Three years after voters narrowly approved Proposition 114, Colorado Parks and Wildlife fulfilled its legal mandate Monday when the agency released five wolves onto public land in Grand County.
For supporters of Colorado’s wolf reintroduction, the event kicks off a highly anticipated restoration process that will span the next three to five years.
But voters who did not support the ballot question that led to the reintroduction, including about 16,000 in La Plata County, are preparing for the worst.
Prop. 114 mandates that CPW reintroduce gray wolves in Colorado west of the Continental Divide no later than Dec. 31. The question eked out a narrow victory in 2020, passing with 50.91% of the vote. Only five Western Slope counties, including La Plata County, favored the question.
“Whether you love wolves or whether you hate wolves, wolves are truly now a part of Colorado,” Gov. Jared Polis said at a news conference Monday evening.
Ranchers and other stakeholders in the area of the release were notified in advance, officials said.
“We’ve had lots of conversations … with people in the area,” said CPW Species Conservation Program Manager Eric Odell.
The release had been an ongoing conversation for several months, he said.
The reintroduction plan approved by the CPW Commission in May includes several provisions to protect ranchers’ livestock from the apex predators. It includes a program to deter wolves using flagged electric fencing and explosives meant to “haze” the animals. The program will also provide 100% full market value compensation for each animal depredated by wolves up to $15,000.
In extreme situations, wolves caught in the act of attacking or killing livestock may be killed by private citizens or wildlife officers per a federal rule finalized last month.
“We don’t want rural landowners to feel like they’re in this on their own,” CPW Director Jeff Davis said.
Still, ranchers in Southwest Colorado are unconvinced that conflict mitigation efforts will work. Even three years after the proposition passed, the highly politicized reintroduction still sparks anger in the agricultural community. Some ranchers in Southwest Colorado say they have not pursued conflict mitigation tactics, but nonetheless have concerns.
Colorado Wolf Release 12-18-23 from Colorado Parks & Wildlife on Vimeo.
“These people that say, ‘Oh, you can get along with them. You can live with them.’ That’s a bunch of malarkey,” said Ignacio rancher and former State Rep. J. Paul Brown. “It’s going to be rough.”
Brown grazes herds of sheep, as well as some cattle, on public lands in the Southwest.
In a long-winded tirade, he said the reintroduction approval process was “the biggest farce there ever was” and said he was “madder than hell about it.”
But Brown said he has little intention of taking advantage of CPW’s mitigation tools.
“They want us to haze ’em,” he said. “We have herders with our sheep and we have the guard dogs. But the wolves will just come in and kill the guard dogs.”
Greg Riley, another Ignacio-based rancher, said he is less worried about his 300-head cattle operation and more concerned about backcountry users and ungulate herds. Still, he called the mitigation efforts an “absolute joke.”
Evidence suggests that impact to ranchers could be relatively minimal.
“It won’t just be the ranchers,” said Riley, who has concerns about broader impacts.
He called the introduction “ballot-box biology” and questioned the suitability of Colorado’s increasingly developed land for wolf habitat.
Matt Barnes, a rangeland scientist with the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, said San Juan Mountains are one of the “best chunks of habitat in the state of Colorado.”
According to the reintroduction plan, multiple studies have shown that Colorado’s Western Slope has the ecological capacity to support a wolf population.
Barnes, himself a former rancher who used to run a small grazing operation in Gunnison County, said that the fears shared by ranchers such as Brown and Riley are both reasonable and understandable.
“They’re not crazy to be worried,” he said. “But to me, I would say livestock die of all kinds of things. There’s many natural causes of livestock death. And predators are a small proportion of everything that kills livestock.”
Pointing to the Northern Rockies, where wolves were reintroduced in the mid-1990s, Barnes said there is every reason to think that some conflict will happen – but in the scheme of livestock fatalities, it will depredation will be a small factor.
And, Barnes noted, the compensation program for ranchers is more generous than any other in the country.
At a news conference Monday evening, Commissioner of Agriculture Kate Greenberg said the release is just the beginning of a commitment to work with the agricultural community.
She said the next year will include increased communication and coordination between the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Natural Resources as the two departments advance nonlethal management tactics.
The wolves were released in Grand County, north of I-70. Barnes said that could significantly slow their migration south. However, future releases could occur south of I-70, and Barnes says it is possible they could end up in this region within the next year.
“We would be surprised if wolves didn’t eventually take up residence here,” he said.
CPW is expected to capture and relocate five more wolves through March 2024 as part of an agreement struck with the state of Oregon as the agency moves toward the goal of releasing 10 to 15 wolves annually over the next three to five years.
rschafir@durangoherald.com
