Republicans Worry the Wolf Is at the Door...of the Statehouse

Colorado is pushing to meet a 2023 deadline to reintroduce wolves, as established by the extremely tight passage of a November 2020 ballot measure that saw most support coming from the urban Front Range and most opposition coming from rural areas.

And the sides have only moved further apart since then. In the wake of reports of wolves killing cattle in Walden, the Colorado Republican Party of Colorado quickly labeled Governor Jared Polis’s recent appointment of Rebecca Niemiec to a new post as manager of the Bureau of Animal Protection program, which investigates and works to prevent animal abuse, as anti-agriculture and pro-wolf, another slap in the face to rural Colorado.

“We see time and time again that Governor Polis claims to care about rural Colorado, but every time he has a chance to show it, he does the opposite,” says Kristi Burton Brown, the state party chair. Burton Brown says the manager of the Bureau of Animal Protection should be someone who respects and understands ranchers and agriculture, an important part of this state's economy.

But the Bureau of Animal Protection doesn't have much involvement with ranchers or agriculture. While it's under the Colorado Department of Agriculture, it oversees enforcement of the Animal Protection Act, and its mission is distinct from that of the state's Pet Animal Care Facilities Act program, which licenses and inspects facilities that house animals. The Animal Protection Act focuses mainly on issues of animal abuse rather than regulation of facilities; while the protections apply to both pets and livestock, Kate Greenberg, the state's commissioner of agriculture, says that livestock accounts for less than 6 percent of the bureau’s cases.

With Niemiec’s appointment, Greenberg says she hopes the department will be able to move beyond response and into prevention. “For a long time, we have had very limited resources to deal with anything beyond responding to what comes into our office,” she notes. “What we're trying to do now is figure out how we get on the front end of bad things happening and actually prevent cases of animal abuse, neglect and mistreatment before something bad does happen.”

After she requested additional funds last year, Greenberg says that the bureau received resources to build the program. Along with Niemiec, the department will hire two investigators and a forensic veterinarian.

A Colorado State University professor, Niemiec studies interactions between animals and people; she'll retain her CSU position part-time in order to continue her research after she starts managing the bureau on March 7. She plans to use her background in social science to bring in various stakeholders to help create a program focused more on prevention than citation.

Of the three finalists for the new job, Burton Brown says that Niemiec is actually the least objectionable. The others were John Hopkinson, a strong opponent of animal cruelty in the ranching industry, which Burton Brown says indicates he doesn’t support ranchers; and Douglas Doneson, who sued dairy farmers in a class-action lawsuit.

“When the best person on the governor’s shortlist is someone who wants wolves to be introduced and supports wolves over our cattlemen and ranchers, that's problematic for a state like Colorado, where we have so many people who survive off their ranching,” Burton Brown says.

But Niemiec suggests that people characterize her as a supporter of wolves because of her research, which wasn’t slanted in either direction. “The primary focus was not advocating for or against wolf reintroduction, but really trying to apply the social science approach and social science research to understand diverse public and stakeholder perspectives on this issue," she explains.

To that end, Niemiec helped run a workshop with people ranging from ranchers to hunters and wildlife managers to examine how to reduce conflict; she’s currently working with Colorado Parks and Wildlife to study how the process of wolf reintroduction has impacted trust in the department, along with other social outcomes.

Aside from that research, Niemiec isn’t involved with wolf reintroduction, which is overseen by CPW rather than the Department of Agriculture. Greenberg says the Bureau of Animal Protection would only come into play if a case of livestock neglect was somehow connected to a ranch involved in wolf depredation; depredation events themselves are handled by CPW.

Recent wolf depredation events have been the subject of concern in Jackson County, especially near Walden, where a local wolf pack lives. In fact, CPW collared the first wolf pup born in Colorado on February 10. The female pup was born from a mother who migrated from Wyoming.

A U.S. District Court in California ruled on February 12 that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was incorrect when it removed protections of the Endangered Species Act from wolves, which were first put under the act in 1978, by delisting them. The ruling reverses that, and now Fish and Wildlife must resume recovery efforts for wolves, which are again protected from being hunted or illegally harvested in most of the country. However, wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming remain unprotected, as wolves in those areas were delisted in 2011 and several lawsuits failed to succeed in getting them relisted.

“The ESA is really one of our nation's most fundamental environmental laws, as well as one of our most effective for protecting native wildlife in danger of extinction,” says Kelly Nokes, a lawyer who represented various wildlife organizations on the case. “It serves as a really crucial safety net.”

Colorado is included in the ruling, though the ruling notes that the state's protective programs are adequate to protect wolves without needing the Endangered Species Act. Through a spokesperson, CPW declined to discuss the case, saying that wolves have been protected in Colorado since 1974 and will remain protected regardless of what is going on nationally.

Rob Edward is a strategic advisor for the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, which was key to passing wolf reintroduction in Colorado. “We certainly support the efforts to get wolves relisted even though it could conceivably complicate things a little bit in terms of our movement for putting wolves on the ground,” he says.

CPW has appointed a working group of reintroduction and management experts and a stakeholder advisory group of people from various geographic areas that may be impacted by wolf reintroduction. The groups will advise CPW on its plan to reintroduce wolves, which will be completed in late 2022 or early 2023.