Garfield County commissioners recently issued a letter complaining about the latest round of wolf releases in Colorado, and pressuring Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) to prevent releases of wolves in their county. The commissioners were completely out of line in doing this. 

The commissioners’ letter ignores the 37% of Garfield County voters who supported the ballot initiative to bring wolves back to Colorado and instead focuses only on the constituents who opposed, suggesting that the county ought to be able to opt-out of the wolf recovery effort. The 11,039 votes for wolves from Garfield County were enough to provide the winning margin statewide, putting wolf reintroduction over the top. Kudos to Garfield County residents for doing your part to support the recovery of wolves in the Colorado Rockies. Garfield County commissioners are doing a poor job of representing all of you, nor are they respecting the will of the voters throughout the state. 

The election victory that brought wolves to Colorado overrode decades of internal agency politics that had corrupted the biological mission of CPW to suit the whims of a good-old-boy club that served county interests instead of serving wildlife and the public interest. Exhibit A is the scandal over disgraced CPW Regional Manager J.T. Romatzke, who famously got caught colluding with an anti-wolf county government lobby group to undermine wolf reintroduction in the state and to discredit Parks and Wildlife Commissioners perceived as pro-wolf. These toxic agency politics, which had nothing to do with biology, blocked wolf reintroduction for decades, until the citizens of Colorado voted to require wolf reintroduction under a plan “using the best scientific data available.”

GarCo commissioners’ letter also complained about the “current secrecy” in the latest round of wolf releases. Transparency is always a best practice in governance, but it only means telling the truth, not painting a target on agency staff or wolves while the reintroduction operation is underway. Given the threats to agency staff, the illegal advice to “shoot, shovel, and shut up” (in violation of federal law) paraded constantly on anti-wolf social media sites, and the fact that two of the wolves from the 2023 release were illegally shot, CPW would have to be crazy to publicly announce the time and location of wolf releases. That would just give would-be criminals the opportunity to fulfill their felony aspirations. 

The Colorado wolf reintroductions have been a big success, benefitting Coloradans and the mountain ecosystems of the high country. Colorado’s wolf release process mirrors, almost exactly, the wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone: anti-wolf locals foaming at the mouth, complaining that it will be the end of ranching (or elk hunting) as we know it, and illegally shooting a few wolves. Local ranchers with disingenuous and wildly exaggerated claims about livestock losses. It’s all part of the anti-wolf playbook. Today, wolves are finding their natural niche in the mountain ecosystem, and starting to form breeding packs. This is a positive process towards the establishment of a viable wolf population, not of a few hundred, but of the thousands of wolves that Colorado wilds can support.

There’s a reason that county governments aren’t given the authority to manage wildlife within their borders. County commissioners (even former game wardens) aren’t research biologists qualified to manage wildlife populations. Migration routes commonly cross county lines, with elk herds summering in one county and wintering in another. Wolves move even more broadly, some dispersing hundreds of miles. Wildlife are managed by the states for the benefit of all the state’s residents. And that’s as it should be.

It’s a good thing that squabbling commissioners don’t have the authority to meddle in the wolf reintroduction and muck up the process. Garfield County Commissioners should stop mouthing off about the state wolf reintroduction, and get back to work on issues that are within their own scope of work.

Erik Molvar is a wildlife biologist with scientific research published in peer-reviewed journals, a former Laramie Wyoming city councilman, and Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit conservation group working to protect and restore wildlife and watersheds throughout the American West.