Transcript
Mark Harvey: So this is our horse barn where we keep our tack and where we tack up our horses
Chris Hill: Mark Harvey is a cattle rancher on the western slope of Colorado.
Mark Harvey: We use our horses to work the cattle. You can't do it any other way. It's such rough terrain. We move the cattle around with our horses.
Chris Hill: We visited Mark on his 2,000 acre family ranch in the Roaring Fork Valley this summer. The landscape was covered in yellow and pink wildflowers, and the trees and lush grasses were bright green against the blue sky.
Mark Harvey: This is a high country ranch and it has all the elements of the high country. It's got a lot of aspen trees, which only grow at a very precise elevation. We have scrub oak. We have quite a bit of native grass and also some grass that isn't native. We have a lot of conifers, blue spruce, and pine trees, willow trees. So it's a huge mix of what a healthy plant community should look like.
Chris Hill: The ranch is ecologically diverse, with everything you'd expect on a western landscape. Mark likes it that way.
Mark Harvey: One of the great beauties of Colorado and the entire Rocky Mountain West is wild quality, the wild animals, how unkempt all the plant communities are, that they're still growing in their natural element. And it's kind of what keeps me sane. You know, if I was stove up in some city, I'd probably have a hard time with my sanity.
Chris Hill: But there's something missing from this landscape. The last gray wolf was shot in Colorado in 1945. Wolves were hunted down across the American West, often with the support and even compensation from the United States government.
Mark Harvey: I think one of the reasons the wolf is so contentious is because it's dramatic. Our culture and every European culture for thousands of years, it's the big bad wolf. It's a big animal. It has teeth. They're very smart and they're good predators.
They were eradicated all over the entire country, mostly because stockmen, sheep growers, and cattle growers considered them a threat to their livelihood. There's been a few individuals that have crept down from Wyoming, but in terms of viable populations, we haven't seen wolves for, what is that, 80 or 90 years?
Chris Hill: In almost a century without wolves, Colorado's landscape has changed. Wolves are an apex predator, and when they're removed from an ecosystem, the impacts ripple through the food web. This is called “trophic cascades.”
Mark Harvey: Which basically means, if you take out an apex predator, the prey below them, their populations will explode or they'll take on behaviors they didn't have with the apex predator.
Chris Hill: Without their main predator, elk and deer populations have expanded exponentially. Their grazing habits kill vegetation in delicate riparian areas along riverbeds. That vegetation is essential. It offers shade to rivers, keeping temperatures cool for fish. It also serves as food for animals like beavers, who then go on to create beaver ponds for aquatic plants and animals to thrive. And this goes on and on in every direction of the food web until the ecosystem is woefully out of balance.
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Chris Hill: So in 2020, Proposition 114 was put in front of Colorado voters to reintroduce wolves to the landscape.
Mark Harvey: So I've been to some meetings where the wolves are discussed and there are people in this valley and certainly all over Western Colorado who are just vehemently against them
Chris Hill: Ranchers and stockmen largely opposed the measure, fearing their herds would be wiped out by this new predator. Mark has different ideas.
Mark Harvey: Apex predators have a lot to do with balancing the ecology. They have a lot to do with culling sick and lame animals. They have a lot to do with where an animal migrates and whether it migrates in the right places. I think we're in the midst of the sixth great extinction. If you look at the biological data, you know, the number of animals becoming extinct is just horrendous. It's happening very fast. And so I think anything we can do to try to keep our biodiversity up and happening is a valiant thing to do.
Chris Hill: In today's episode, we're taking a look at the effort to reintroduce wolves to Colorado, and what it actually looks like for ranchers, tourists, and outdoor enthusiasts to share land with these apex predators. Let's take it outside.
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Chris Hill: In the 2020 election in Colorado, there was one question more hotly contested than any other: Should the State Parks and Wildlife Commission create a plan to reintroduce wolves by the end of 2023? Mark voted yes.
Mark Harvey: I am very much a minority in my business, you know, in the cattle industry. I'm very much a minority, but I'm not just coming about this opinion lackadaisically — I've studied it.
Chris Hill: Mark looked at the three other states that have successfully reintroduced wolves to the landscape and decided that the benefits outweigh any perceived risks to his livelihood as a rancher.
Mark Harvey: If I was living in Colorado in the 1800s, out in the middle of nowhere and all I had was a rifle and nothing else, and there were no highways, no airplanes, no pavement, you know, I'd be scared of wolves, too. I'd be scared of grizzly bears. I'd probably wanna shoot every single one I could. But this is a new era, and I've looked at the numbers where they've reintroduced wolves in Wyoming and Montana and Idaho. And if you add up the economies of those three states in terms of cattle, it's a $5 billion cattle economy, and wolves killed probably to the tune of 150–200 cattle in 2015. So they've killed maybe $200,000 of cattle on a $5 billion industry. So I think the fear is outsized relative to the danger of the wolf.
Chris Hill: The ballot measure passed by a razor thin margin of 51 to 49 percent. Since then, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission has been working on a reintroduction plan that balances the will of the voters with the worries of the ranchers. Here's what they came up with.
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Chris Hill: Starting in December of 2023, 10–15 wolves will be released on public and private lands every year for three years. The goal is a self-sustaining wolf population. Ranchers will be compensated up to $15,000 for animal deaths caused by wolves, and no wolves will be released within 60 miles of the state border.
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Chris Hill: But will this plan work? Mark is optimistic that not only will it work, but also, it will bring more than wolves to the area.
Mark Harvey: The University of Montana did a study of the three states that reintroduced wolves in the 1990s. That's Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. And wolves bring in the neighborhood of $35 million a year just in tourism — wolf tourism. Hundreds of thousands of people go up to those states to see wolves. Most of them never see them, but they go up there and they spend $35 million a year in those three states. And I'm sure wolves will bring millions and millions of dollars to the tourism industry in some of these places that could really use it. You know, some of these beat down towns.
Chris Hill: But not all wolf advocates are so optimistic. The plan in Colorado also includes provisions to downgrade wolves from endangered to threatened species once the wolf population reaches 50, and then they are removed completely from the state's endangered species list once the population reaches 150. This opens the door to lethal management of wolves in the future. And some conservationists feel like it's setting wolves up to fail. So what about those states where wolf reintroduction has been successful? I wanted to see for myself what a sustainable wolf population can look like.
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Chris Hill (in tape): “So we are in the Lamar Valley, in the northern part of Yellowstone National Park, and we are around the Slough Creek area.”
Chris Hill: In January of 1995, three packs of Canadian wolves were released into a temporary enclosure inside Yellowstone National Park. Today, Yellowstone is home to over 100 wolves. It's also home to an informal network of wolf watchers, mostly retired folks who love the Yellowstone wolves and delight in sharing their expertise with tourists.
Chris Hill (in tape): “We got in, probably about 6:00 a.m., woke up and hurried up and got in the park. So we're gonna go meet Rick McIntyre. He comes out every day to watch the wolves and talk about the wolves with wolf watchers and folks passing through the park. And so we're gonna try to find him and see what we're looking at.
Chris Hill: It doesn't take long before we spot Rick's truck with his wolf license plate and dozens of cars parked on the side of the road.
Chris Hill (in tape): “I think I might park here.”
Chris Hill: Rick is a bit of a celebrity in the park, and as we approach the crowd all peering through binoculars and scopes, we see Rick at the center, making sure everyone gets a turn to view the gray wolf from the Junction Butte pack that has just come into view.
Rick McIntyre: “Folks, if there's anyone that hasn't seen a wolf, I can help you. Okay. It's going, it's going uphill. You wanna look for a gray that's slowly moving uphill. Look for motion. Are you seeing it? Okay? Is there anyone else that needs their scope on it?”
Chris Hill: Rick has been watching wolves in Yellowstone since they were reintroduced. He considers himself a wolf evangelist, dispelling rumors that wolves are dangerous and regaling tourists with the drama that plays out among wolves on a daily basis.
Rick McIntyre: “Okay, so a new boyfriend, a potential boyfriend, has come into the area from another pack. He's been trying to gain entry into this pack, and if he succeeds, he will be in a pretty good position because, the alpha male who is getting pretty old, he needs to be replaced. And this young male has come in and he'll have a whole harem of girlfriends.”
Chris Hill: Since the reintroduction in the ‘90s, wolves have reshaped Yellowstone. Elk populations have been rebalanced, willows and aspen trees have returned to riverbeds, and the ecosystem just became a lot healthier. The park acts as a haven for wolves who roam free at the top of the food chain. However, just outside the park, wolf hunting is legal.
Rick McIntyre: In a recent year, 24 of our wolves were killed just outside the park. It was the next year that they dropped that down to a quota of just six.
Chris Hill: The park is surrounded by private ranches and public grazing land, and like Colorado, wolves are contentious creatures among ranchers. So we left the park and headed to the Tom Miner Basin to meet a local rancher.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: This is the Anderson Ranch. That's the house I grew up in. My parents live there.
Chris Hill: Malou Anderson Ramirez runs her family's cattle ranch on a beautiful piece of land right outside of Yellowstone.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: Let's see if we can see our cows here. We can just walk down here.
Chris Hill: She and her husband recently moved home to take over operations from her parents. The ranch has seen a lot of changes since her grandfather bought it in the 1950s.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: My grandfather was a World War II veteran. We come from a family that we were able to buy a ranch up here in the ‘50s, so that's really important. And we really have always valued education, and we valued an open mind and curiosity. However, he wanted to be a rancher, and in the mid-’50s. And so he was taught how to be a rancher by all of our dear friends and neighbors that are still our dear friends and neighbors, and that was a “conventional system.”
Chris Hill: Conventional ranching is what you might picture as an Old West or cowboy style of ranching. Pastures are overgrazed, pesticides are used to kill weeds, and cows are fed hay in the winter.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: And so we definitely were raised and grew up in a conventional system of agriculture. However, we always, we were always sort of a rogue kind of family.
Chris Hill: Malou's family adapted with the times, and today, the Anderson Ranch wouldn't be considered conventional at all. Malou remembers when things started to change.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: I probably really shifted when the wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone. So in the mid-’90s. We were raising sheep up here at the time, quite a few sheep. And so we were one of the first families around Yellowstone that felt that impact pretty heavily. And so, we lost sheep, quite a few sheep, and we were able to take a little bit of it and not get super angry about the situation. But when our dogs started going — our guard dogs and our border collie were killed by wolves — that's when things really shifted for us. And we were so sad and so angry that we, I just remember my family having a lot of conversation around it and we decided that this was not a place for sheep. And actually, we would rather see wolves and bears than have to be reactive and frustrated and angry about a situation that was occurring.
Chris Hill: It was around this time that Malou and her siblings were getting old enough to leave the basin for school. It was education that really pushed this rogue family to shift their practices.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: A few of us went to holistic range management schools, and that was even before we were talking about regenerative agriculture. And the idea around it was that, if you have resilient ecosystems in large landscapes, then the operations that are working within those same natural models will also be resilient and functional and economically viable, hopefully.
Chris Hill: Malou's family decided to adapt their entire operation to work with the ecosystem instead of against it. This led to a healthier ranch overall and less livestock loss from predators.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: We're ranching next to Yellowstone National Park. As my sister-in-law says it so beautifully, we're raising prey next to Yellowstone National Park.
Chris Hill: The biggest change was switching to a seasonal grass finishing operation, which basically means cattle no longer live on the ranch in the harsh winters. This helps reduce losses in a few ways, but crucially, it allows them to switch to what’s called “solstice calving.” That’s where cattle have their babies in the middle of the summer instead of late winter or early spring. It’s a schedule that more closely aligns with the wild grazers in the area, like bison.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: It used to be that those babies that they would have were the first babies on the landscape. And so what do large carnivores need and do, and how do they eat? And so if we are putting the only babies on the land before any wild babies are born, we're setting up a situation to fail in that piece.
Chris Hill: This effort to mimic the behavior of bison is just one of the tools the Anderson Ranch uses to reduce conflict with predators.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: We use a lot of electric fencing to either keep cattle contained or try to keep some predators out. We have a range rider who checks our cattle and keeps them sort of acting like good cattle and smart confident cattle in predator country.
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Field tape: “Hi, this is Ellery.
-“Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Chris. Ellery, nice to meet you.
“Nice to meet you, too.”
Chris Hill: Ellery is a range rider for a few ranches in the Tom Miner Basin and plays a key role in limiting conflict between cattle and large predators.
Ellery: Section 12 is cool. Yeah, very different than everywhere else. Very, very, very, very, very, very…
Malou Anderson Ramirez: That's what I said this morning. I was like, “it's bare dense up there.” So yeah.
Ellery: No, it's so pretty up there.
Chris Hill: Ellery rides on horseback to check on the cattle every day.
Ellery: So I take a morning ride, usually pretty early, so that way I can be out on the landscape at a time when the predators might be out. So that way, they kind of know we're hanging around. I can also check cattle, look for signs of predators, and also just being out there looking to see what's going on.
Chris Hill: This morning, she saw two young bears.
Ellery: I saw them before they saw me, and then I made noise and they tootled off, but I'm really excited about seeing bears. It's just really cool to be able to see them out in the wild doing their thing and have cattle nearby and watching them interact without any negative conflict, so I’m excited.
Chris Hill: Ellery is also responsible for quickly finding carcasses of cattle to determine if they were killed by a wolf or other large predator. That way, the ranch can be compensated from state funding for their loss. They haven't found any carcasses so far this year.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: We've had one cow that had a run-in probably, but she's healing, and so far, so good.
Chris Hill: A lot of these changes have also been adopted by Malou's neighbors and have led to curiosity and interest around other regenerative agriculture practices.
Chris (in tape): So a lot of this, it seems like just in talking to you, Malou, is just being smart and thinking about, okay, we have some understanding of apex predators, how they operate, the schedule in which they operate.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: Yes.
Chris Hill: And let's use the tools that we have available to deter that.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: That's right. Yeah. A really good producer also knows some stuff about wildlife and is curious about it — wants to learn.
Chris Hill: As for reintroducing wolves in Colorado, Malou has some advice for ranchers.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: We're not gonna get anywhere with fear. I think Colorado's doing a lot of great things by holding a lot of meetings and educational forums with other ranchers who have been with current carnivores for a while, so that they can get ahead of the game and be preventative. If you're preventative and you have different tools in your tool shed for different seasons, different reasons, then you're gonna be okay. And one of those important things is, maybe consider writing in a few losses every year into your budget beforehand, so that then, when you do have a loss — if you don't have any losses, great — if you do have a loss or two, you're prepared.
Chris Hill: It remains to be seen how wolf reintroduction will go in Colorado. Even Malou is skeptical of the uphill battle wolves will face in an environment that is so hostile to them.
Malou Anderson Ramirez: They're surrounded on all sides by difficult policy and people. And so, while I want them to survive, I just worry that there's gonna be a lot of killing that happens in order for them to survive. I just really think we gotta be super thoughtful and very, very slow at those kinds of things. And it sounds to me like Colorado is being a real — this has been a slow process, and that's a very thoughtful process. So at least those steps are being taken.
Chris Hill: As for Mark, he's not too worried about the threat to his ranch. In fact, he's excited to live somewhere a bit more wild.
Mark Harvey: There's kind of a movement to rewild parts of the West — to bring back the buffalo in greater numbers, to bring back the wolf. to try to get some of the wildness back.
Chris Hill: Mark likes to call wolves ecological engineers. Their presence on landscapes across the west is key to solving the mass extinction and biodiversity crisis. And it’s not just wolves. Activists and organizers across the country are working to protect and restore keystone species like beavers, salmon, black bears, and so many others. Because healthy biodiversity — and protected lands for that biodiversity to thrive — are some of the best tools in our fight for a healthy and livable planet.
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Chris Hill: This episode was produced by Tina Mullen, edited by Isaac Kestenbaum of Future Projects, and hosted by me, Chris Hill. Our Colorado field producer was Rachael London. Ian Brickey is our executive producer. Mixing and sound design by Nick Nevis. Special thanks to Delia Malone, Ronan Donavan, Bonnie Rice, the Yellowstone Wolf Project, and all of the wolfwatchers of Yellowstone.
Reintroducing wolves in Colorado is just the first step. Advocate for strong protections for Colorado’s future Gray Wolves at the link in our show notes.