By: Rose Pray
Whenever my three year old grand daughter, Emily, sees me in a wolf T shirt, she makes a wolf
howl. Emily has never seen a wolf, with the exception of the plush wolf that I gave her on her first
birthday.
Once wolves numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the U.S., ranging from Canada to
Mexico, West Coast to East Coast. They were in such great numbers that pioneers were never far from a wolf, similar in numbers to today’s backyard birds.
Those early wolves were an apex species who kept their environment in check, making sure
that buffalo and other native species did not outstrip their food sources. In the blink of an eye, when settlers saw the wolf as a problem, they were trapped, shot and poisoned. By the early 1940s, the U.S. wolf population was reduced to less than 500.
Twenty five years ago, wildlife biologists and environmentalists realized the crucial role that
apex species play in wildlife and wilderness biodiversity, and had the ambition to restore wolves
to the Northern Rockies. The wolves, living up to their role, returned wasteland to thriving bio-
communities that gave life again to native flora and fauna, from fish to song birds to grazing big
game.
With the delisting of gray wolves from the Endangered Species Act, the shoot-on-sight policy
across most of Wyoming, and the recent liberalization of wolf hunting and trapping policies in
Montana and Idaho, the wolves of the Northern Rockies are again at the mercy of hunters and
trappers, including some famous Yellowstone wolves who happened to wander outside of the
park boundaries. With each passing day, the numbers of wolves killed in Idaho, Montana, and
Wyoming continue to climb, disrupting wolf families and packs, decimating the fragile
population.
In Colorado, the situation is different. Coloradans across the State voted last November to
restore gray wolves to western Colorado. Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) has been tasked
with developing a wolf management plan and putting wolf paws on the ground by 2023.
Restoring wolves to Colorado will provide a crucial piece of the wildlife corridor that will allow
wolves to once again roam from Canada to Mexico.
In order to have a robust, sustainable and ecologically effective wolf population, we must
advocate for more stringent hunting and trapping regulations in the Northern Rockies. We must
hold CPW to the task of restoring wolves to Western Colorado. Our wonderful state can serve
as an example for wolf and human coexistence and as a sanctuary