf re-introduction may bring significant negative impacts to the state.

“Positive impacts, where they occur, should be recognized and fostered, and may include, but are not limited to: providing complementary offtake of ungulates in management units where they are overpopulated; dispersal of wild ungulates that may result in habitat improvement due to less herbivory on vegetative communities; selective removal of individual diseased animals from herds; and social, economic or non-monetary values, such as intrinsic value, existence value, and other possible values for present and future generations.”

“Negative impacts could include, but are not limited to: depredation and harassment of livestock, herd dogs and guard animals; loss of pets and hobby animals; concentration of wild ungulates on private lands possibly resulting in property damage; reduced ungulate hunting or viewing opportunities and related economic considerations; reduced hunting license sales resulting in a reduction in recreational opportunity and decreased revenue for wildlife management; and declines in ungulate populations or in ungulate recruitment rates. Some negative impacts may be low on a statewide scale but can be acute on a local or individual scale, with social and economic impacts for those that are affected.”

The plan allows for payments of up to $15,000 per animal to ranchers who lose livestock or working dogs to wolf predation.

The CPW management plan calls for the species to be delisted by the state as a threatened or endangered species when it reaches, “at least 150 wolves anywhere in Colorado for two successive years, or a minimum count of at least 200 wolves anywhere in Colorado.” And when the population reaches that point, a decision about managing wolf numbers through legalized hunting will be made:

“At some point in the future, the long-term management of wolves in Colorado may need to be considered further than what is outlined in this plan. These discussions would only occur after wolves have successfully been recovered and removed from the State Threatened and Endangered list. The long-term management of wolves should be impact- and science-based, with consideration of biological and social science as well as economic and legal considerations. CPW will defer consideration of and development of specifics for long-term management until the beginning of Phase 3 at the earliest, when better information about wolves and their distribution in Colorado is available. Future management will be guided by the best available biological and social science data provided by CPW.”

Ultimately, the protected status of its wolf population may not be up to Colorado officials. Last week, wolf advocates won a legal decision in federal court that will require USFWS to develop a cohesive national recovery plan for the species within the next two years. To date, wolf management has been handled piecemeal—on a state-by-state basis. Rather than set specific population quotas by state and leave the management of wolves up to the politically-unstable whims of local governments, USFWS will instead set a nation or region-wide goal. Due to the mandated need for public input in federal decision-making, this will foster more local and individual participation, hopefully resulting in goals agreed upon by all stakeholders.

In the meantime, Colorado’s first wolf reintroduction is being viewed as an unqualified success by wildlife advocates. The Center for Biological Diversity, whose legal action brought the national recovery plan decision, stated, “This is a momentous occasion worthy of big celebration and a huge step toward seeing wolves thrive in this wild landscape once again.”