Lauren Boebert reintroduces bill seeking to remove wolves from endangered species list

Colorado wildlife officials are saying successful wolf reintroduction may be tracking. But that could change if people trying to hobble the program with a state ballot measure and a bill in Congress by U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert are successful. 

During a public discussion with The Colorado Sun in March, Eric Odell, wolf conservation manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said year two of reintroduction has been “very exciting” and that wildlife officials “hope to continue for at least another year to work to establish a self-sustaining population.” 

And Brenna Cassidy, CPW’s wolf monitoring and data coordinator, said officials suspect some pairs from the 10 wolves released from Oregon in December 2023 and another 15 brought here from British Columbia in January “may have bred because they were together in February,” when most wolf breeding happens. 

Biologists won’t know for sure until mid-April to early May, because a wolf’s gestation period is around 65 days, Cassidy added. And Odell said restoration would not be considered successful until reintroduced wolves’ survival rate is high, they stay in the state, multiple packs form and breed, and pups born to those packs also go on to breed. 

But both he and Cassidy seemed optimistic about the overall health of the 29 wolves currently on the landscape, including 27 wearing tracking collars and two without. That’s despite the death of a collared wolf that traveled from Colorado into Wyoming in March and preyed on five adult sheep before being legally shot and killed by U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services agents. 

Successful reintroduction may be harder to reach if a bill proposed by U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, who says wolves are an existential threat to rural life in Colorado, gains traction. 

House Resolution 845, or the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, has the support of the National Rifle Association, the American Farm Bureau and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, along with the backing of 30 Republican members of Congress, including Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton, Jeff Hurd of Grand Junction and Jeff Crank of Colorado Springs, but no Democrats have signed on.

Boebert says the bill is a direct response to Colorado’s 2020 voter-directed wolf reintroduction. She presented it to a House Natural Resources subcommittee last week. The measure would restore a 2020 Department of the Interior final rule to delist the gray wolf from the Endangered Species Act, so management activities may be determined by affected states “using the best available science.” 

The bill is a do-over of Boebert’s attempt to remove protections for the gray wolf through her Trust the Science Act, introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2024. It passed in the House but was never taken up by the Senate. 

Boebert said Colorado’s “ballot box biology” caused the state to rush reintroduction “despite numerous protests and questions about the legality and dysfunctional and chaotic approach to prioritizing predators over people.”

She told the subcommittee CPW released wolves without notifying landowners, livestock producers or other reasonably concerned constituents during the first release and that five of those wolves had come from packs with a known history of attacking and killing cattle and other livestock.

And she blamed “frivolous litigation” that impeded wolves losing Endangered Species Act protection for the “$580,000 Colorado’s agricultural producers lost in just one year from when wolves were introduced.” (CPW settled with two Grand County ranchers for $350,000 in compensation.)  

But Defenders of Wildlife took issue with Boebert’s plea to the committee, made up of mostly Republicans including Crank, saying gray wolves in the Northern Rockies are already removed from ESA listing, so her claim that “30 Colorado gray wolves must also be delisted is just a blatant and egregious conflation of the issue,” Maggie Dewane, the group’s communications director, told The Sun after the hearing. 

In the hearing, Boebert argued three presidents have supported the delisting of wolves, starting with Barack Obama, who removed protections in Idaho and Montana in 2009. Donald Trump later removed them for all but Mexican wolves in 2020. And the Biden administration asked an appeals court to revive the Trump-era rule in September. 

The repeat relistings occurred after a federal judge in 2014 threw out the Obama decision and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Trump’s ruling in 2022. No decision was made on the Biden appeal before he left office. 

Boebert also has called for an end to Colorado’s wolf reintroduction program, and supports a proposed ballot measure that would ask voters to do that in 2026. It passed its first hurdle in February, when the Colorado Secretary of State’s Title Board approved language for the proposed measure. If the Colorado Advocates for Smart Wolf Policy group gathers the 124,238 signatures required for statewide ballot measures, the state’s voters could end wolf reintroduction by the end of 2026. 

The proposed initiative would amend Proposition 114, which directed CPW to start introducing wolves in 2023, by tacking on a formal end date to the law of Dec. 31, 2026. Proponents argue this move wouldn’t impact CPW’s ability to continue with reintroduction until that date and Dewane says it’s not a big concern for Defenders of Wildlife because they expect wolves in Colorado to be “fully recovered” likely by the end of this year.

But opponents say it could squeeze the three- to five-year timeline CPW says complete restoration could need. 

Travis Duncan, CPW spokesperson, said gray wolves in Colorado currently are protected by the federal Endangered Species Act and state law, and that if they were to be federally delisted, “they would still remain listed as state endangered, which includes substantial penalties for illegal take.”