Colorado Voters Are Set To Decide If Wolves Should Be Reintroduced To The State

For wolf advocate Larry Wiess, the battle to bring wolves back to Colorado isn't just about ecology. It's about challenging more than a century of U.S. wildlife management. Last summer, the retired animal rights lawyer spent days gathering signatures for an initiative set to appear on Colorado's November ballot. If successful, it could force the state to capture and release wolves in Western Colorado by 2024. According to the coalition backing the plan, it'd also be the first time that voters — in any state — would decide whether to reintroduce an endangered species. Weiss is well aware of the historic nature of the initiative. For him, it's a chance to question the authority of government biologists to make big decisions about wildlife. "That definitely should be decided by the people and not by the scientists," he said in his home in Denver. "Then we take it to the scientists to implement what the people feel about this major division of opinions." Critics of the initiative have a name for the approach: "ballot box biology." Sportsmen's groups and wildlife managers see the plan an assault on a tradition of North American conservation, which has long let bureaucrats manage wild animals based on science and public input. Proponents believe that the same model can't be trusted to help predators like wolves, which are often seen as a threat to hunters. Weiss suspects that's why federal and state officials have refused to return wolves to Colorado for decades. He said going to the ballot was a way to sidestep their control. "It's difficult to make any headway because the hunters and ranchers have such a powerful lobby on all the commissions in the states," he said. Mark Holyoak, a spokesman for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, said the current wildlife management practices are based on the idea that wildlife belongs to the public. The principle dates back to early conservationists like Teddy Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold, who shaped a system that relies on experts to preserve game species. "People in the know are being intentionally left out of the process," Holyoak said...MORE