Opponents of Colorado wolf reintroduction will start gathering signatures for 2026 ballot measure that would stop it

A group seeking to end wolf reintroduction by Dec. 31, 2026, will start gathering the signatures it needs to get a citizens’ initiative on the November 2026 ballot in the next few days. 

Initiative 13 would end voter-mandated reintroduction of wolves that started in December 2023. 

Over the past several months, Colorado Advocates for Smart Wolf Policy amended their proposal to add a provision that would ban importing wolves to Colorado if the initiative passes. 

The State Title Board denied that amendment Wednesday. But Patrick Davis, the lead organizer of the Smart Wolf group, said, “We still have a title. And that’s what we’re going to run with. It’s the simple language the people in Colorado have always understood. Let’s end this wolf experiment.” 

A coalition of ranchers, conservationists, hunters and community leaders opposes the initiative, saying it muddies the waters of negotiations it wants to make with Colorado Parks and Wildlife to continue reintroduction. They say it left them feeling “blindsided” by people lacking “any real knowledge of the groups and the people who are living on the ground with the wolves.” 

Davis said he’ll get the petitions for Initiative 13 printed in the next couple of days and start collecting the 125,000 signatures from registered voters in Colorado needed to place it on the November 2026 ballot.

Ranchers oppose initiative   

If proposed Initiative 13 passes, it would end gray wolf reintroduction exactly three years after Colorado Parks and Wildlife began its first release of wolves in a three- to five-year plan to fully restore the species. They were fulfilling the mandate in Proposition 114, which Coloradans, largely east of the Continental Divide and in a few liberal pockets, voted for 51% to 49% in 2020. Three years of intense planning by multiple stakeholder groups including ranchers, conservationists, wolf lovers, wolf haters and Colorado Parks and Wildlife followed. 

The first group of 10 gray wolves from Oregon were released in Grand and Summit counties in December 2023. A second group of 15 wolves from British Columbia were set loose in Eagle and Pitkin counties in January.  

But a coalition of 15 mostly Western Slope county commissioners along with ranchers, conservationists and hunters say the Smart Wolf group’s efforts are hurting their mission to get wolf reintroduction paused for a year while they continue to press Colorado Parks and Wildlife to fulfill multiple stipulations for continuing reintroduction they presented in a petition to the Parks and Wildlife commission in November.  

In March, the coalition sent a letter to the Smart Wolf group asking them to pull their ballot measures, because “effective policy solutions require strategy and direct engagement with those most affected,” and the group has left them out of the discussion. 

Smart Wolf “should have started by engaging with the stakeholders that truly have the best interest of their livestock in mind, being the ones that are in danger and needing protection,” said Tom Harrington, board president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and a coalition member. Instead, they “came at this thing with pretty limited knowledge” about ranchers’ involvement in reintroduction from the beginning and what’s at stake for them, he added.     

During the creation of Colorado’s wolf management plan many in the ranching community fought for protections like compensation for lost livestock, funding for nonlethal deterrents to keep wolves away and programs supporting carcass management — the removal and storage of dead cows and sheep to keep the rest of their herds safe, Harrington said. 

But reintroduction has inflicted many problems on ranchers, including the confirmed loss of 18 sheep, cattle and sheep between April 2 and Sept. 9, according to CPW records. Reintroduced wolves have killed one confirmed yearling cow since the second release. CPW in December finally released its definition and stipulations of chronic depredation — wolves repeatedly injuring or killing livestock.  

In December, CPW director Jeff Davis vowed to do a better job with the second phase of wolf reintroduction through improved assessments of ranches for nonlethal conflict mitigation tools, additional conflict reduction specialists, enhanced response to wolf conflict and livestock killings, range riders, carcass management help and increased funding for ranchers to implement nonlethal responses to wolf and livestock conflicts. 

In March, the Parks and Wildlife commission also agreed to pay two of the affected ranchers — Conway Farrell and Bruchez and Sons — $350,000 in compensation for their losses. 

But Harrington said CPW “hasn’t held true” to their initial wolf management plan, in part, “because they relocated a pack that was a problem in one area to another area, unfortunately just to the east of me in the Roaring Fork Valley.” He was referring to Colorado’s first established wolf pack, the Copper Creek pack, which was trapped in Grand County after the adults killed sheep and cattle on Farrell’s ranch, held at an unnamed facility and rereleased in January. 

The Parks and Wildlife commission also failed to adopt the petition a coalition of 26 key players, including many of Harrington’s group, put before them in January that asked for a one-year pause on reintroductions to get some of the critical programs Davis said they were already doing in place. 

The commission on Jan. 8 voted 10-1 to reject the petition. 

Less than a week later, CPW began releasing British Columbia wolves in Eagle and Pitkin counties. 

Lauren Dobson, spokesperson for the coalition, said, “this group kind of formed out of that denial, feeling as though they were not heard, that their concerns, their needs, were not taken into consideration, and a lot of these programs are still not in place.”  

They’ve been devising a new strategy to get that yearlong pause they believe the reintroduction needs, she added. 

This is where trying to stop Colorado Advocates for Smart Wolf’s initiative comes in. 

Initiative 13 “serves ranchers in no way”

Dobson says her group is not opposed to going to the ballot for actions related to wolf reintroduction but that the proposed initiative “serves them in no way, because there are still two wolf release seasons before Initiative 13 would go into effect.” 

But CPW spokesperson Travis Duncan said only one group of wolves will have been released by then if all goes to plan. 

Dobson also said Smart Wolf never consulted with the coalition before submitting their proposal to the State Title Board, “so the initial drop of the citizens’ petition blindsided all of our coalition members and their membership. It was done without any coordination, any real knowledge of the groups and the people who are living on the ground with the wolves.”

“The coalition doesn’t feel like this is the right group to represent their needs,” she added. “They don’t have any true understanding of what they are dealing with or how their citizens’ effort would impact the agricultural, rural and hunting communities.”

Patrick Davis, the Smart Wolf leader, said his group did talk to several members of the coalition after he submitted his original petition for a ballot measure to repeal wolf reintroduction and shared several text messages with The Colorado Sun to prove it. 

He said Grand County Commissioner Merrit Linke and Mesa County Commissioner Cody Davis “jumped on a January 16 Zoom call to express to us their concern … that if you blanket repeal what passed in 2020, you would put in jeopardy the depredation compensation funding and funding from the state legislature for wolf management they had worked hard to get after it passed.” 

And he said in the February 4 submission of the proposal to legislative services he amended the proposal “to preserve depredation and management funding for which the stakeholder ranchers had won and requested remain in the law in the January 16 Zoom.”

But “even though my phone number and email address have been on the bottom of our website since Jan. 3, no one who signed the letter ever called me,” he said. “They just ambushed me, ambushed us, and then they sent the letter to the press.” 

Wolf reintroduction hurts taxpayers 

Patrick Davis said the initiative is motivated in part by the burden it places on taxpayers.

“I’m a taxpayer, and in early December, I started reading Republican Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer and Democratic Sen. Dylan Roberts’ comments during the Joint Budget Committee meeting,” he said. “They were talking about how we had, at that point, a $900 million budget deficit. It’s since grown. And the wolf reintroduction budget was over budget. They were saying it might have been a good time to pause it and re-look at funding it. And I thought, ‘Oh. Well this is obvious. We can’t afford this as taxpayers in Colorado.’”

Reintroduction has also been brutal for the cattle industry, with animals killed and “the stress on the cattle producers themselves,” said Patrick Davis, who is also political campaign strategist from Colorado Springs. The quality of the meat has degraded because of the stress on the animals, he added. Birth rates are lower. “It’s been a disaster for that, particularly in western Colorado.” 

But Dobson says her stakeholder coalition has accepted wolves are here to stay, even though “Colorado rushed their reintroduction and CPW did not have a lot of time to get programming in place before the governor and the administration said that wolves needed to be on the ground.”

That rush has strained rural communities and their relationships with their local CPW area wildlife managers, she added. But ranchers don’t necessarily think trying to end reintroduction is the answer. 

“They want a short, reasonable pause, to get all of the programs in place,” Dobson said. “They want metrics and measures to assess success, both on the reintroduction side and on the conflict minimization side. And they’re looking to do this through communication with the wildlife commission. They’re working through what a legislative request would look like. And at the county level, they’re asking how do we involve our county commissioners, our county leadership, in more of the decision making and conversation to make sure we are all prepared.” 

In a response to Smart Wolf’s decision to move forward with Initiative 13 Wednesday, they said it “reflects that disconnect and lack of stakeholder engagement from the beginning. We face a number of challenges with the wolf reintroduction program and will continue to urge coordination with our efforts.” 

In Smart Wolf’s press release following their decision, they wrote “the Title Board is denying the owners of livestock guard and herding animals the chance for compensation for losses caused by a gray wolf and denying the professionals at the Colorado Department of Parks and Wildlife the chance to be given flexibility to manage Colorado’s wolf population as they see fit. Additionally, Colorado voters were denied the opportunity to weigh in on prohibiting wolves from being imported into Colorado.”