With the news last week Colorado Parks & Wildlife will not release any wolves this winter, it has become clear the state is at a crossroads with its reintroduction program. Which is as good a place as any to reverse course — and admit the program is a failure.

Voters were ever-so-slightly in favor of the idea back in 2020, when Proposition 114 passed by the hair on its chinny-chin-chin. The margin was 50.91% to 49.09%, fewer than 57,000 votes total. The majority of the counties that voted in favor were comprised of citizens unaffected by the specifics of the ballot initiative, which was exclusively to release wolves on the western slope.

Eight of the 13 counties in favor were comprised of urbanites and suburban dwellers along the Front Range. Another two counties, Summit and Pitkin, although west of the Continental Divide and closer to the releases, are wealthy, tourism-based areas with far more remote-working skiers living in condos than ranchers working the range.

In other words, the ill effects of wolf reintroduction are downstream from a lot of the voters who enacted it. But since the first wolves arrived a few years ago, problems have mounted for our state’s cattle industry, among others, creating blowback from critics across the political spectrum. There’s even opposition in Washington state, where that state’s Department of Fish & Wildlife said no to giving more wolves to Colorado.

Our state has experienced dead cattle aplenty, endangered and embattled livestock guard dogs and unnerved ranchers. As the ranchers had expected, their livelihood — and many Coloradans’ dinner — were at stake. And, of course, there is the welfare of the wolves themselves, as seven of the 15 that were brought into the state in 2025 already have died. Most recently, a female gray wolf died in northwest Colorado earlier this month.

Colorado Parks & Wildlife — which already sacrificed leader Jeff Davis as an offering intended to win back some public favor — and the agency’s boss, Gov. Jared Polis, are trudging forward stubbornly with promises to “establish a self-sustaining gray wolf population in Colorado.” It apparently will be with another release next winter on the strength, between now and then, of more of the same — “meeting with producers and stakeholders,” “investments in significant conflict minimization,” updating wolf population “source plans,” etc.

Affected ranchers have shown patience and grace in working with state officials in making their case for a pause to reintroduction. As Carlye Currier, president of the board of the Colorado Farm Bureau, told Colorado Politics “ranchers have been the victims of poor management decisions beyond their control.” To say the least.

Ranchers in fact have borne the brunt of those bad decisions, not only by management in the state bureaucracy, but also by the voting public. It was hoodwinked by a slick “save the wolves” pitch that was bankrolled from out of state and orchestrated by the national animal-rights movement.

“It is time,” Currier continued, “to be honest about the failures and missed marks for all constituencies involved.”

Critics of the 2020 ballot measure called it “ballot box biology” and rightly so. Voters never should have been forced into the position of second-guessing the state’s wildlife management. It has backfired in a big way on the state’s ag producers as well as Colorado’s wildlife. 

The ballot simply is no place for wildlife management. This experiment has failed. The legislature ought to search for a way to get Colorado out of it.