Dear Editor,
As a lifelong wolf lover, I voted against the Wolf Reintroduction Program in Colorado. It is, despite our best human intentions, a cruelty against animals. Many of the few reintroduced have been tragically shot with the hatred...
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Dear Editor,
As a lifelong wolf lover, I voted against the Wolf Reintroduction Program in Colorado. It is, despite our best human intentions, a cruelty against animals. Many of the few reintroduced have been tragically shot with the hatred of the men living closest to them. Only more deaths await, should Colorado Parks and Wildlife proceed with its ill-conceived plans to bring more into our state from British Columbia.
Wyoming and Idaho have both refused to supply wolves, citing suitable habitat and social acceptance. https://coloradosun.com/2024/12/24/colorado-governor-ranchers-at-odds-wolf-reintroduction-program/
Lacking social acceptance amidst the population living on the lands closest to wolves, it is the wolves who suffer. Time has only, tragically, proven this true.
In 2004, I studied the Central Idaho Gray Wolf Recovery Program. My thesis was on the 1995 wolf reintroduction into the wolf recovery areas of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. Interviewing Nez Perce tribal elders and further researching other reintroduction programs for the Mexican Gray Wolf, I found that lack of social acceptance and perennial anti-wolf sentiment amidst ranchers was bringing the reintroduced wolves to an early demise.
Notably, the Mescalero Apache offered:
…To presume that nature is a static entity requiring man’s intervention is contrary to the basic concepts of ecosystem management, and is truly arrogant…The void left by the wolf has been filled by other predators such as coyotes, mountain lions and bobcats. Change has occurred, and nature has compensated. To attempt to play ‘God’ and interfere at this point will wreak havoc with a system that has already equalized…
As with the Mescalero Apache and off-record interviews with Nez Perce tribal elders, the return of the gray wolf to a changed landscape was a cruelty visited upon the wolves themselves. Not only are they synecdoches, symbols of political strife, but they are now in the literal crosshairs of ranchers intent upon murdering them, with, in the words of Barry Lopez, an almost pathological dedication.
The Colorado Wolf Reintroduction was an idealistic notion at best, and continuing the program, now with Canadian wolves, will result in more animal cruelty. Responsible wolf management and moral ethics mandate it must PAUSE the reintroduction, until and unless more social acceptance is achieved.
On behalf of the vulnerable wolves,
Denise Boehler, M.A., Writer, Ecopsychologist
Nederland