Why voting to reintroduce wolves in Colorado was a mistake

The killing of the two-year-old wolf from the Copper Creek pack by Colorado Parks & Wildlife earlier this month should be a wakeup call that the wolf reintroduction program has failed.

I admit that voting in favor of their reintroduction was a mistake on my part. But I truly believed that ranchers would welcome wolves back to Colorado’s landscape and do whatever was necessary to make sure coexistence was a real probability. How wrong I was.

It has never been the wolves’ fault. They’ve always done what is expected of them. When we introduced them to easy meals (cattle, sheep), of course they took advantage of it.

I blame Colorado Parks & Wildlife for the program’s failure. They claim to be experts, but that isn’t possible because wolves haven’t lived here for 60 years — years before the decision-makers were born! They even caved to livestock producers by giving them anything they wanted, even if they believed animal losses were unverified. As a direct consequence of their inexperience and apparent inability to say no, 16 of the 25 wolves have died. Mostly by human hand. However, unless we can resume the reintroduction program, we’ve lost the ability to have a genetically diverse population. We’d only introduce the likelihood of more deaths because we just don’t know how to coexist.

So the 64-million-dollar question remains. Should we continue to honor the majority of Coloradan voters who demanded that we bring wolves into our state? Or shall we admit we made a serious mistake, accept the financial loss, terminate the employees of Colorado Parks & Wildlife who contributed to these uneducated decisions, and grieve and apologize for the deaths of wolves we’ve already “loved” to death?

I’ve made my stand. No more wolves. But stop killing the ones who are already here. Do you think we can do that?

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