Colorado Passes Historic Legislation to Reintroduce Wolves
On November 3rd, 2020, one of the most historic elections in United States history took place, with the highest voter turnout in the history of the country. But, in Colorado, another piece of historic legislation was passed. Winning by a slim margin, Colorado Proposition 114, the Gray Wolf Reintroduction Initiative, was passed. This represented the first time ever that a state used the ballot box to decide whether to reintroduce an extirpated species. Proponents of the bill pointed to the success of the wolf reintroduction programs in Washington, Idaho, and most famously, in Yellowstone National Park as evidence of the benefits for reintroducing the apex predator to their historic range. Opponents call it biology by ballot box, and insist that the potential economic damages created by wolves outweigh the ecological benefits of their reintroduction.
The true impacts of the presence of a healthy wolf population in Colorado remain to be seen, but one thing is sure: Wolves will be reintroduced to western Colorado by 2024. To understand the potential impacts we can look to the incredible story of what happened in Yellowstone National Park.
A Sordid History: Man and Wolf
Homo sapiens and wolves have not always been enemies. There is a great deal of evidence that 20,000 years ago, during the last ice age, homo sapiens and wolves cohabitated hunting grounds, and that both species benefited from the presence of the other. Early humans learned pursuit-hunting techniques by watching wolves, and wolves fed on the scraps left behind by humans. This relationship eventually led to the domestication of some wolves, which after generations of selective breeding turned into dogs.
But, as human society evolved from hunter-gatherer tribes into permanent communities dependent on the cultivation of plant and animal food sources, their relationship with wolves changed as well. Seen as a menace and threat to livestock, and sometimes even humans, wolves became public enemy number one. Legends of the big bad wolf and stories of four legged, toothy monsters devouring children can be found throughout our written and spoken histories, as wolves and humans learned to fear and hate each other. This animosity would continue for thousands of years.
Before the ingression of Europeans into the New World, wolves ranged across most of the American continent. But, over the next several hundred years, wolves were hunted, poisoned, and trapped to the point of total extirpation from most of the contiguous United States. Only in remote ranges of unspoiled wilderness in the Canadian Rockies and other inhospitable habitats did wolves escape persecution.
In 1926, a Yellowstone park ranger shot the last wolf in the Yellowstone area, thus beginning a 70 year period of ecological imbalance, where the apex predator was missing from a delicate ecosystem. The ecological impacts of this policy of wolf extermination can be felt today, and the scale and minutia of this impact could never have been imagined in that time, when government sponsored kill programs sought to eliminate the wolf entirely from most of its historic range.
A Land Without Wolves