 Hi, I'm Marsha Martin, and this is Inside the Ballot Box. Here Inside the Ballot Box today with me is Rob Edward, and Rob is the President of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund, the issue committee established to run the campaign for Proposition 114. Proposition 114, in case you're not already seriously focused on it, is the campaign to reintroduce the gray wolf in the northern ranges of the Colorado Rockies, mostly on the western slope. And Rob is a resident of Lewisville. He's been working toward the eventual return of gray wolves to Colorado for over 20 years. Rob, thank you so much for being here, and really this is going to just be your interview. So the first thing I have to ask you is why, I mean, you've dedicated 20 years to this. What do you think is the importance to humanity and the planet earth to have gray wolves in more of their original range? Gray wolves were the engine of evolution throughout all of the ecological systems that they were part of throughout the northern hemisphere. And that's for a very simple reason. It's because of the way they hunt. They look for infirmities in their prey. They hunt as a group, usually. To do that, they need to test their prey for weakness, whatever that might be. To do that, they need to get their prey moving. And their prey happens to be large grazers in the western United States. Some Canada, that generally means elk, sometimes deer, but elk are a little bit bigger. A member of the deer family and more part of the wolf diet, wherever they occur. And so by moving their big prey around those big grazers, they keep the big grazers from grazing everything down to the ground. And especially in the wetland, riparian, riverside areas, that's important. Because those plants need a chance to rebound from some grazing. Grazing is important to the process as well, but too much grazing is like too much fire. It creates a sterile environment. So the problem came when Europeans in their conquest of North America decided that wolves and most other large carnivores were a competitor and needed to be eliminated. And they went about it with a vengeance. We actually created a special branch of the U.S. government back in the early 1900s called the U.S. Biological Survey, Congress appropriated at the time $250,000. Now think about that, that's in 1914 dollars. If that was now, that would have been many millions of dollars. That's how serious they were. They were going to wage and did wage war on wolves. Yet it still took from the late 1800s to 1945 for Colorado's last wolf to be killed. And that was down in the South San Juan Mountains. So it took a very long and arduous campaign by professional wolf hunters, wolfers they were called, to eliminate wolves. And it's because we wiped them out that we now have things like if you go to Rocky Mountain National Park and you notice all the fencing that they've put up for several million dollars in the last 10 years. We're fencing elk out of the riparian areas in order to help some of those areas rebound from the over browsing that Elker are doing there. Aspen had almost been eliminated from the park because the elk were so hard on it. And a lot of the willow communities as well. So now we're fencing them out artificially, which is obviously not a long term solution to the problem. The problem was created because we reintroduced up to Rocky Mountain National Park in the early part of the 1900s as we were wiping wolves out and then they had no natural coursing predator. When I say coursing, that's that action I was talking about earlier. Wolves are coursing predators, they move their prey around, they chase the course. And it's that action that is so ecologically important and beneficial. In the absence of wolves, we've got an ecological degradation cascading through the system over the course of decades. At the same time, we know that starting in the 1960s and 70s, ecological awareness was building and people were understanding that some of the things that our forebears did weren't necessarily the wisest things in the world. And that we maybe should take a chance to take a pause and where we could make things right again. So there's been a call for restoring wolves to the places that they were wiped out of throughout the United States for many decades now. And Colorado is one of those places. But Colorado now stands as probably the last best place for wolves. Western Colorado is the majority public land. It's over 68% public land and 17 million acres, way bigger than Yellowstone. Yes, it's crisscrossed with some roads, but it's still public land and it's full of the largest population in North America, one of the largest deer populations. And there's no reason why we shouldn't have wolves back there. So people started calling for a study of Colorado's status vis-a-vis wolves back in the mid 1990s, and that's when I came to Colorado. And we actually got a study appropriated through the Congress, then Congressman David Skaggs got an appropriation that paid for a biological and a public opinion study. And the biological study said that Western Colorado's seven national forests, just a national forest, not the other public lands, could support well over a thousand wolves. That came out around 1994. Right around that same time, late 1994, the public opinion survey came out and it showed that statewide support for wolf restoration stood at 75%, approximately 75%. And that if you looked at it, if you broke it down geographically, the Western slope, the respondents on the Western slope supported wolf recovery by 71%, and the front range by 73%. Now remember, this is back in 1994. And private polling since then, several times along the way, and all we've seen is gradual creep in favor of wolf restoration. We haven't lost any support, we've gained it and solidified it. And in 2019, as we were starting to go to the ballot, and we'll talk about the reasons where we decided to go to the ballot in a minute. They did another public opinion survey and they should they, sorry, I should say Colorado State University did another public opinion survey and they showed amazingly that statewide support for wolf restoration through reintroduction stood at 84%. Which is just incredible on what what you would think in reading the media over the years you would think that it was much more 5050 or something along those lines but it's wildly popular with the public. Sure. Yeah, that's the big picture ecological picture and the public support picture about why we're going to the ballot but the real guts of what's led us here stands in the in the public policy arena. The public policy arena completely ignored the biological reality which is that Colorado can support and needs wolves that the public supports the idea of putting wolves back in Western Colorado. And in the public policy arena, both the state legislature, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission, formerly the division of wildlife on their, their wildlife commission have steadfastly refused to entertain any real scientifically based study of the potential of wolves back on the ground. Time and again they've refused. So, after doing 20 years worth of due diligence, which I think is plenty. Yeah, enough. We decided that the, it's the public's time to have their say on this. We're not asking the public to, to legislate the, the details of this. All I'm saying is, should the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Department begin and complete a plan for wolf reintroduction by the end of 2023 that starts pause on the ground by end of 2023. So that we can move towards self sustaining population of wolves in the next 10 to 15 years. That sounds like a reasonable ask. But we certainly have opposition we can talk about that in a minute as well. But yeah, this is the public's opportunity to have their say on this. I think that sounds reasonable. It sounds very much like my experience with the oil and gas extraction industry. And therefore regulating it and the power is not. So, I think there's a pretty close analogy there. Well, we're on the upside. There are a couple of really good stories that you probably know. Talk about the wolf reintroduction impact in Yellowstone because I thought the benefits with that of that were just lovely and I'd like everyone to hear a good storyteller salad. Tell it. Absolutely. Well, you know, as I was telling the intro here, I was telling the backside of that is what did we lose when we lost wolves we lost that that force on the landscape. It sounds like wildfire. Wildfire is very important to the health of our forest systems. We need fire. What we don't need is the kinds of things that have been happening lately because we suppressed fire for so long that once fire actually happens it happens explosively. But in this instance with wolves we've wiped them out and that has degraded their native habitat. So when we decided we were going to put wolves back in Yellowstone, and that went through a federal process because of course Yellowstone is a national park and tied to that was a reintroduction simultaneously in Central Idaho where I'm from originally. Yellowstone was perfectly set up to immediately start studying the effect of putting wolves back on the ground. So in 1990 late 1994 early 1995, we got the first batch of wolves, about 15 or so into the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. And then the next year we put another 15 or so down. And after they had had some time to acclimate in their pens. We brought entire family groups to the extent that we could. Right before it was time to have pups, the fence came down to each of these various locations where they were being housed, and the wolves wandered out into the Yellowstone ecosystem. They dug dens, they had pups, and within two years, scientists were seeing small glimmers of changes on the landscape that they thought might be possible but hadn't had any evidence until then. And within another year or two, they had entire willow communities suddenly rebounding along stream banks that had for decades been denuded in Yellowstone by the elk. And with the rebound and willow and aspen beaver started coming back. And as beaver started to come back into the Lamar Valley and build beaver dams, the water got deeper and colder, and suddenly there were more native fishes that were spending time in the Lamar Valley and river otters and songbirds were back in more abundance because there was more willow habitat for them and aspen. And the list goes on, but the fact is that by helping to give the the plant communities a break from constant browsing by elk. And suddenly those plant communities were able to to bounce back and that has tremendous ecological benefit. What period of time did have these changes been observed over? Well, they really there were papers coming out within the first five years of reintroduction and then there's been several since. Impressive. And in the realm of science, there's always debate about, oh, are we really seeing, you know, this effect? Is that truly only owed to wolves? You know, so there's there's been some of those kinds of debates, but by and large scientists agree that it's had a significant ecological benefit to the Yellowstone ecosystem. And I don't know real study of what happened in central Idaho is very different sort of reintroduction scenario where instead of bringing the wolves in and putting them in acclimation pens for a couple of months feeding them roadkill and then letting them go. And so they just opened the cage doors and the wolves ran out, but they still stayed close enough in central Idaho that they were able to start breeding and and ultimately reach the self sustaining level and started to populate Washington and Oregon and ultimately northern California. The interesting thing about what I'm just describing there is that during the period from 1994 to 2014, let's say, we had individual wolves occasionally wandered down from the southern portion of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem into northern Colorado. 2001, nearly everyone was killed or disappeared went back to, you know, back to Yellowstone or we don't know where they went, but none have ended up resulting in a rekindled population here. Yet, Washington and Oregon and northern California have wolves now that are breeding and, you know, trying to get to the level of being self sustaining. The reason for that is that southern Wyoming is big open country. It's not full of a bunch of wolf prey. There are there are some migration corridors that they could take that are very narrow, but the trip is pretty dangerous one way or the other. And given that southern Wyoming now in a scenario where wolves are not protected under the Federal Endangered Species Act in Wyoming anymore, they're basically treated as vermin. They can be killed 24 seven. And so it's a very risky proposition for wolves to wander southward and they don't generally do it as multiple wolves. So the fact that there was suddenly a report of multiple wolves in Northwest Colorado, the week that we put proposition 114 on the ballot was to say the least stunning. Good PR for them, huh? Good PR for them, but it creates a PR quagmire for us in terms of messaging this. The reality is though that our scientific community has been very clear. Those wolves do not mean that Colorado is is now going to have wolves. It's such a small group of wolves. They're extremely vulnerable to all kinds of, you know, nefarious activity as well as just simple, you know, accidents. And you don't want to start a population in a new area based on four or five siblings. Unless, you know, you want to start a bluegrass band. No, no. I'm a bluegrass man. I get to say that. So, yeah, okay, me too. But I wouldn't have said it anyway. So in terms of good, I guess, pack management, you want to obviously introduce a more genetically diverse group of wolves than might just wander down. There's the another reason that I could think of for this is sort of climate change insurance, right? You want the range of the animals to be as wide as possible in case one locale or another becomes bad habitat sometime in the future. Is that one of the things you're thinking about? Yeah, absolutely. Those are very important. The potential for the ecological effects of wolves being back in their native range. That has implications for climate change resiliency. Right, because if you have a place that is robust and the water is running deep, even in drought years, it's being retained by the beaver dams and the plant material is so robust that it's got a lot of roots in the soil. And so the soil is retaining water. The ability to be more resilient to creeping climate change is important. Sure. You know, that can't be understated. Right. And of course, the reestablishment of the Aspen forests is really important if fires are more common. Absolutely. Okay. So I noticed that the Sierra Club, and possibly in conjunction with your organization, I'm not really sure, is doing a lot of messaging about livestock management in the presence of wolves. Is this a response to the opposition issue committees which are largely farmers and ranchers associations? Certainly, their messaging around some of that is directly tied to that. But regardless, we know that it's important to help people who grow livestock here in Colorado understand, number one, that the world's changing. If we are going to reintroduce wolves, that is going to change the way they have to do business to some degree. And that there are good models already in place and being constantly updated that show how we can raise livestock in the presence of wolves on the landscape in a way that promotes the sustainability of the wolf population while minimizing depredation on livestock. We are very clear with our constituents and the voting public that there will be ultimately, once there's enough wolves on the ground, there will be some depredation on livestock. There absolutely will be. We know that for 20 years of wolves being in the Northern Rockies, for example, which is very similar habitat and a very, the same food base, which is elk. We know that, you know, when you've got wolves in a county and livestock are in that same county that on average 99.95% of the livestock in that county are never killed by wolves. Right? So that means a fraction, a multiple decimal point fraction of a percent are killed by wolves every year, which is insignificant in the larger scheme. But if it's, you know, one calf or 12 lambs or, you know, some sheep that get killed by wolves on a single light or something, that individual rancher, that hurts monetarily. So we built into Proposition 114 a economic compensation component that says any confirmed depredation by wolves on livestock will be compensated for at fair market value. Okay. Yeah, I saw that in the bill. I thought that was very smart. And was going to ask about it if you hadn't come to it on your own. Are there, are there ranching techniques that can be used and taught as outreach? Can you tell me about how that works a little? I'm not an expert in that end of animal husbandry. We've got some ranchers who are working with us who are very excited about helping Colorado come on board with this. To their credit, Colorado State University has created a new extension, a piece of the extension service that's focused on carnivore coexistence. And they're going to play a long term vital role in ensuring that livestock production and wolf conservation go hand in hand. But there are ways that, for example, one of the primary ways that we know you can reduce conflict with wolves on livestock is to have herders. So it's asking for the model of livestock production in the open range public lands west to change some. Because the model here to four has been I've got a hundred head of cattle or sheep. I have a public lands allotment and I put them out on that allotment in early June and I come back in late September and put them back into the truck and hopefully I've got as many as I left there in June. And that, you know, you're going to see more losses on those kinds of allotments than you will where they've got a herder in place. The other thing is to help ranchers understand that they can teach their livestock how to defend themselves quite literally from predators, not just wolves but coyotes. And that means teaching the herders and the ranch owners how to get their cows when they're faced with a threat to bunch up and not run in five different directions because when they separate is when the wolves can get to an individual. Sure. You know, let's face it cows and sheep are not the fleet of foot that or deer or antelope are so when they split up they are totally vulnerable when they bunch up into a tight herd and face outward kind of like musk oxen do in the part of the northern hemisphere. So when musk oxen are faced with with wolves and bison do the same thing to a some degree. They just basically all bunch up, put their butts together face outward and it's a big deal for a wolf to try to come in there and get a bite. Yeah, I see that. And that's a skill that is deep in the DNA of the cattle they just haven't had to use it for a while right. So, in terms of benefits to the agricultural community, I would think that the eventual wildfire control that you get from not having the elk eat all the baby aspen would be a big deal and would improve the ecosystem has any thought been given to that. There are so many different facets of scientific study going on with regard to wolves and ecological benefits. I'm sure somebody's probably thinking about that, but I don't know specifics. Okay. Fair enough. In terms of the opposition. Do you know enough about the case, because I don't know whether I'm going to be able to interview anybody on the opposition side or not honestly, but you know, they're there's the obvious cases, you know, I send my, send my herd to the high pasture and it comes back less that there's going to be predation. And that's the end of the story. Do they have a deeper case than that or is is that just the nature of the opposition. You know, I've having done this so long and had many conversations, most of them very similar with with ranchers. It's, it's complicated because some of them say, and especially on the sheep ranching and the things say, well, you know, just the presence of wolves in an area can cause my sheep to not give birth to full weight lambs or abort. Whether that's completely true or not. That's what they're saying. And some of the cattle ranchers have said the same kind of thing. Some of the cattle ranchers have said, well, you know, if they come in and get a prize bowl of mine. If your prize bowl wasn't able to defend itself against wolves, I'm wondering whether it's worth the genetic import, but that's my own take on it. Oh, you only have that many prize bulls. Can't you keep him down in the low pasture? I mean, certainly that's, I'm being flip and you probably should. The final line is I think that there's a way for us to be innovative in Colorado. If the people of Colorado stand up on November 3rd or when they get their mail in ballots and say, we want wolves and we have a strong majority of them say that, then that's a strong signal to the agricultural industry in Colorado that you need to come on board and you need to make Colorado proud of you. Sure. You can do that by, you know, swallowing your pride if you were against this and saying, all right, well, I guess I'm going to have to figure out how to make a go of this. Really, most ranchers are never going to see wolves. Sure. Or they'll see them off in the distance, but they're going to be affected by them in their lifetime. Even if we have over a thousand wolves here, it's just not going to be the end of the world for them. But to learn how to protect your stock is an important academic and cultural change for them. But it's also the opportunity for us to look at ways we might be able to incentivize that haven't been done before. For example, if you've got a large cattle operation that has both public and private allotment rotation where you're putting them on public land for part of the time and bringing them back down into the valley in the winter. So if you end up with wolves, setting up shop with a den or something nearby, or on your on your private property, why couldn't we pay that ranch to grow wolves? I think the public would be on board with figuring out how to do that to say, no, we expect there's going to be some depredation. We'll pay you for whatever depredation there is. But beyond that, we're actually going to proactively give you some incentive to try to prevent depredation and to not ask for lethal control if there is depredation. And relocate the wolves into unoccupied areas when they start building up. So relocate the livestock into unoccupied areas where there are wolves. Yeah, so livestock is it's an interesting question because some apex predators, I'm thinking mostly in the sea, you know, why we can swim with sharks right have a preferred have preferred species for prey. Is it going to be true with wolves? I mean, if there are elk around, are they going to leave the cattle alone? Or are they indiscriminate in that way? Actually, they're not indiscriminate. I just saw a new study come out. I can't cite it verbatim, but I know it was in a peer reviewed journal that looks at that very question. And the overall thrust was or in the abstract was that indeed, if native prey or present wolves tend to select for native prey. So the mule deer, the elk, not so much the sheep. Right. Well, in my mouth. Who likes the taste of landland anyway. Yeah. Um, yeah, I mean, it's not black and white, but it science is telling us that they do tend to prefer their native prey. They'll even go for a bison over a cow. Interesting. Which is long memories. Not easy. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't want to take on a bison. Actually, I wouldn't want to take on an elk either, but right. Um, all right. So, you know, the other aspect of our organized opposition right now is is is a segment of the hunting community. You would think from the public statements or anything you would read in the media that all hunters are against wolves. But in fact, if you look at public opinion survey after public opinion survey, including the one that was done in 2019 by CSU hunters are majority support for world frustration. I don't certainly think so because it's a lot more sporting to hunt fit plentiful but not overpopulated animals, then then to shoot elks in a in a valley and then have to have them tested for chronic wasting disease. Exactly. But there are certain segments that have banded together under the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation in particular. Amazingly, they were in favor of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone until wolves were on the ground and then suddenly that all changed. They were fighting alongside the organized ranching opposition and their basic refrain is that wolves are going to wipe out the native prey, which is on its face, ridiculous, because let's just take, take it one step at a time here from a pure logic because wolves were prone to wipe out their native prey. Wouldn't they have done that? Everywhere else. Pleistocene, right? Okay, but setting that aside, what does science tell us about that? Well, science tells us that in the northern Rocky Mountains where we've had wolves now back for 25 plus years, that elk population in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana is higher than it was in 1995 when wolves were reintroduced. Because the habitat has improved. Well, we don't know. It's complicated, but it's, there are more elk. There's not a ton more, but there are more. They haven't been wiped out. There's a bunch more wolves than there were, which was zero. The northern range herd definitely was significantly reduced, the northern range being that part of the northern part of the Lamar Valley going up into Montana. But it was already significantly over management objective for elk population anyway. So the wolves actually did a good job bringing the elk population in the northern range back down into decent shape in terms of what the habitat could support. And hunter success has not dropped with regard to those places where wolves are present. That was a question I had too, because I did notice that a couple of the signed up opposition issue committees were outfitters. I guess outfitters are people that an inexperienced hunter would go to to get told what to do to go get his elk. Not inexperienced necessarily, but somebody with a big wallet. So, but anyway, the objective is a guarantee of success in hunting. Those hunts usually cost tens of thousands of dollars when they're usually conducted on private land. Not usually, but part of the time they're conducted on private land, usually by ranchers who are, you know, supplementing their income by having an outfitting business. So they've kind of got a dual reason to be concerned about what wolf restoration means and I understand that. But again, it's not the end of the world. It does change. It can change where you can expect elk to be. And it's not, what we're asking is what we're asking for is for elk and deer to be moving around the landscape, which means that it's not so easy to guess from year to year whether your favorite hunting unit and a particular valley in that hunting unit is going to have elk in it. So yeah, okay, I get it. It changes the dynamic. It actually makes you have to like be more strategic about where you hunt and when you hunt. But it's not the end of the world and it doesn't mean there is any less animal biomass out there for you to hunt if you're a hunter. Isn't that what makes it a sport? One would think. Okay, well we are trying to keep these under half an hour, but and I've got a little spiel I have to say at the end, but I want to give you one more shot to just sum up and and give us your best message. You bet. Well, we're asking the voters of Colorado to think long and hard about what we leave our grandchildren. And we have an opportunity now to restore a keystone species to Western Colorado to the vast public lands of Western Colorado. Gray wolves, which have tremendous ecological importance to Colorado's future. And you have that opportunity on your ballot. This fall, Proposition 114 will allow us to tell the state game management agency to develop a plan with public input to put wolves on the ground by the end of 2023 and and enough thereafter to ultimately get to a self-sustaining population. And anytime livestock are depredated on by wolves, thereafter the public will compensate them for it. It's not going to break the bank. Neither is the reintroduction program. So we believe for all those reasons, a yes vote on Proposition 114 is is the way we're going to restore the balance of nature to Western Colorado for future generations. Thanks. Balance of nature in the Colorado way of life right. In other words, thank you very much for giving me your time. I know that in the thick of the election season and this is something you've been dedicated to for a long time. It's a big deal for you to take time out and come do that in this and for me in a small media audience. So I really do want to thank you. And I want to tell everybody out there. Proposition 114 is going to be fairly far down a very big ballot. And I want you to look for it by voting the whole ballot from top to bottom. And that's the way democracy works. And I think everybody needs to do that vote the whole whole ballot, all the way down to the propositions. And here inside the ballot box, we are trying to make sure that you know what to do when you get there. All right. Thanks very much, Rob. Thank you. Great public service. You're welcome. Goodbye, everybody.