Sunday, February 2, 2025

How wolves explain America’s urban-rural divide

Colorado reintroduced wolves to stimulate the environment. They’ve also disrupted a traditional industry and way of life.

BY MARK DENT

One morning last April, a Colorado rancher named Doug Bruchez guided his 1997 Toyota Land Cruiser toward a scene he’d feared was inevitable.

It was around 6:30am. Patches of snow covered his meadow, a golden expanse in northwestern Colorado where Bruchez’s family has run cattle for about 25 years. He’d checked the livestock six hours earlier, but an early phone call from Colorado Parks & Wildlife brought him back.

As Bruchez approached, he saw paw prints that were roughly the size of his palm in the muddy snow. The cows, gathered in a semicircle, barely moved, all staring in the same direction.

A calf lay on its back, dead.

(Courtesy of Doug Bruchez)

Hours later, a Colorado Parks & Wildlife officer confirmed Bruchez’s suspicion. It was a wolf attack, the first confirmed kill of a calf since the state reintroduced wolves four months earlier.

Over a century ago, wolves were considered a scourge to the developing American West. The predators caused millions in annual losses to ranching and agricultural industries that fueled the economy, prompting government officials to mostly eradicate them from the continental US.

Since 1995, however, a handful of western states like Idaho, Montana, and Colorado have reintroduced the historically-hated carnivores for a simple reason: They wanted them back.

Colorado transported 10 gray wolves from Oregon and released them into the wild in December 2023. It expects to introduce as many as 50 in a five-year period, spurred on by wildlife and environmental advocates touting ecological benefits.

But for ranchers like Bruchez, wolves come with fatal — and financial — consequences.

The story of wolves isn’t just about the relationship between man and animal. The wolves have magnified a more challenging dynamic: coexistence between Colorado’s rural and urban economies.

The ‘warm glow’ of wolves

On a frigid January night in Denver, a running group jogs past restaurants, old churches, and niche apparel stores in the River North neighborhood, an area that has symbolized Colorado’s 21st century renaissance and status as a magnet for highly-educated, outdoorsy newcomers. Their run ends in front of a brewery, where a mural displays a different type of newcomer: wolves.

Artists designed the mural three years ago. One wolf advocate described it as a reminder “that the restoration of the wolf is a remarkable conservation achievement, something that Coloradoans can really take pride in having participated in.”

A wolf mural in RiNo. (Mark Dent/The Hustle)

Previous generations felt the opposite. After the forced removal of Native Americans and increased migration from the Homestead Act, Colorado became a hotbed for raising livestock.

But predators were a concern, causing some $20m-$30m (more than $600m today) in livestock losses per year nationally, according to federal estimates from the early 20th century. Wolves, along with mountain lions, disrupted the industry more than any animal, with each one estimated to kill 2x as much as a bear and 20x as much as a coyote.

Counties and cattlemen associations throughout Colorado set bounties — as high as $1k ($19k today) for the most cunning wolves. The federal government allocated $125k per year ($3.9m) starting in 1915 to support salaried hunters as they devised new poison and trapping methods and hunted wolves with high-powered rifles.

“The federal system dealt with [them] through efficiency,” says Michael Robinson, author of Predatory Bureaucracy and conservation manager for the Center for Biological Diversity. “And it worked.”

A gray wolf transported from British Columbia surveys its new Colorado habitat on January 14, 2025. (Colorado Parks & Wildlife)

Colorado’s last wolf was reported killed in 1945, trapped by a federal employee. By then, one prominent hunter estimated that ~$100m, more than $1B today, had been spent to eradicate wolves nationwide dating back to colonial America. 

But livestock production’s influence waned over the years as Colorado boomed with new residents and jobs in biosciences, tech, and aerospace. More Coloradoans saw reintroduction as an ethical imperative to reverse a wrong from a past era. 

“It was all about economic gain at that time,” says Gary Skiba, wildlife program manager for the Colorado nonprofit San Juan Citizens Alliance. “People have changed the way they look at things partly because they no longer gain their living directly from the land, other than ranchers and farmers.”  

In November 2020, a wolf reintroduction plan — which included a requirement that ranchers be compensated for livestock losses — passed with 50.9% of Colorado residents voting in favor. Just 12 counties out of 64 supported the measure, but nearly two-thirds of Denver voters approved, saying they believed wolves would restore ecological balance. 

The animals’ environmental effects are well-documented, but hotly debated.

Delia Malone, an ecologist and wildlife chair of the Colorado Sierra Club, says Colorado’s wolves could eventually kill off enough elk to lead to the regrowth of plants near riverbanks, improving the flow of rivulets emptying into the Colorado River, one of the region’s most important sources of water for drinking and irrigation.

There’s some precedent to turn to in assessing the the benefits of wolf reintroduction:

• In Wisconsin, which started repopulating wolves in the 1980s, University of Wisconsin Madison professor Jennifer Raynor found that wolf predation on deer reduced deer-related traffic collisions by ~25% from 1988 to 2010, preventing thousands of crashes and saving a total of $10.9m annually.
• In Montana, researchers found that Yellowstone wolf tourism is worth ~$35m in annual economic activity. 

A wolf in Yellowstone. (William Campbell/Sygma via Getty Images)

Colorado State University economist Dana Hoag says wolves also carry what economists call an “existence value” — the knowledge that something good exists and creates a “warm glow” that can spark economic activity.

Hoag surveyed Colorado residents and found that those who voted yes would have been willing to pay as much as $99 annually for the existence of wolves in the state. But they pay nothing except for a small portion of taxes, so knowing there are wolves is like getting a yearly $99 bonus they can spend somewhere in the economy, a total of $115m if you include all pro-wolf residents.

The problem is how the warm glow is distributed. The benefits go almost entirely to people in Colorado’s urban Front Range, while a small portion of rural residents on the state’s Western Slope shoulder nearly all the costs.

The realities of ranching

The Front Range is separated from the Western Slope by a literal Continental Divide that doubles as a cultural divide. The eastern side of the Rocky Mountains features big cities, wolf murals, and America’s largest concentration of millennial transplants. The western side features small mountain towns, actual wolves, and many residents who trace their family’s agricultural roots through generations.

Like Doug Bruchez.

Bruchez barely slept for weeks after the wolf attack last April, often staying up with the cattle. When he spoke to a group of ranchers about wolves in May, he says he started shaking. His blood pressure had spiked. His resting heart rate was up. He went to the hospital and was prescribed blood pressure medicine.

“I was worn out,” he says.

Doug Bruchez’s family has ranched on the Western Slope for about 25 years, and his ancestors moved to Colorado during the Homestead Act era. (Courtesy of Doug Bruchez)

Bruchez only lost one calf during the attack. Later in the spring, he received help from a state-funded range rider who monitored for wolves.

But in the summer a pack settled near the Copper Creek subdivision in Grand Junction, a couple miles east of where some of Bruchez’s cattle grazed.

By fall, the mother cows near Copper Creek had conception rates of 90.5%, well below the 98% he saw from another herd that didn’t graze near the wolves. The calves’ average weights, he says, were some 30 pounds lower than he’d averaged the previous three years, denting his sales. He was unable to pay back his line of credit — taken out by most ranchers every year to cover expenses — for the first time ever.

These indirect effects on cattle have not been thoroughly studied. But University of Montana researchers analyzing 15 years of data found that calves, while typically unaffected by the appearance of wolves, lost weight if the wolves attacked.

Bruchez submitted a compensation claim to Colorado Parks & Wildlife for the wolf-related problems that totaled $43k. Nearby ranchers submitted another $500k+ of claims, exceeding the state’s wolf depredation fund budget. Bruchez worries the state may delay payment or reject it — a devastating outcome, especially if his conception rates and weights remain lower than average in the coming years.

“If I have 10 years in a row like this, I’m out of business,” he says.

Bruchez has a mid-size family ranching operation, running some 300 cattle and producing ~$400k-$550k in annual revenues. The vast majority of the state’s 15k+ livestock farms are even smaller than Bruchez’s, with annual revenues less than $350k. A small number of large operations, often not family-run, gross more than $1m and account for the majority of state livestock sales.

Even with subsidies and favorable deals to lease US forest lands, it’s not uncommon for small and mid-size producers to fail to cover their costs in a year, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

The margins are slim: Beef prices have spiked since the pandemic, but so have the costs of fertilizer, diesel, and tractors.

While predator kills comprise just ~2% of all deaths, they increased nationwide by more than 2x from 1995 to 2015, even as cattle and calf numbers, as well as total ranching operations, declined.

New ways of life in rural Colorado

On the Western Slope, ranching and farming — along with the once-prominent mining and coal industries — have receded. Some 41% of workers in Grand County, where Bruchez lives, work in tourism.

The Hustle

Merrit Linke, a Grand County commissioner and a rancher, has seen families sell their land, and homes fill up with deep-pocketed newcomers, especially since the pandemic. More than half of the housing in Grand County is owned by a vacant owner who uses it for recreation.

The people moving in “seem to have an unlimited supply of money to purchase those homes,” Linke says. “So it makes it really tough for workers to find places to live.”

The wolves, even though they’ve affected a small percentage of livestock farmers, have become another complication for rural residents dealing with changes that they believe are dictated by Front Range residents who don’t understand their way of life.

“I get all the time, ‘Well you’re going to kill [the livestock] anyway. It doesn’t matter,’” says Bonnie Brown, executive director of the Colorado Wool Growers Association. “It does matter. Our job is to treat things humanely and to be able to protect them.”

“People in the city,” she adds, “don’t deal with that.”

Bruchez agrees. He drove to Denver last month trying to explain his side at a Colorado Parks & Wildlife meeting. More than 100 wolf advocates and opponents gathered to discuss a petition by livestock groups to delay the introduction of more wolves.

The previous year included setbacks for all. The wolves killed a confirmed 27 livestock animals, a number ranchers say is much higher. Two wolves, protected as an endangered species, were illegally shot.

Bruchez told the wildlife commissioners about the weights of his cattle and his concerns that not enough resources were available to help ranchers safeguard against new wolves.

The Hustle

After six hours of public comments and debate, he left unsatisfied: The commissioners denied the petition. New wolves were on the ground in Colorado a week later, with Colorado Parks & Wildlife (CPW) pledging more funding for range riders and assistance with protective measures.

“Now is a time to celebrate,” CPW director Jeff Davis said at a press conference, “not in front of those directly impacted. But to roll up our sleeves collectively to help support our ranching and rural communities.”

That comment and the plans for assistance didn’t sway Bruchez.

“It is 100% lip service,” he says.

Bridging the divide 

Jo Stanko, co-owner of the Stanko Ranch outside Steamboat Springs, went to nearly every wolf meeting in Colorado for 20 years, speaking out against the reintroduction movement.

But at one meeting in 2022 she started a lasting dialogue with somebody on the other side. Their relationship began at the refreshments table, where Stanko complained that there wasn’t any wine. Courtney Vail, board chair for the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, overheard her comment.

“And I said, ‘I want to sit by you,’” Vail recalls. “We struck up a friendship immediately.”

It was an opening. For wolves to succeed — and for ranchers to at least grow accustomed to them — a shift must occur, a redistribution of the benefits and costs associated with the animals.

The people in Denver who voted to bring back wolves, says Hoag, the Colorado State economist, considered the benefits they’d get — that warm glow — without paying much attention to the costs that would be inflicted on others. But Hoag’s research and surveys also indicated that pro-wolf residents in Colorado were willing to pay expenses beyond the state’s budget to reduce the burden on rural communities.

The challenge would be initiating such a transfer. Stanko and Vail have helped bridge the divide.

Courtney Vail and Jo Stanko. (Courtesy of Courtney Vail)

Stanko invited Vail and dozens of pro-wolf advocates and researchers to her ranch for a summit. They split into small groups led by five ranchers, who talked about the history of the Western Slope and how ranching was a lifestyle more so than a profit-squeezing endeavour.

The advocates shared their side: the wolves’ ecological benefits, the moral reasons to bring back an animal the government had previously eradicated.

The summit precipitated more gatherings between advocates and ranchers and inspired wolf groups to contribute their own money and time to safeguard ranches from wolves. Colorado State University’s Center for Human-Carnivore Existence created a fund for researching and deploying wolf-deterrent tools, which have helped states like Montana see confirmed wolf depredations decline.

The Hustle

Vail helped start a wolf license plate program that’s so far earned over $600k for Colorado Parks & Wildlife to spend on wolf deterrence for ranchers. After gaining the trust of one rancher, she helped install brightly colored flags on his property that ward off wolves.

“We’re all just trying to do the best we can,” Vail says. “Everybody’s looking for the bad guy, and there might not be a bad guy.”

Vail knows these efforts aren’t a panacea. Some wolf advocates won’t reach across the aisle and claim the ranchers are being unreasonable. And some ranchers have found the deterrence tools and volunteer assistance impractical or unhelpful.

Stanko says wolves will become normalized before frustrations toward the Front Range subside. But she’s moved on from the anger phase and recommends the same for everyone else in her line of work.

“The speech when I’m talking to ranchers now [is the wolves are] coming. They’re here,” she says. “And what is your job? Your job has always been to protect your livestock and your land.”

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