Colorado wolf reintroduction is hitting another ugly milestone in Colorado’s wolf reintroduction saga. Colorado Politics reporter Marianne Goodland reports that another wolf from the King Mountain pack, a female identified as No. 2310, has died, pushing total fatalities to 14 out of the 25 wolves brought into the state from Oregon and British Columbia. That leaves the program with a reported survival rate of just 44 percent. For a project sold to voters like some kind of enlightened wildlife success story, that number lands like a cinder block through a sunroom.
Goodland also notes that Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s own management plan says the agency is supposed to examine relocation efforts if survival rates fall below 70 percent. Meanwhile, ranchers have already been paid more than $724,000 in compensation for wolf-related livestock losses and reduced reproduction and market weights in 2025, with more than $1 million in claims having been received. So this is not some abstract debate for a faculty lounge in Boulder. It is a real-world mess with real costs, real dead livestock, and now a whole lot of dead wolves too.
The Bullet Point Brief
- Fourteen of twenty-five reintroduced wolves are dead. That is not a thriving restoration effort. That is a government program wheezing along at 44 percent and hoping nobody notices the math.
- The King Mountain mating pair is now gone. The male died after a botched collaring operation in January, and now the female is dead too. Quite a sales pitch for the folks who promised they were bringing scientific excellence to the mountains.
- Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s own plan says a review is in order if survival drops below 70 percent. We are not a little below that line. We are in the ditch waving at it.
- Ranchers are getting hammered twice. First by livestock losses, then by the usual political food fight over whether they should even be compensated for the indirect damage. Nothing says we care deeply quite like moving the goalposts after the checks start going out.
- The state suspended its effort to track another wolf tied to repeated livestock attacks, after using drones and thermal imaging without success. So the wolves are not safe, the producers are not safe, and the taxpayers get the bill. That is some first-class ballot box biology right there.
My Bottom Line
I have taken this wolf story to task for a long time, and every time the numbers get worse, the same crowd acts offended that anybody is still paying attention. Here is why I keep paying attention. This whole mess is a perfect snapshot of the Denver-Boulder bubble trying to run rural Colorado like a group project they will never have to clean up.
A couple of kombucha sippers get the warm fuzzies over wolves, round up their well-heeled environmentalist friends, and sell a glossy moral fantasy to voters who do not have to calve out heifers, protect sheep, or make payroll off the land. Then the thing squeaks through, despite the objections of the people who actually know something about biology, animal behavior, and livestock production. After that, the true believers move on to the next crusade while producers, taxpayers, and now even the wolves themselves pay the price.
That is the part that ought to make everybody stop and think. This experiment is not just hurting ranchers. It is not just draining compensation funds. It is not just spreading chaos into communities that never asked for it. By the numbers in this very story, it is also failing the wolves. When your grand plan manages to harm livestock producers, taxpayers, and the animals you claimed to be saving, maybe it is time to admit the bumper sticker was smarter than the policy.
Here’s what matters for Colorado families. Rural people are tired of being treated like props in somebody else’s virtue pageant. Good stewardship is real. Sound wildlife management is real. But ballot-box sentimentalism dressed up as science is still sentimentalism. Colorado deserves policy built on facts, local knowledge, and accountability, not a hair-brained social experiment cooked up over artisanal tea in Boulder.
Source: Colorado Politics
