A FEDERAL JUDGE has allowed the reintroduction of grey wolves in Colorado to move forward in the coming days by denying a request from the state’s cattle industry for a temporary delay in the predators’ release.
While the lawsuit will continue, Judge Regina Rodriguez’s ruling allows Colorado to proceed with its plan to find, capture and transport up to 10 wolves from Oregon starting on Sunday.
The deadline to put paws on the ground under the voter-approved initiative is December 31.
The lawsuit from the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and The Gunnison County Stockgrowers’ Association alleges that the US Fish and Wildlife Service failed to adequately review the potential impacts of Colorado’s plan to release up to 50 wolves in Colorado over the next several years.
The groups argued that the inevitable wolf attacks on livestock would come at significant cost to ranchers, the industry that helps drive the local economies where wolves would be released.
It’s a debate that has reared its head in different quarters of the world in recent years, with Green Party leader Eamon Ryan famously calling in 2019 for the reintroduction of the animal to help rewild part of the countryside.
Most recently, in September, the European Union launched a review of laws protecting wolves from hunters and farmers, as EU chief Ursula von der Leyen argued that the “concentration of wolf packs” in some European regions has become a “real danger” to livestock and perhaps even people.
Wolves were once hunted to near extinction in Europe, but in the 1950s countries began granting them protected status. Now populations are growing in several regions.
In Colorado, attorneys for the US government said that the requirements for environmental reviews had been met, and that any future harms would not be irreparable, which is the standard required for the temporary injunction sought by the industry.
They pointed to a state compensation programme that pays owners if their livestock are killed by wolves.
That compensation program — up to 15,000 US dollars per animal provided by the state for lost animals — is partly why the judge sided with state and federal agencies.
Judge Rodriguez further argued that ranchers’ concerns did not outweigh the public interest in meeting the will of the people of Colorado, who voted for wolf reintroduction in a 2020 ballot initiative.
Grey wolves were exterminated across most of the US by the 1930s under government-sponsored poisoning and trapping campaigns.
They received endangered species protections in 1975, when there were about 1,000 left in northern Minnesota.
Wolves have since rebounded in the Great Lakes region.
They have also returned to numerous western states: Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington and, most recently, California — following an earlier reintroduction effort that brought wolves from Canada to central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s.
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