The howling: Colorado’s wolf reintroduction program off to a rocky start

The controversial and much-ballyhooed wolf reintroduction process in Colorado came about because a citizens’ initiative — Proposition 114 — was passed by the skin of its teeth into law in 2020. Proposition 114 directed Colorado Parks and Wildlife to begin reintroducing gray wolves into the western part of the state — which in old-timey days was home to thriving populations of canis lupus — by 2023. Diligently following the will of the voters, it did so: 10 wolves, captured in Oregon, were released in the rural parts of Grand and Summit counties.

That release was a disaster, with three of the 10 dying within the first year and most of the rest of the pack having to be recaptured by CPW because it was chowing down on local livestock. Several of the wolves sent to Colorado from Oregon purportedly had previous issues with livestock predation.

At this juncture, CPW is scheduled to release another 10 to 15 wolves — this time procured from British Columbia — “sometime in January.” Might happen next week. Might have happened last week. Might be happening right now. CPW is tight-lipped about such things, out of reasonable concern for the safety of the wolves (as well as any rancher who’s willing to let wolves be released on their private property). What we do know is that north of the border, the capture process officially started Friday, Jan. 10, and the whole process could take upwards of two weeks.

Three counties are on the release shortlist: Eagle, Garfield and Pitkin. Again, CPW ain’t saying. Either way, there is a very good chance that, by the end of the month (maybe by the end of this sentence), residents of the Roaring Fork Valley might very well be hearing a distant howl that has not been heard in 80 years echoing through the mountains of home.

The media has been on the wolf reintroduction story like flies on dung. Every angle has been covered ad nauseam.

Save one, which takes the form of a series of related interrogatives: What about the individual wolves that, through no choice of their own, are or will be the living, breathing components mandated by the passage of Proposition 114? Not the nebulous “wolf population.” Not “the reintroduction process.” Not such lofty concepts such as “restoring ecosystem balance.” The wolves. What about the wolves themselves?

When you go seeking answers to those questions, you find some dark corners that many people would like to see remain unexplored.

Most of the stories that have been penned about Colorado wolf reintroduction program say nothing more than words to the effect of, “The wolves will be coming from British Columbia.” It sounds so benign, like they will be rounded up by some earth goddess sprinkling fairy dust or a First Peoples shaman walking into the forest with a handful of sage and asking for volunteers. Like a pack of wolves will then come bounding out of the woods saying, “Yes, take me! I’ve always wanted to visit Colorado!” 

Think again. 

‘Judas wolves’ and helicopter havoc

Americans often look at Canada as some sort of enlightened ecotopia. To that, one would suggest Googling “Athabaskan tar sands.”

According to a Sierra Club of British Columbia report cited in a story by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “3.6 million hectares of old-growth and second-growth forests were clear-cut in the province between 2005 and 2017 — creating ‘dead zones’ that, combined, are larger than Vancouver Island.”

In the opinion of environmentalists, the clear-cutting of the old-growth forests in British Columbia is directly applicable to the shocking wolf-management situation in Canada’s westernmost province, which is half as large as Texas with a population less than Tennessee — and, in turn, to the on-ground implementation of Proposition 114 some thousand miles to the south.

Mollie Cameron is the lead wolf campaigner for an environmental organization called Pacific Wild, which, she says, has been fighting for the protection of wildlife and wildlife habitat since the 1980s.

Cameron says the provincial government has killed, mainly via aerial gunning from helicopters, 2,192 gray wolves — the species being reintroduced in Colorado — over the past decade, ostensibly as a means of helping endangered caribou populations grow. That number does not include the additional 6,000 or so wolves that have been killed by private citizens through hunting and trapping. (There are currently about 8,000 wolves living in B.C., according to Cameron.) 

“The government calls the wolf kill a short-term measure to help reestablish caribou populations,” Cameron said. “We think 10 years is hardly short-term. Wolves have little or nothing to do with declining caribou populations. 

“The issue is mainly habitat destruction, such as clear cutting, oil-and-gas drilling, fracking, the laying of pipelines through previously undisturbed habitat and human disturbance, such as backcountry heli-skiing,” she continued.

Cameron admits that wolves do indeed prey upon caribou, but with a big asterisk.

“The clear cuts have caused linear features that make it easier for wolves to predate caribou,” she said. “Wolves prefer to eat deer and moose but, if caribou are available, they will predate them. What is especially frustrating is that caribou hunting is still allowed in some parts of the province.”

According to Cameron, the B.C. government contends that caribou populations have stabilized and even increased in certain areas — but she stressed that the ongoing wolf cull has little to nothing to do with that.

“Maternal penning and supplemental feeding have played a big role,” she said. “More than wolf culling.”

In the meantime, the decade-long culling of wolves continues. Cameron says that 200 additional wolves are slated for culling via aerial gunning in 2025.

“The situation is absolutely disgusting,” she said. “Just in 2023-24 alone, 44 individual packs were completely eliminated by aerial gunning. 

“What’s even worse is that government contractors will sedate and collar certain wolves and send them back into the wild, where they will lead gunners back to their packs. They will then shoot the rest of the pack and leave the collared wolves alive so that, when they join up with another pack, it will happen all over.”

These wolves, Cameron says, are called “Judas wolves.”

The techniques honed by the wolf culls most likely will be used — or, rather, are actively being used — to capture the 10 to 15 wolves slated for transfer to Colorado. The same helicopters used to gun down wolves by the hundreds will be used to capture wolves destined for Colorado. Cameron speculates that there is the possibility that additional Judas wolves will be collared during that capture process.

Canada’s controversy

Let’s back up a bit. All attempts to get information from British Columbia’s Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship regarding the specifics of the process by which the 10 to 15 wolves slated for relocation to Colorado will be captured and transported have been mostly unsuccessful. 

When asked very directly how those wolves will be chosen — from where in B.C. they will be captured, by what methods they will be captured, whether they will be captured pack intact or as unrelated individuals and how they will be transported to Colorado — were met with deflection and non-answers.

This lack of forthcomingness apparently does not stem from some manner of anti-U.S. media bias. All of the Canadians herein quoted tell much the same story.

According to Cameron, such non-responses are standard operating procedure for the B.C. provincial government.

“One of the biggest problems we face is transparency from the government on this specific issue, for sure,” Cameron said. “We have asked many of these questions. Lots of times. We have filed freedom-of-information requests. We filed some FOI requests in January 2024 and have still not received any sort of response.”

And though CPW was cautiously helpful when plied for information about Colorado’s wolf reintroduction program, when asked the exact same questions as those posed to the B.C. Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, the only one it was able to answer was the last: the one about transport. The captured wolves will, under the direct supervision of a CPW wildlife biologist, be placed in cages and flown from B.C. to Colorado, where they will be held in an undisclosed location until such undisclosed time as they will be hard-released into their new lives in an undisclosed location. Maybe outside Aspen. Maybe somewhere else on Colorado’s Western Slope.

As for the other questions, CPW suggested that the B.C. provincial government be contacted.

You can at least understand why CPW’s media-relations people are inclined to hold their cards close when addressing Proposition 114-related information. On the one hand, this is all new; they are still trying to figure things out at the same time that residents of half the state are angrily shaking their fists at the notion of wolf reintroduction and, on the other hand, attempting to keep specific information about the upcoming releases private for the sake of the wolves. They harbor not-unreasonable fears that those with anti-wolf sentiments will act in ways unfavorable to the wolves’ survival if the release points are publicized.

But the British Columbia people? Why the disinclination to release information about the wolf-capture process?

Again, here’s where we reconnect with Colorado.  

John and Mary Theberge are among Canada’s senior wolf-research and conservation biologists. They were instrumental in wolf reintroduction efforts in Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario. They have an opinion on why the B.C. government is so tight-lipped on what would seem from the sidelines as reasonable requests.

John Theberge wrote in an email: “The B.C. government, perhaps out of shame, has not publicized its agreement with Colorado and has not been willing to answer questions like those you posed. Why? We assume it’s because the less said about wolves in this province, the better. There is considerable public opposition to their aerial wolf-killing program over the last 10 years, including a petition with more than half a million names raised and presented by Pacific Wild to the B.C. legislature against the killing in 2021. This is politically motivated killing — wildlife-exploiter votes, especially in the north — and in our opinion is scientifically unjustified.

“Revealing that this is political wolf killing, not a concern to bring back more caribou, the government allows caribou hunting by hunters in some of the very blocks of land where they kill wolves to ostensibly recover caribou!” Theberge concludes.

Basically, according to Theberge, the less that people in Colorado know about what’s really happening to wolves in B.C., the better.

This is not to say that Theberge is totally against the concept of capture and release as it applies to wolf reintroductions into territory the animals once occupied. After all, they have been involved in numerous reintroduction efforts. It’s just that they are of the opinion that, in this particular case, the Colorado reintroduction efforts are unwittingly enabling the ongoing wolf cull in B.C.

“We are totally supportive of wolf-recovery objectives in the United States and past ‘donations’ of Canadian wolves for that purpose in Yellowstone — where we have done wolf research since 2000  — and in Arizona and New Mexico, where we also have worked in the past,” Theberge wrote in an email. “And we support the effort in Colorado and the conservation organizations’ involvement despite the difficulties encountered so far.

“But, and a big ‘but’ in this situation, there is myopia in the United States about what is going on in Canada when a conservation leader like Rob Edward of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project is quoted in a press release of Defenders of Wildlife that ‘British Columbia’s partnership with Colorado shines a light on their commitment to biodiversity and ecological stewardship, and we deeply value their leadership,’ Theberge continues. 

“Saying something like this undermines the efforts of Canadian conservation organizations in trying to get this province to clean up its act: stop their aerial killing of wolves, get a provincial endangered species act (one of few Canadian provinces without one), stop old-growth logging, which has left only remnants from years of overcutting. This is an environmentally bankrupt province who, we know from inside sources, made a tactical decision before the last election a few months ago that they had no political need to concern themselves with environmental matters.”

Edward, one of the founders of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project and one of the people most involved with getting Proposition 114 on the ballot, not surprisingly takes some umbrage from Theberge’s reference to him.

He responds: “Had this agreement [between Colorado and British Columbia] not been reached, these wolves likely would have been some of the ones slated for culling.”

He makes a good point. Though it is impossible to know the specifics, given the lack of  cooperation from the B.C. Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, it is not unreasonable to assume that the process of capturing the wolves for transport to western Colorado will involve the very same people, helicopters and rifles that are used to shoot and kill more than 200 wolves per year in B.C.

It amounts, according to Theberge, to a public-relations victory — or at least a public-relations diversionary tactic — on the part of the B.C. provincial government.

You want to cull your native wolf population? Well, send some wolves that, according to Edward, might otherwise be shot dead to Colorado. It distracts attention from grim reality — and earns you some brownie points with wolf reintroduction proponents in the U.S., who likely do not have a clue about what’s happening in B.C. Plus, it saves bullets. 

So, at this point, it seemed fair to this journalist to ask: Is the process of capturing wolves in Canada and transporting them southward one of complicity — inadvertent (or justified) though it might be — on the part of Colorado wolf reintroduction advocates, or is it a case of liberation?

Methods and means

Mike Phillips is one of the foremost experts on the subject of wolf reintroductions in the world. A founder and board member of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, he has been actively involved in wolf recovery and research since 1980, having first led restoration efforts of the red wolf in the southwestern United States and then gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park. He has served on every gray-wolf recovery team convened since 1995. He was a member of the technical working group that advised Colorado Parks and Wildlife on the state’s wolf-restoration and recovery plan. He is considered one of the fathers of Proposition 114.

He probably howls in his sleep.

Phillips is sympathetic though unapologetic when it comes to his perceptions regarding wolf reintroduction methodology. Sure, he loves wolves. What he loves even more are functioning, restored ecosystems that include self-sustaining populations of wolves roaming unfettered throughout their native territory. He often alludes — with well-documented justification — to the positive effects wolf reintroduction has had on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Few dispute that.

Though he is unaware of the specifics of the questions that were posed to both the B.C. Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship and CPW regarding the capture and transfer of wolves from British Columbia to Colorado, he can make an educated guess based upon decades of applicable experience.

Essentially, those 10 to 15 wolves will be shot with tranquilizer guns from the very same helicopters used to cull their brothers and sisters. Ergo, those wolves will undoubtedly be very wary when they hear the whoop-whoop-whoop of approaching gunships. Then adrenaline levels will skyrocket. They will flee. Maybe scatter.

“You follow old tracks, come up behind them in a helicopter, shoot them in the ass with a dart,” Phillips said. “The helicopter lands, people jump out, get the wolf, stick him in the helicopter, stick him in a crate, take him to a holding facility. All the same stuff we did for Yellowstone. CPW has a lot of experience handling wildlife.”

But not, it should be noted, a lot of experience handling wolves.

According to Phillips, there might be several wolves captured and detained at the same time, or they might be brought to the holding facility on a piecemeal basis.

“Capturing wolves is not the easiest thing in the world to do,” he said. “But darting wolves from helicopters is a very safe and effective technique for capturing gray wolves. Hundreds of animals have been caught that way for Yellowstone.”

The captured wolves might or might not “know” each other, Phillips noted.

“They could be plucked from different packs, if that’s how circumstances play out,” he continued. “You can sometimes tell from the air about social relationships, but sometimes not. If they have studied wolves as part of caribou research for seven or eight years, they have a notion of the nature of the pack. You don’t want to take the big, breeding male. You want youngsters.”

Phillips admits that the process truly sucks for the individual wolves.

“You’re upending their world, and I don’t use that phrase lightly,” he said. “It is reassuring for them if they have familial bonds with the other captured wolves, but, in the end, you take what you can get. Once they are released in Colorado, they will have to figure it out.”

Dr. Paul Paquet is a senior scientist at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, who has published more than 200 scholarly papers on the subject of wolf management, ecology and behavior. He is considered one of Canada’s foremost experts in matters related to wolves. He disagrees with many of Phillips’ assertions, which he considers to be insensitive to the wolves and, in some instances, ethically questionable.

“Look at the entire process — the capture and the handling that’s involved,” Paquet said. “Stress levels are immeasurable. All of this, from an animal-welfare perspective, is problematic and ethically questionable. It amounts to animal cruelty, and I don’t think the people in Colorado have been thinking about that.

“It puts these wolves in a terrible situation,” he continued. “Given the responses we already know of from individuals in Colorado and antipathy toward the wolves in the area where the reintroduction is taking place, this may be their death warrant. There are a lot of questions that people do not ask — and should be asking.”

Disruption of wolf packs is high among Paquet’s list of concerns.

“They don’t know which animals they’re taking,” he said. “It’s going to be haphazard. They’re going to get the ones they can capture easiest with little or no knowledge as to the status and previous social role among the wolves. This process will fracture existing packs in B.C., which can affect their ability to survive.

“A lot of things come into play, such as the age of animal, sex, social role of that particular animal … in pack and previous affiliations the captured wolves might have had with some of [the] other captured wolves,” Paquet continued. “We know from experience that the process of trying to assemble a pack often leads to dead wolves right away.”

New group dynamics can lead to a host of new issues pertaining to the welfare of the wolves involved — issues that only emerge in real time, when it’s often too late to course-correct.   

“They probably don’t know whether they are capturing three alphas or three omegas,” Paquet went on. “The alphas might fight and kill each other for dominance once released into Colorado; the omegas don’t know how to lead a pack. There is no doubt that these issues will impact the ability of the reintroduced wolves to survive.”

In addition to all these issues, Paquet says the timing of the capture and release is counterintuitive at best and borderline idiotic at worst — and underscores what he considers to be the disorganized nature of Colorado’s reintroduction process.

“They are capturing wolves at the absolute worst time of year,” he said. “It’s breeding season. This is [the] most stressful time for wolves. All interactions are intensified among wolves, particularly among females.” 

According to Paquet, the process is made more problematic because, for the wolves, everything feels heightened. 

“I can’t believe they are doing this in mid-January. They need to be thinking about these things. They need to be answering these questions. They are not. This amounts to animal cruelty, and no one ever talks about it.

“To be clear, I’m not completely against wolf reintroductions,” he added.

But from Paquet’s vantage, the individual experiences of the wolves in the reintroduction process are not addressed, nor even considered, by their captors. “I have a real frustration about this. … In my mind, there should be a thorough evaluation about the stress being placed on these individual wolves before they are captured and released into a strange environment,” he said. 

And, he added, it’s been done better before.

“There was more thought given to these questions with the original reintroduction into Yellowstone,” Paquet noted. “The Colorado reintroduction process just seems too haphazard. A lot of wolves are going to die.”

B.C. officials, Paquet feels, are just looking for a way to get rid of wolves, no matter the circumstance.

Phillips — the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project founding board member and Proposition 114 leader — acknowledges the push-pull dynamic of many reintroduction efforts.

“If you’re willing to think deeply about restoration ecology, and I have been blessed that I have been restoring endangered species through reintroductions for more than 40 years, there are parts that are flat-out ugly,” Phillips said. “We have restored, very successfully, a population of bighorn sheep in the Fra Cristobal Mountains of New Mexico. We killed a lot of cougars to get that done. That’s f***ing ugly, right? 

“We let a bunch of swift fox from Colorado and Wyoming go in South Dakota in an attempt to establish a swift-fox population. We killed coyotes. That’s ugly. We have posted the most successful restoration work in history on behalf of the inland cutthroat trout in Montana and, to do that, we killed thousands and thousands of innocent rainbow and brook trout.

“Darting a wolf from a helicopter is a big deal. It is not without problems,” Phillips continued. “It is extremely stressful. It is very heavy-handed. It is not something they would choose to be part of. From the time you put the helicopter on that wolf’s ass to the time you let that animal out at an appropriate site in Colorado and it runs off and can finally catch its breath and it cannot smell or hear people — until that time, it is a pain in the ass for that wolf. His world is upended.”

But Phillips maintains that the stress is worth the reward. 

“But at that point, he looks around and thinks, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t know where I am, but this isn’t a bad spot.’ And with each passing day, all these wolves are going to realize, ‘Holy shit, I’ve died and gone to heaven.’”

No matter what, they did not die via a sniper bullet being fired from a helicopter back in B.C.

Every vote counts

Western Colorado, Phillips contends, represents the best unoccupied wolf habitat in the world, with well more than 20 million acres of land across which gray wolves would receive legal priority and protection.

He pointed out that western Colorado’s landscape — made up mostly of public land — offers gray wolves a safe and secure habitat. Even with hunters taking 70,000 to 80,000 deer and elk each year, the state’s own numbers show there are still around 600,000 to 700,000 deer and elk spread across the region. That’s an incredible amount of prey, almost “unheard of” in most places, as Phillips put it.

He points to what he calls a similar landscape — the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem — where he has worked with wolf reintroductions for decades. Edward, also of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, says that, across 15 to 17 million acres where gray wolves receive protection under the federal Endangered Species Act, the GYE might support 200,000 to 250,000 deer and elk that would be available to native critters like gray wolves. Which, he says, amounts to half to a third of the ungulates found in western Colorado.

“On top of all that, there’s a socio-political layer that we introduce into our habitat model, and that is social tolerance and acceptance,” Edward said. “Coloradans want wolves there. All of this work is being done per a directive issued by a majority of Coloradans. I know for sure darting a wolf from a helicopter is a big deal not without problems — [it] is not something the wolves would choose to be part of. But sometimes the end justifies the means.”

There are those who would consider Phillips’ statement that “Coloradans want them there” to be, while technically accurate, a bit of an exaggeration.

Proposition 114, which marked the first time in the country’s history that an electorate made a direct decision to reintroduce a species, passed but only barely — 1,590,299 in favor and 1,533,313 against. That margin is even slimmer than the popular-vote margin in the 2024 presidential election.

Voters in 51 of Colorado’s 64 counties rejected Proposition 114.

For the most part, those counties that rejected the ballot measure are the very counties where the wolves would be reintroduced. The vast majority of the pro-Proposition 114 votes came from the Front Range. (In Pitkin County, 62% of voters supported Proposition 114, while 63% of voters in Garfield County opposed it. Proposition 114 also was defeated in Eagle County.)

It’s a political landscape that inspires Tai Jacober, a longtime Carbondale-area rancher and member of the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission (who stressed that he is speaking for himself and not as a member of the commission) to opine, “The Front Range voted for this, and it’s going to affect the western side of the state.”

Phillips counters by pointing out that an awful lot of people in the wolf reintroduction area voted in favor of Prop 114.

“There were ‘yes’ votes for Proposition 114 recorded all across the state,” he said. In addition to his other credentials, Phillips is a 14-year veteran of the Montana State Legislature who now heads the T.E. Turner Endangered Species Fund, which he co-founded. “It is true that most of the rural counties were in the majority opposing Proposition 114. It is true that population centers in Colorado were sufficiently supportive as to compensate, overwhelm or beat out the tally everywhere else. It is equally true that there was support voiced in every county in the state where the reintroductions will take place.

“Here’s the thing  — a barber in Denver, his vote counts as much as a rancher outside Carbondale,” Phillips continued. “This wasn’t a regional vote. We live in a country where each state practices representative democracy. Everybody gets a say.”

That “say” indicated, by the slimmest of margins, that gray wolves will be reintroduced into Colorado, mostly in places where a majority of the residents don’t want them.

“That really doesn’t matter,” Phillips said. “That’s not how votes are counted.”

It matters to Paquet.

“My concern is that the B.C. wolves that will be captured and (mis)handled, will likely not survive in Colorado, owing to the intense anti-wolf sentiment that is pervasive in this state,” he said in an email.

Once again, the question remains: Are these wolves — despite 20 million acres of mostly public land, an abundance of prey, the passage of Proposition 114 (narrow as it was) and all the stresses outlined by Phillips and Paquet — truly being saved from a contractor’s bullet in British Columbia’s ongoing wolf-culling efforts? Or are they simply being moved from the frying pan into the fire?

Political crosshairs

It’s not a reach to find parallels between Jacober’s opinions and Paquet’s. Again speaking as an individual rather than as a member of the CPW Commission, Jacober expresses concerns not necessarily of wolf reintroduction as an idea, but around reintroduction in Colorado specifically. 

“It is going to be tough on the wolf itself,” he said. “I believe in complete ecosystems. I studied range science [at Montana State University] in Bozeman. When they were putting wolves in Yellowstone, I studied the range ecology and understood the benefit of wolves. I saw things change for the better in that area.”

But Wyoming is not Colorado — for one thing, Colorado’s population is roughly 10 times that of its northern neighbor. 

“I am concerned, because of the amount of livestock producers and the concentration of humans in the release area [in Colorado], that we’re putting them in a situation that is unfavorable to them,” he continued. “Sure, we have over double the amount of elk of any other state, but it’s just the function where the ungulates live now — around subdivisions, not just in the big, wide-open spaces. This is particularly true in the Roaring Fork Valley. This means that the wolves, when they’re hunting elk, will be coming closer to humans. And the terrain that is around us is steep and unfavorable to wolves in general.”

Jacober is of the opinion that, with more opportunity to plan the reintroduction process initiated by the passage of Proposition 114 — which mandated an initial wolf release date of 2023 — the wolves would have a better chance at survival.

“Proposition 114 made for a very difficult management situation for CPW, which I think is the best wildlife-management organization in the country,” he said. “It didn’t give CPW proper time to plan. I think CPW has done an amazing job dealing with a very emotional subject.”

Then there’s the 800-pound gorilla: the potential effect the reintroduction process will have on the livelihoods of western Colorado’s agricultural community, which in many ways dominates the politics of the areas in which the wolves will be reintroduced.

“It takes time to educate cattle producers about the right way to handle these wild animals,” Jacober said. “But, no matter how much time or planning, there are going to be certain livestock producers affected by the wolf reintroduction. Citizen initiatives are not really the right way to handle wildlife issues.”

Bill Fales, another longtime Carbondale rancher, contends that the land-use patterns in western Colorado will work against the wolves.

“The White River is the most-heavily-visited national forest in the nation,” said Fales, whose Cold Mountain Ranch has been in his wife’s family for more than 100 years. “We have more people in the backcountry per acre than Yellowstone does. The reason that wolves have not migrated back into Colorado by themselves in any great number is that we don’t have suitable habitat for them, and what habitat we do have is overpopulated.”

The irony of the ballot initiative that brought wolves back to Colorado, in Fales’ mind, is that it was based on a false premise — namely, that wolves, rather than humans, are the alpha predators that make a meaningful ecological impact.

“People in favor of wolves talk about ‘restoring the balance,’” he continued. “Well, the best way for the people of Denver who voted in favor of Proposition 114 to restore the balance would be to call up United Van Lines and get 3 or 4 million people to move out of Colorado. We’ve got 5 and a half million people in Colorado right now, and millions of visitors to the places where the wolves are going to be released. 

“We can’t go back to 1890. Restoring the balance isn’t going to happen. In the meantime, we’re going to have a lot of livestock killed. It’s no fun to have to shoot a cow whose udder has been ripped open by a pack of wolves or to hear the anguished cries of a mother cow whose calf was just devoured by a pack of wolves right in front of her.”

Given those issues, why does Fales think people, including many in western Colorado, voted in favor of Proposition 114?

“The proponents showed a lot of pictures of wolf pups. I see a picture of a wolf pup, and I maybe would have voted ‘yes.’ They’re cute,” he said. “Right up until they tear into your livestock.”

Phillips, while certainly sympathetic to the already-troubled economic conditions facing the ranching community in western Colorado, feels compelled to address the points raised by Jacober and Fales.

“First, wolves can and do coexist around people,” he said. “There are healthy populations of wolves in heavily populated eastern Europe. Yellowstone gets more than 2 million visitors a year, and the wolves there are thriving. As far as the prey base moving down toward more populated areas, well, wolves don’t give a shit. They are very prey-based. They will go where the prey is, and most times people will not even know they were there.

“And, as far as the point that if western Colorado were prime wolf habitat, they would have naturally reintroduced themselves, that’s a stretch,” Phillips continued. “There’s a lot of distance through inhospitable territory between the closest wolf population — northwest Wyoming — and western Colorado. The topography, prey base and social situation are not conducive to that migration. Sure, a few individuals have made the journey, but not whole packs. Why would they? Life for wolves is pretty good in northwest Wyoming.”

And it’s not just the divide between Wyoming and Colorado. Phillips likened the situation to that in Minnesota, where healthy wolf populations thrive in the northeast and northwest, but inhospitable terrain between the two regions prevents natural migration.

Lastly, he contends that there were likely a host of reasons why people voted against Proposition 114 that have little or nothing to do with their attitudes toward wolves.

“They may have voted against it because they did not think that the state should be spending money on wolf reintroduction or that they didn’t like the petition process,” he said. “Embedded in 114 is the insistence that CPW not ignore concerns of local citizens. This is a situation where you can have your cake and eat it, too. The bottom line is that Coloradans want wolves.”

Survival isn’t guaranteed

Predicting mortality rates for reintroduced wolves is simply not possible, especially for a reintroduction program in its infancy, like Colorado’s. CPW does not include predicted mortality rates into its wolf-management equation.

Though it is a textbook case of comparing apples to oranges on numerous levels, let’s travel 600 miles to southeast Arizona and southwest New Mexico, where the Mexican wolf reintroduction — overseen primarily by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service — has been ongoing since 1998, when 11 captive-bred Mexican wolves were released into the wild. (A total of 222 wolves have been released since the program’s inception.)

Michael Robinson works for the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, which has been intimately involved with the Mexican wolf reintroduction process (as well as the gray-wolf reintroduction in Colorado).

He said it is tough to predict mortality rates for reintroduced wolves — no matter where that reintroduction process is transpiring — because you need to hammer down the definition of “mortality” as it relates to the reintroduction process.  

“How long do you consider survival for the purposes of this question?” Robinson asked. “Are you referring to within weeks of release, or months or years? Or are you referring to the population overall and not just the released animals?”

The average life expectancy for a Mexican wolf is about six to eight years. So, do you count wolves that have died of old age?

According to Robinson, there have been 304 documented mortalities of Mexican wolves in the wild in the U.S. from 1998 through 2023. Of those, 149 were illegally shot and 40 were killed by vehicles.

Colorado wolves will have one thing going for them that the Mexican wolves do not: In New Mexico, ranchers are able to borrow telemetry receivers that allow them to track wolves. 

“While FWS has declined to cease this practice to protect Mexican wolves, it is noteworthy that Colorado is not providing such info to members of the public,” Robinson said. “The periodically updated map of Mexican wolf locations may also be used to facilitate illegal killings, and again, Colorado is not posting wolves’ locations online. Those management differences may result in a lower level of illegal killings of Colorado’s wolves.”

There are several other differences between the Mexican wolf reintroduction process and the reintroduction process occurring as a result of Proposition 114 in Colorado.

First and foremost, the opposition to wolf reintroduction from the ranching industry in the Southwest is intense to the point of fanatical. Pickup trucks in southwest New Mexico are often adorned with bumper stickers with quips like, “Smoke a pack a day,” with a graphic of a rifle site honed in on a wolf.

Though there is plenty of anti-wolf sentiment in western Colorado — as evidenced by the votes cast against Proposition 114 — it would be hard to exceed or even approach that found in the desert Southwest. The 114 Mexican wolves that have been shot were likely not dispatched by Rainbow Hippies.

Second, almost all of the reintroduced Mexican wolves have been captive-bred — meaning that they had no experience in the wild. They had to wing it.

The wolves brought to Colorado from Oregon in 2023 and those being brought from B.C. are all wild. They know how to survive.

Still, despite obstacles that include intense opposition to wolf reintroduction by the ranching community, in the nearly 40 years since the reintroduction process commenced, there are now 257 Mexican wolves living in the release area. They are not out of the woods yet, but things are looking good for the establishment of a stable breeding population.

And, as Phillips points out, the successful reintroduction process in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem — which bears more resemblance to Colorado than do New Mexico and Arizona — has been a great success.

At this point, no one knows for sure how Colorado’s nascent wolf reintroduction process will play out. There is already an effort to get a question placed on the 2026 ballot to overturn Proposition 114. There are already three dead wolves, out of 10.

More than that, however, the myriad forces universally acknowledged to be working against the wolves may come into play. The deep-seated enmity that has defined the relationship between humans and wolves since the dawn of our species could very well spell their doom. Or maybe — just maybe — the implementation of Proposition 114 will begin to challenge what often feels like a genetically ingrained hostility toward canis lupus.

As Phillips stresses, wolves are a very resilient species. They were here long before humans began to walk upright. They might very well outlive us.

Phillips is confident that, once the wolves recover from their harrowing, pack-fracturing capture in British Columbia, their stress-inducing journey south and their eventual release into the elk-and-deer-(and cow and sheep)-rich wilds of western Colorado, they will, as he said previously, sit there and think they have died and gone to heaven.

Then they will build their new lives in their new home and, if all goes well, reproduce and rebuild their species in a place they once called home.

Paquet, whose wolf-studying bonafides rival those of Phillips, is less optimistic.

“Again, we might just be signing their death warrant,” he said. “But we might also consider that, given B.C.’s own mismanagement and abuse of wolves, the wolves are likely doomed anyway.”

For 12 years, M. John Fayhee edited the Mountain Gazette. He is a longtime contributor to Backpacker magazine who has worked as a staff writer and editor for numerous newspapers in Colorado, including the Aspen Daily News. A two-time Colorado Book Awards finalist, Fayhee’s latest work, “A Long Tangent,” was named a winner of the 2024 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. He now lives right where the Mexican wolf reintroduction process is taking place. He can hear both howls and rifle fire from his house.