by Mark Chesnut - Tuesday, March 18, 2025
This NRA website continues to chronicle how states reintroducing wolves to areas in the western United States can lead to not only a drastic decline in deer and elk populations but also to significant losses for ranchers near release sites. A report from Colorado following its wolf reintroduction indicates the state has utilized almost its entire depredation budget to compensate a single rancher for livestock losses due to released wolves.
As background, Coloradans voted by a narrow margin in 2020 to reintroduce wolves to the state. Ten wolves were released in Summit and Grand counties in December 2023. In January 2025, CPW released another 15 wolves, which they had captured in British Columbia and relocated to Pitkin and Eagle counties.
According to media reports from the Denver Post and a growing list of other media outlets, Colorado lawmakers allocated $350,000 in 2024 for its Wolf Depredation Compensation Fund,
which was established to compensate landowners and agricultural producers for wolf depredation of livestock and working animals. This amount was double what was available through the fund in the previous year. However, ranchers in Grand County, Colo., presented Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) with a $582,000 bill for wolf kills and the associated impacts on cattle and sheep in the first year of reintroduction.
On March 5, the CPW Commission agreed to pay Farrell Livestock $287,407, which includes compensation for 15 cows killed by wolves in the spring of 2024. The payout also accounts for a 3 percent reduction in conception rates and decreased calf weight in the herd, compared to three years prior to the 2024 figures.
At the same meeting, the CPW commissioners also unanimously approved wolf depredation claims from Bruches and Sons totaling $56,008. With the Farrell payment included, that brings the total to $343,415—leaving just $6,585 remaining in the depredation compensation fund.
“The request for payment on this is not a bonus to anybody, it’s simply trying to recover some of the costs that have been lost and actually should have been to these producers last fall,” CPW commission chairman Dallas May said at the meeting. He also noted, “This is not somebody asking for a bonus or a dividend, but this is someone simply trying to stay in business,” said commission chair Dallas May, who is a rancher.”
If the payouts sound extravagant, you likely don’t understand the ranching business very well. Rancher Conway Farrell, owner of Farrell Livestock, put the situation into perspective in a recent interview with the Coloradoan.
“We could get a half million dollars out of this deal, and it wouldn’t touch the losses we actually had to sustain our operation,” Farrell told the newspaper. “We need the money to stay in business. This is money we usually would have had last fall to go through another year of ranching.”
The depredation issue has been contentious ever since the decision to reintroduce wolves in Colorado. Chad Franke, president of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union (RMFU), recently addressed the matter directly.
“The state of Colorado, Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW), Colorado Department of Agriculture (CDA), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) have the responsibility under the law and the Wolf Management Plan to mitigate impacts to Colorado’s farmers, ranchers and rural communities arising from last year’s wolf introduction,” Franke said in a released statement. “We call on CPW, CDA [Colorado Department of Agriculture] and USFWS [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] to immediately work with those bearing the impacts of the introduction by finalizing the definition of ‘chronic depredation’ and using all means, up to and including lethal take, to protect the livelihood of those who make their living providing food for Colorado, the country and the world.”
The $582,000 bill sent to the state by Grand County ranchers in January involved claims from three producers and focused on livestock attacks in 2024. A breakdown showed $18,411.71 for confirmed attacks resulting in the injury or death of cows, calves and sheep; $173,526.63 for yearling cattle, calves and sheep reported missing from ranches with confirmed attack or death; $216,772.20 for cattle from those ranches taken to market at a lower-than-normal weight; $172,754.64 for decreased conception rates among sheep and cattle on ranches with confirmed attacks or kills; and $515 for one necropsy of a deceased calf.
States considering the reintroduction of wolves, or increasing their numbers, should be mindful of the financial implications seen in Colorado from past reintroductions. Additionally, the ongoing controversy does not even factor in the decline of wild ungulate populations resulting from the introduction of wolves and the negative effect on hunters from that population drop.
About the Author
Freelance writer and editor Mark Chesnut is the owner/editorial director at Red Setter Communications LLC in Jenks, Okla. An avid hunter, shooter and field-trialer, he has been covering Second Amendment issues and politics on a near-daily basis for over 25 years, previously serving as editor of the NRA’s America’s First Freedom.