In 1990, the California electorate approved Proposition 114, which banned cougar hunting in the state and activated dozens of similar voting measures nationwide, usurping the authority of state wildlife agencies that are subject to the vagaries of public opinion. The ironic result of Proposition 114 was that more mountain lions are now killed each year in California than before the alleged ban was implemented.
The Sacramento Bee reports that an average of 98 mountain lions die each year under so-called “predation permits” (issued by the state when mountain lions kill cattle and pets), nearly 4 times the number before the voting initiative is approved. . The law of accidental consequences prevailed, as is the case when emotionally charged wildlife control problems are in the voting role.
The question is whether wildlife should be controlled through electorates or agencies whose mandate is to do so. “States have wildlife departments run by biologists, researchers, and other scientists,” says Jeff Crane of the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, founded in Washington, D.C., “The United States has the most effective wildlife control style in the history of the world, and the basic precept is that those professionals are guilty of making decisions in the interests of others and wildlife.”
In November, the citizens of Colorado will go to the polls if Canadian gray wolves deserve to be taken to the west side of the state. The 114th Initiative arrived at the polls thanks as a giant component to the outdoor teams of the state of Colorado. According to reports filed with the Colorado Secretary of State, more than 75% of the request’s investment comes from external sources, adding teams funded by George Soros, the liberal progressive billionaire who created Open Society Foundations, which reports an endowment of $19 billion. .
Although biologists in the state’s Parks and Wildlife Division do not have to present wolves, Gov. Jared Polis has upheld state law that prohibits the firm’s staff from publicly sharing their perspectives on voting issues. However, her husband, Marlon Reis, 39, is a long-time open vegan rights activist who has been involved in the debate, supporting efforts to introduce wolves to Colorado. In his Facebook posts, Reis quotes almost literally the faction that supports wolf presentations: “Instead of decimating the herds of moose as some feared,” he writes, referring to wolf presentations in Yellowstone National Park, “these predators in the wisest have filled a gap in the ecosystem.”
However, this is a gap that many athletes feel they want to fill. “Hunters have provided most of the investment in conservation in this country for more than a generation,” says Ted Harvey, former state healer and crusade manager for Stop the Wolf PAC, an organization that leads efforts to oppose the wolf advent initiative. “If your main argument in favor of introducing wolves is that it will improve habitat fitness by reducing the number of moose and deer, then it will allow hunters who pay the highest licensing fees and contribute powerfully to the rural economy of the state to fulfill this role. Hunters can decrease the number of herds without wreaked havoc on livestock, as wolves did in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, where they were liberated decades ago.
According to a 2018 study commissioned through the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Division (CPW), about 350,000 big game licenses are sold a year in Colorado and athletes contribute $1.8 billion a year to the state economy. “Colorado is home to about 300,000 moose,” says Ron Velarde, retired regional director of CPW Northwest. “It’s more than any other Western state so far.”
And that’s what considers so many other people on the west side of the state. Opponents of the advent of wolves point to what has already happened in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana to gain a better sense of what would happen if wolves were brought.” In Idaho, 35 wolves were brought first and this population now exceeds 1,500 animals. “, wrote former congressman and breeder Bob Beauprez in a full Colorado editorial. “The result has been devastating for the backcountment’s big game fighter shipowners. Half of them have ceased operations as a result of the decrease in the number of moose and the remaining 50% reports a decrease in activity.”
What some see as a black-and-white factor has a blue debate by red, with densely populated Democratic urban centers imposing their will through the polls in rural, largely Republican counties.
“Activists in the big city of Denver have collected the vast majority of petition firms needed to qualify the factor for the election,” Beauprez writes. “Of course, they don’t need wolves to be released in their backyard. The drafters of the initiative ensured that the wolves were taxed on other people on the west side.
“It’s like asking someone in New York if they wanted them to throw the trash in their community or in New Jersey,” Harvey says. “When you see classified ads from wolf groups, you wonder how we survived without the wolves.”
One such team is called the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project (RMWP), an animal rights organization and environmental organizations that are commonly out of state, adding the Sierra Club (involved in its own recent controversy over the racist prospects of its founder, John Muir), Council of Wildlife Defenders and Natural Resources, among others. RMWP is not a non-profit organization, so the Tides Center in San Francisco, with soros support, was implemented for nonprofit prestige in Colorado on behalf of RMWP.
Visit RMWP’s online page for ads and videos that look like complicated productions related to multimillion-dollar corporate lobbying efforts rather than grassroots environmental groups. Leading his efforts, Mike Phillips, a former director of Yellowstone, has become director of Ted Turner’s Endangered Species Fund. “What we did at Yellowstone may be done in Colorado,” Phillips says in one of the many videos on the band’s online page. “Our purpose is to identify wolves from the Upper Arctic to the Mexican border.”
“Unfortunately, wolves will pay the value if this happens,” Harvey says. “People in the spaces where they would be released simply don’t need it and this leads to poor effects for wolves. Talk to other people in Yellowstone and they won’t see the arrival of the wolf a success. This is the federal government that is pushing its throats from inside the Beltway.
“The research shows that after the Colorado electorate has come forward with all the facts, not just the dubious claims of the promoters,” says Mark Truax of Coloradans Protecting Wildlife, an organization that represents a coalition of agricultural, livestock, recreational and conservation organizations that oppose the wolf initiative, “No longer the arrival of wolves across the polling place.”
These perspectives do not appear on the RMWP website. Instead, they greet you through a video of a guy on the street who randomly asks passers-by in Denver the undeniable question: “Are there wolves in Colorado?” Many of the interviewees answered yes, as if they were ignorant city dwellers who did not have the concept of wolves. Then the voice of the video informs them that there are no wolves in Colorado, as if the perception of that was ridiculous unless the initiative allows predators to be introduced into the state. The challenge is that, like many of the statements discovered on the RMWP website, the data is false or misleading.
In February, CPW officials showed the presence of a herd of six wolves in northwestern Colorado that had moved from neighboring Wyoming. Numerous other wolf sightings were also reported prior to the agency’s announcement. So, as a headline in Denver mag 5280 magazine asked in its June 30 edition, “If the wolves are already in Colorado, shall we resubmit them?”
Not if you ask the network of breeders and state suppliers. Some 38 of Colorado’s 64 counties have passed resolutions that oppose the wolf’s initiative, and many are in rural areas where herders care about their livestock if wolves settle and expand as they have in other states.
Idaho rancher Jeff Siddoway made headlines when he reported wasting 176 sheep on a single night while wolves hunted his flock on a steep embankment, causing damages of $28,000. Since wolves were brought to the state in 1995, Idaho has shown that only about 1,000 cows, more than 3,000 sheep, 53 grazing dogs and horses, goats, mules and flames have become prey to wolves; the numbers are probably much higher than no attacks reported. .
None of these facts appear in RMWP documents. The site, on the other hand, is also making an additional effort to categorically proclaim that no camper has been injured by wolves in national parks. However, that’s not true if you ask Matthew and Elisa Rispoli and their two young children who were sleeping in their shop in Banff National Park last August, when a Canadian gray wolf broke the store, attacked the father and educated him.
“It’s like anything that comes out of a horror movie,” Elisa wrote in a widely cited Facebook post on foreign media. “I don’t think I can ever describe terror well.”
RMWP also does not mention that Canada’s grey wolf is a particularly giant wolf that never existed in Colorado. The Canadian subspecies can grow to more than six feet long and weigh up to 175 pounds, according to Live Science, a stark contrast to the much smaller 110-pound giant plain wolf that roamed the state a generation ago. “These giant wolves are much more effective at killing moose and moose,” Harvey says. “It is not a reinventor at all, it is the advent of an exotic species, not native, because there has never been such an animal in Colorado.”
“According to the Wyoming Department of Hunting and Fisheries,” says Velarde, “before the first arrival of the wolf in 1997, the moose population had more than 10,000 animals. Since then, it has fallen to fewer than 1,400 animals in 2018. Most of this decline, according to biologists in this state, can be attributed to the arrival of wolves in Wyoming”.
The fact that Canadian grey wolves are known carriers of fatal hydatic disease is another fact that has not been reported on the RMWP website. This disease is caused by the tapeworm cyst Echinococcus granulosus. Humans can contract the disease by handling inflamed corpses from the soil, dust, and cyst-exposed plants. According to a study published in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases, “It was detected to have 39 of the 63 wolves in Idaho and 38 out of 60 wolves in Montana.”
For an Idaho nurse who contracted the disease when she and her husband moved from their home in Boise to the mountains frequented by wolves, the disease replaced life. It affects the liver, kidneys, lungs and brain, according to the World Health Organization.
“In 2001, I was given bad health and confused,” says the woman, who spoke on anonymity for fear of reprisals from pro-wolf groups. “It wasn’t until 2003 that I was diagnosed with hydatic disease. It’s a terrible affliction.”
According to the National Institutes of Health, hydatic disease was the cause of at least 41 deaths between 1990 and 2007 in the United States.
In 1859, John Stuart Mill, in his e-book On Liberty, complained about the tyranny of the majority in what persisted as an uplifting narrative for democracies around the world. When it comes to managing wildlife through the polling place, it’s a public relations war where facts become endangered species. Motivate the electorate with emotion-laden messages, let science and wildlife experts be damned, and chances are to get away with it… for better or worse.
“I don’t believe in wildlife control through surveys,” says Velarde. “When you entrust control to professional wildlife biologists, you make a mistake … because there are accidental consequences.”
Ask California.
I am the founding spouse of Denver-based Dorsey Pictures, a leading manufacturer of lifestyle television systems for a wide variety of networks that add HGTV, National
I am the founding spouse of Denver-based Dorsey Pictures, a leading manufacturer of lifestyle television systems for a wide variety of networks that add HGTV, National Geographic, Oxygen, Nat Geo Wild, DIY, History Channel, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, Travel Channel, ESPN, NBC Sports, Outdoor Channel and many others.
I am the author of 10 books on sports travel, business and herbal history and my paintings have been published in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, National Geographic, Report and many outdoor adventure magazines from around the English-speaking world. In the past, I was the youngest editor in the 140-year history of Sports Afield magazine, the world’s oldest open-air newspaper, only The Field of London.