A federal judge has allowed the reintroduction of gray wolves in Colorado to move forward in the coming days by denying a request Friday 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 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 U.S. 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.
I farm right next to (within 10km) pristine forest stretching for a few thousand km in a couple directions. I’ve seen plenty of wolves, but they never really come into the farming areas, and even if they do, the cattle aren’t very concerned. You have a couple hundred head together in a field, they aren’t worried about wolves, cougar or coyotes. They’d stomp them into a paste.
We have neighbors that bitch and moan about the coyotes “killing calves”. I’ve seen plenty of coyotes chewing on dead calves, but I feel it’s pretty unlikely to have been them that killed it, they’re just cleaning up a late miscarriage that might have walked around for a while looking for a place to die. It’s almost always calves I’ve looked at and thought they weren’t going to last long.
And there are more than enough deer, moose and elk around for these predators to go after that they would much rather take anyway, rather than risk an angry bunch of momma cows mopping them up.
Frankly, if the price of having a healthy wildlife population means losing a few sick calves to them and a couple tonnes of grain to deer, I’m fine with it. That ecosystem benefits us in a lot of ways.
Interesting. Maybe the reason so many ranchers complain to the Wyoming Game and Fish is so they can get damage payouts. Perhaps they’re over exaggerating the issue.
Maybe it’s a very small amount of people complaining and the story is being made about them, and not the thousands of other ranchers that don’t give a fuck.
Don’t underestimate the size and support of the Cattlemen’s Association