Ever since as a child I read Willa Cather’s My Antonia, I’ve had a strong dislike for wolves. You might recall the bride being thrown to the wolves on her wedding night. My dislike was further reinforced by a 2000 DIY (do it yourself) caribou hunt on the Alaskan peninsula with Greg McCann and Ed Kniffen. Our hunt was foiled by wolves as they had all but wiped out the caribou. A 2003 elk/mule deer hunt in Alberta’s Canadian Rockies with Doug Koupal sent us home in an empty pickup truck for the same reason. Friends in Idaho tell me that wolves have decimated their elk herd.

Wolf reintroduction has proven to be a serious mistake in my estimation, and I was surprised to learn that Colorado residents would be voting on a gray wolf introduction proposition this November. As it turned out, it didn’t matter whether Colorado voted or not. The wolves settled the issue.

Known as Proposition 114, the measure passed by a narrow margin. Proposition 114 was adamantly opposed by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF). In its simplest form, I see this measure as an answer to the question, “Who manages the elk herd? - Hunters with a humane bullet, or a wolf pack that hamstrings the elk and eats them while they are still alive.” I realize my description is ghastly, but that’s exactly the way it is. Proposition 114 was based on the premise that wolves will not recolonize Colorado without human intervention, and the proposition now forces the state’s wildlife commission to introduce the wolves by a 2023 deadline.

What most voters didn’t realize is that the wolves didn’t need reintroduction. They were doing quite well on their own as the wolves don’t know about state borderlines. After the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed wolves in Yellowstone National Park as well as Idaho’s Frank Church Wilderness in 1995-1996, their numbers grew on an average of 20% a year for more than a decade. As a result, large elk herds in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho saw their numbers cut in half at a minimum. In the winter of 1995, the Northern Yellowstone herd numbered nearly 19,000. Last winter the number dwindled to 5800.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) has received multiple reports and photos of wolves across a large swath of the state’s northern tier. CPW staff found wolves while inspecting an elk carcass last January, and through binoculars they spotted a pack of six wolves two miles from the carcass site. Scat samples around the kill site provided DNA evidence that proved the animals were gray wolves.

Proposition 114 dictates that the wolves be released on Colorado’s West Slope, but it doesn’t specify how many, for how long, where they would come from, how they would be managed, what the livestock compensation program would look like, or what the threshold would be for wolves to be considered recovered and no longer in need of protection. Prop. 114 is obviously riddled with loopholes, and there will be much leeway in its implementation.

As neighboring Montana and Wyoming have too many wolves, we could expect them to filter into Colorado as well as our own South Dakota. While elk hunting in Wyoming in 2017, I observed wolves on the perimeter of a vast elk herd. The hosts of my recent Black Hills elk hunt have seen SD wolves. You might recall that a wolf was killed in the Parkston area last winter. Like most political boondoggles, Proposition 114 served no purpose. Some information for today’s column was taken from “Ballot Puts Stark Choice to Voters” in the November-December 2020 issue of Bugle magazine, a RMEF publication.

Next week I’ll tell you about our West River deer hunt. It started on a sour note when we headed north at the junction of Highways 34 & 63 west of Pierre. Twenty-five miles later we were made to turn around by a Cheyenne River Sioux roadblock. This related to the Corona Virus. We went the 25 miles back to Hwy 34 and then eventually headed north on Hwy 73. From Hwy 73 we were going to take Hwy 20 to Glad Valley and then go in on the gravel, but the tribe had also blocked that. Near Meadow Corner, the junction of Highways 73 & 20, we took the Athboy Road into the ranch. It would have been a simple courtesy for the Cheyenne Sioux to put a warning sign at the Hwy 34 & 63 junction. They have now been so advised by yours truly.

See you next week.