DENVER — Depending on who’s talking, Colorado’s wolves are an existential threat to ranching, an imperiled native species crucial to a healthy ecosystem, a ruthless predator that kills for sport or a beautiful species that enriches lives.

Despite a full year passing since the first reintroduced canines put paws on the ground, tensions over the apex predator remain high. Over the last year, the voter-mandated reintroduction has faced a series of legal challenges, a petition from ranchers to pause the next releases, potential budget cuts, a claim for more than a half-million dollars in wolf-caused damages and, now, a proposed ballot measure to repeal the first statewide vote authorizing the program just over four years ago.

“A little bit of this conflict is about the wolves themselves. But what I think people are really arguing about is more than that: who has power and who doesn’t,” said Matt Barnes, a rangeland scientist and former ranch manager who served on the stakeholder advisory group for the reintroduction.

“It’s about what public land is for and how people think humans should relate to the rest of nature — and who gets to decide.”

The challenges facing the program have not stopped the expected arrival this week of more wolves, however.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists on Sunday began trapping wolves in British Columbia, Canada, for transport to Colorado and release in Eagle, Garfield or Pitkin counties. Representatives from CPW have declined to confirm whether wolves from Canada had already been released, but they said they would provide more information once they finished the operation.

Biologists expect to add up to 15 more wolves this month to the nine other wolves already roaming the state in the wild.

Ahead of the new wolf releases, tension over the species boiled over in a seven-hour public hearing Wednesday, where CPW commissioners weighed whether to grant ranchers’ request to delay them. Just minutes into the public comment period, the commission’s chair was forced to briefly pause the proceedings to ask participants to lower the tone of their rhetoric and stop bashing opposing views.

“We cannot have a productive dialogue if we’re just yelling at each other and accusing,” commission Chairman Dallas May said.

Throughout the hours of comment, some wolf advocates called livestock producers “privileged wolf haters” and accused ranchers of crying crocodile tears, fearmongering and trying to undermine democracy.

“There is a coordinated effort to undermine and sabotage wolf recovery in our state,” wolf advocate Kelly Murphy said.

Ranchers told commissioners that their livelihood, their way of life and their children’s futures were at risk. They said they felt under attack.

“It’s very difficult to hear folks accuse ranchers of being poachers and villains,” said fifth-generation Grand County rancher Lee Bruchez, his voice cracking. “I appreciate the reminder, though, that there are many who are ignorant of the plight of those of us actually living with these wolves.”

Of the 10 wolves released into Colorado’s central mountains a year ago, three are dead and one remains in captivity, along with four of her pups, after a series of livestock killings involving her pack. Nine known wolves remain wild: six adults from the 2023 releases, two wolves remaining from a pack that migrated south from Wyoming and a pup that was left behind when the rest of the depredating pack was removed from the wild.

Two of the three dead wolves were shot. One survived its gunshot wound but the other — the father of the state’s first pups born of reintroduced wolves — died from his injury.

The number of wolves in the wild could balloon up to 29 by the end of winter with the addition of the wolves from Canada, along with the agency’s plan to release the five wolves held in captivity.

Commissioners deny delay request

The core question Colorado Parks and Wildlife commissioners faced last week was whether to grant ranchers’ petition to delay the release of the next round of wolves until the agency better solidifies conflict-minimization programs and puts into writing when it will kill wolves caught killing livestock.

Ranchers have repeatedly said programs to reduce conflict between wolves and livestock were not fully developed or fully staffed before the state released wolves in December 2023.

“This is what it feels like to the ranchers — that it’s a runaway train and it’s picking up speed, and the engineer knows full well that there is a bridge out ahead,” Grand County Commissioner Merrit Linke said during the meeting. “But yet we’re not putting on the brakes.”

The ranchers’ petition, filed by the Middle Park Stockgrowers and 26 other livestock and agricultural groups, asked that the state stop releasing wolves until the agency could adopt clear rules for when it would kill a depredating wolf, conduct assessments of ranch properties, develop a range rider program, create a team to respond to wolves harassing or killing livestock, craft guidelines for carcass management and develop a transparent plan to communicate with locals about wolf releases.

“Although it’s a great start, these programs are yet to be fully funded, implemented and proven,” said Renee Deal, a sheep producer on the Western Slope.

CPW staff for more than an hour described the progress they were making in meeting the requests of the petitioners — work that started before the petition was filed, they said. For the first time, its leaders presented rules for when the agency should kill a wolf that is killing or injuring livestock. The agency had lacked a definition, resulting in frustration when a wolf killed more than a dozen animals in Grand County.

The new definition states that the agency will kill a wolf if it is connected to three depredation events in a 30-day period. CPW must also consider other factors, such as whether the rancher used a variety of nonlethal conflict-minimization strategies.

The state is working to hire and train more staff members to work as range riders to ward off wolves and investigate potential killings by wolves, as well as handle a backlog of requests for site assessments. The latter help ranchers minimize their risk of attracting wolves to their land.

“We’ve spent thousands of hours on this project,” said Reid DeWalt, deputy director of Colorado Parks and Wildlife. “Is it perfect? No. Was that ever the goal? I don’t think that was attainable.”

Delaying the next release could severely impact the momentum of the reintroduction, biologists said. A delay of even a few weeks would eliminate the possibility of any breeding among the new wolves this year, said Eric Odell, CPW’s wolf conservation program manager. New genetics and gender diversity is also greatly needed in Colorado’s population.

The commission voted 10-1 to deny the petitioners’ request, with Commissioner Marie Haskett the only vote in favor of the petition. Several of the commissioners who voted to deny the petition said they did not want to lose momentum or go against the will of the voters who mandated the reintroduction.

“I don’t think we can let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” said May, the chair of the commission and a rancher. “We have to keep going.”

Tim Ritschard, the president of the Middle Park Stockgrowers Association, said after the meeting that he was disappointed but not surprised by the commission’s vote.

“We’ll just keep doing what we’re doing and try to protect our animals,” he said.

Counter-initiative could appeal to voters

With other attempts to stall the reintroduction failing, a group this month took the first steps to start a ballot initiative aimed at overturning Colorado’s 2020 vote mandating the reintroduction of wolves.

Colorado Advocates for Smart Wolf Policy filed a draft petition to the Legislative Services Office on Jan. 3 and plans to start circulating a petition for signatures in March, said Patrick Davis, a group leader and a political consultant who lives in Colorado Springs. If advocates can collect 124,238 verified signatures, they plan to place the question on the 2026 ballot.

Voters are now better informed about the real-life effects of wolves, Davis said. Thousands of new people have moved to Colorado since the 2020 vote and, since 2026 is not a presidential election year, the demographics of the turnout will likely be different, he said.

“We introduced an apex predator into an unfamiliar environment and expected it not to act like a wolf,” he said. “It just tore through our northwestern Colorado agriculture community, and now we’re stuck with the bill for this.”

But public sentiment may not have swung as anti-wolf as initiative organizers hope.

A survey of 500 Colorado voters commissioned by the pro-wolf group Colorado Nature Action and released last week found that 52% of respondents favored continuing the reintroduction. Forty-two percent opposed the effort, and 6% didn’t know or didn’t answer the question. Support was close to the 2020 results, when just shy of 51% of voters approved Proposition 114.

Participants’ answers in the poll largely depended on their political party. Eighty-one percent of Democrats, 33% of Republicans and 51% of unaffiliated voters said continuing the reintroduction was a good idea.

Jim Pribyl, the chair of Colorado Nature Action and a former chair of the Parks and Wildlife Commission, said he wasn’t surprised wolves had become a divisive political issue. The reintroduction of the species to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 caused an uproar for years and also sparked legal fights from agriculture groups to stop it.

Thirty years later, similar dynamics are playing out here, Pribyl said.

“The role of predators in the ecosystem, and biodiversity, has become a ping-pong ball — another piñata — in the culture wars,” he said.

The organizations that ran Proposition 114 in 2020 spent about $2 million dollars, Pribyl said. The money raised to run the counter-initiative should be spent instead on minimizing conflict between wolves and livestock, he said.

“They’re putting all kinds of resources into trying to stop the will of the people,” he said, “rather than find a way to coexist with a native species.”

Half a million dollars in damages?

With the petition denied, Colorado Parks and Wildlife will now turn its attention to requests from three ranchers for more than $581,977 in compensation for wolf-related losses.

They filed those claims in the final weeks of 2024, with the bulk seeking $191,936 for killed or missing livestock and $389,526 for reduced weight among surviving livestock and lower conception rates — which the ranchers attribute to stress the wolves’ presence placed on herds.

Releasing more wolves without more robust conflict-minimization programs in place would be unfair to livestock producers, the wolves and the taxpayers who must pay the bill for damage, said Ritschard, from the Middle Park Stockgrowers, in a statement.

“The financial damages associated with these three claims could have been much less had the agency taken lethal action on some of the wolves,” Ritschard said. “We feel the process within the agency continues to not recognize what is happening on the ground.”

Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis said he was left with mixed emotions after last week’s meeting because “there was a sense of winners and losers.” The agency has worked hard to create programs to reduce conflict and is now better prepared for releases this year, he said.

Davis pledged to keep working with all people on the issue and follow through on promises made. He planned to reach out to agriculture leaders after the commission vote.

“It’s always been, how do we do this together?” he said. “Recognizing that the vote itself felt like it was done to them, or (the reintroduction) is being done to them — so how do we work together to make sure that we’re doing it in a respectful way that still delivers a sustainable wolf population?”

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