EDITORIAL: Colorado’s costly call of the wild
If only managing the state’s wildlife were as simple as dialing in Animal Planet from your suburban family room and then reaching for the remote when it’s time to shoo the kids off to bed — and the animal kingdom back to the wilds.
For the vast majority of Coloradans, that’s where their understanding of wildlife begins and ends. The complexities, the challenges, the delicate balance of the wildlife eco-system in our state’s vast high country and on its plains are an abstraction for most people in our population centers.
Much the same can be said for their limited knowledge of the agricultural world that puts food on their tables. The hard work and high risk of farming and ranching in the ever-volatile ag economy are another abstraction to Colorado’s largely urban-suburban population.
Hence, recent survey findings that a majority of Coloradans stills supports the state’s controversial, costly and counterproductive wolf-reintroduction program five years after it was mandated by the state’s voters. Just barely more than half of Coloradans voted for Proposition 114 on the 2020 statewide ballot, and a similarly slight majority, 52%, continues to support the ongoing program, according to the poll by the respected Magellan Strategies.
Never mind that the reintroduction effort has been floundering almost from Day 1. By any measure, the endeavor is backfiring — just as its critics, including The Gazette’s editorial board, had predicted.
For starters, 10 of the 25 gray wolves imported to Colorado so far have died. A 60% chance of survival is little more than even odds — a de facto death sentence for a significant share of the unfortunate animals brought here. It doesn’t bode particularly well in the near term for the putative purpose of reintroduction, i.e., to bring greater balance to Colorado’s food chain.
Meanwhile, wolves that have survived already have been wreaking havoc on the state’s pivotal livestock producers. As Colorado’s Common Sense Institute noted in an analysis of the program’s impact, at least 65 cattle, sheep and other livestock — even a llama — have been killed or injured so far in confirmed attacks by wolves.
The state’s statutorily required compensation to those ranchers, as well as related costs incurred by the program, have driven the total bill to the public over $8 million, according to the institute’s analysis. The program was originally supposed to cost about $800,000 a year.
Yet, the public supports it — because it isn’t in a position to connect the dots between the wolves and the damage they’ve done. The vast majority of the survey respondents haven’t been nursing wounded cows or finding decimated calves on rangeland.
Nor have most Coloradans likely been keeping a running tally of the program’s mounting costs — despite ultimately having to pick up the tab. Those numbers are lost in the overall state budget, which, let’s not forget, had faced a nearly $800 million deficit until lawmakers convened in special session last month to bridge the gap.
There’s nothing wrong with city slickers knowing little about ranching. That’s how it always has been. The problem is when they meddle with the best of intentions — through the ballot box.
The state’s Division of Parks and Wildlife has a highly trained staff that includes wildlife biologists; presiding over them is a commission of stakeholders who understand wildlife management in depth. If wolf reintroduction had made sense, they would have been the ones to advance the idea.
Proposition 114, whose campaign was funded by out-of-state interests, was derided it at the time as “ballot box biology.” It was in fact a ballot box backfire.
Many Coloradans still don’t realize that — and can’t be expected to — on such an arcane issue. Which is why it never belonged on the ballot in the first place.
