Ep. 918: Eric Odell, The Man who Ran Colorado’s Wolf Reintroduction

Steven Rinella https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella talks with Eric Odell, the recently retired Colorado Wolf Reintroduction Manager, about politics, predation, and the realities of living with wolves. Presented by Can-Am, the leader in ATVs, SxS, and Utility Vehicles www.can-am.brp.com http://www.can-am.brp.com Find our favorite trail cameras and hunting products at www.moultrie.com https://www.moultrie.com Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 2:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh, man, folks, we got a good one today. I've been wanting to talk to this guy for a long time. I'm sure this is gonna get a lot of, this episode's gonna get a lot of attention from people who follow wildlife politics and intrigue and everything. We're speaking with Eric Odell, who's a veteran wildlife biologist who spent 20 years with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, serving as the state's first wolf conservation program manager.

• 2:50Steven Rinella?

  So back following the passage of Proposition 114, which, as our guest will explain, basically brought on the Colorado wolf introduction. His position was created to execute on that directive. Beyond wolves, Eric led restoration efforts for other key Colorado carnivores, including Canada lynx, wolverines, black-footed ferrets, earning a reputation among ranchers and conservationists alike for his pragmatic, field-driven approach to wildlife management. And he retired on Friday. Retired on Friday. Now, I want to set this first question up,

• 3:29Steven Rinella?

  but I'm gonna try to give a little background. You ran, you ended up running the project that became the wildlife news story of not just a year, but of a couple of years. It became an international news story, right? It was a big national news story. Every person who feels that they have an opinion on natural resources management, wildlife management, every hunter, every rancher, has expressed an opinion on the Colorado wolf reintroduction. It was discussed, you know, like, the biggest podcasts in the country, being Joe Rogan

• 4:11Steven Rinella?

  Experience, this issue was discussed, probably came up, I would guess, scores of times on the biggest podcast in the country. Like, it's a thing. It remains a thing. It was a thing. Tell, tell people how it became, how it came to be that one day, they, they, I don't even know who they are, you can explain who they are, that they're like, Eric, this is your baby. Bring wolves back to Colorado.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, yeah, it's a, it's a long story. But the short of it is, wolves were reintroduced in the state because of a ballot initiative. And, and most recently, the, the whole interest of reintroduction of wolves to Colorado goes back a long time. In the early, in the 1980s, people were thinking about what, what would wolf reintroduction before Yellowstone, before Idaho, and for a variety of reasons, that never happened. And, and so then, starting about 2019, there was a group that started to collect signatures. Understanding that there's this way in Colorado that you can get an initiative on the ballot for the voters to go, if you get enough signatures on the, on these petitions, it will go to the voters to make that decision. And, and so that's what happened. And they, they collected

• 5:22Speaker 04

  enough signatures, 200,000 some signatures of, of people throughout the state, to say, should this be on, on the ballot? And in November of 2020.

• 5:31Steven Rinella?

  I want, I want, as you're doing, this is great. Keep going. But if you don't mind, as you do this, if you can just check in on, on your individual, like, you mean, are you like, watching this?

• 5:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:45Steven Rinella?

  This ballot thing, are you watching this, knowing this is gonna become a thing of, that's gonna impact my personal world and my family?

• 5:53Speaker 04

  For sure. Yeah, for sure. So.

• 5:54Steven Rinella?

  You knew, you saw that.

• 5:55Speaker 04

  For before, before the wolf, before all this, I'd been involved with the agency for a bunch of years, like you said, working on a bunch of other projects, other non-game, non-hunted carnivore species. So primarily focused on lynx and, and wolverine, potential for, for wolverine reintroduction. Been involved with Mexican wolf recovery, planning efforts as well. And so, the whole idea that if, if this comes up, if, if this passes as a, as a ballot initiative, then it becomes my responsibility. And so, so I.

• 6:22Steven Rinella?

  You had awareness.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  I had an inkling that this was gonna be a major player.

• 6:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So keep, please keep doing the timeline. I just wanted to know, at what point you saw it, and then like, oh, this is interesting.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was, it was election night, that we knew that it was gonna happen, right? And so, so, yeah, so, leading up to this, there's, there's, you know, this is not a state-led effort, right? This is not the agency saying, hey, we want to reintroduce wolves. This is the citizens and, and groups saying, hey, should, should this become an issue that the voters make a decision on? First time that any, any kind of ballot initiative to look at any kind of reintroduction, much less wolf reintroduction. And the first time that wolf reintroduction would be put in the state's hands, right? When it was done in Yellowstone, that was park service. When it was done in central Idaho, that was through the tribes and through the state to do that, or through the tribes to do that, sorry, not through the state. And so, this was, this was unique, right? And so, they got enough signatures, 2019, very different time, right? Before COVID, before, you know, all these

• 7:16Speaker 04

  different kind of things that were happening. November 2020, presidential election, anticipating a big turnout. There'd been a lot of polling going into, into the election to say, what's, what's the likelihood that this initiative is gonna pass, like they do with all kind of political efforts? And, you know, initially, it was expected this was gonna pass overwhelmingly, 60%, 70%.

• 7:34Steven Rinella?

  That's how it was polling.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was polling way positive.

• 7:37Steven Rinella?

  I knew at the time, I'd kind of forgot. Yeah. So what, it was, it was, it was expected to have a wider margin.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  For sure. And, and, and so, you know, and as the state, we're, we were limited in terms of what we could or couldn't say. But just by statute, as, you know, we can't take a position on, on a ballot initiative as a state agency. We, we didn't produce a lot of materials, or, or, you know, we didn't get involved to try to influence the decision one way or the other by, by statute, by policy. And so.

• 8:04Steven Rinella?

  But, but, explain that little bit to me.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:10Steven Rinella?

  Who, who was supposed to sort of opine on?

• 8:18Speaker 04

  Right. Who, who would, who would?

• 8:21Steven Rinella?

  Who was, who was doing, who was doing the role of saying, here's what that would look like? Just politicians and private individuals?

• 8:29Speaker 04

  Private individuals.

• 8:30Steven Rinella?

  You guys were said, you guys were, you guys had, as a, and I get it, I'm not questioning it, but I get like, it was, stay out of this.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  That's right. And it, not by choice.

• 8:38Steven Rinella?

  That was the department, that's the department's directive.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  That's statute. That says that we can't get.

• 8:42Steven Rinella?

  You cannot say, as a department, we think blank.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  Right. That's right. And so.

• 8:47Steven Rinella?

  Well, then I've seen people break that.

• 8:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe so. Maybe so.

• 8:50Steven Rinella?

  Not, not in this case, but in other cases, I've seen people break it.

• 8:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and it may be specific to Colorado. I don't, I'm not familiar with the other states and how it works there. But yeah, so we were, we were limited in terms of what we could say, what we could do, and how we could say, this is, you know, wolves could or couldn't, these will be the conflicts, these will be the challenges, these will be the opportunities. We didn't, we didn't have that opportunity to say those kinds of things. And, and so, so we watched, essentially sitting on the sidelines, watching how, you know, the, the, those that were supportive of Proposition 114, those that were opposed to Proposition 114. We saw lots of television ads, we saw lots of billboards on the highways, and vote no, vote yes, all of that kind of stuff that you would expect, leading into an election. And election night term comes up, and, and, you know, the group of us that

• 9:35Speaker 04

  within the agency are texting back and forth, it looks like it's, as, as results are starting to roll in. And sure enough, the story's well told, it passed, just barely, 51 to 49%. And it doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter if it's 51 to 49, or 80, 20, it still passes.

• 9:51Steven Rinella?

  I forgive you if you don't want to answer this. Like, I get it.

• 9:58Steven Rinella?

  The first one's an easy question, two questions. The first one is, you know, it's a presidential election too.

• 10:03Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 10:04Steven Rinella?

  Was you, what would you, was more of your mind space, um, the wolf question than the president question?

• 10:10Speaker 04

  For sure. It was more, more directly impactful, right?

• 10:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So like when you're talking about election, election results, most people think like, oh, who's going to be the president?

• 10:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:18Steven Rinella?

  But you're thinking is the wolf thing going down?

• 10:19Speaker 04

  This wolf thing in the past. And it got a lot of attention. Like looking at the media, the, I mean, it was, it was a big deal. Like in, in Colorado at that time, it was, like you say, it got all kinds of attention locally. It got all kinds of attention nationally and even internationally. And so, yeah, it, it became a really, really big deal.

• 10:34Steven Rinella?

  So the, the second part of that, and I totally get it if you don't even want to say, but did you have a hope?

• 10:41Speaker 04

  You know, I, I don't really want to say how I voted on it or what my thoughts were on it. I think that it's.

• 10:45Steven Rinella?

  I respect that.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I think that it's, it's a, it's a unique way to make a decision. What I'll say is that it's a very unique way to make a political decision on, or a unique way to, to, to pose that question to the voters. Hey, should this be something for, for the state agency that's, that's full of professional wildlife biologists?

• 11:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So the next morning you guys wake up and.

• 11:07Speaker 04

  Proposition 114 passes, right? And so then it's like, wow, well now, now what do we do? We've given some thought to it. Like we had, we had some, some plans within the agency, you know, kind of sketched out plans as to what do we, what if? And we had scenarios about if this passes, if this doesn't pass, but you know, it's, the other unique thing about this is that at this point in time, wolves are federally listed in Colorado. So they're, they're not even, and what that means is that they're, they're listed under the endangered species act. And so when a species, regardless of whether it's wolves or, or grouse, or whatever species it is, when a species is listed under the endangered species act federally, Fish and Wildlife Service has management authority for that. So our federal partners have that. And here it is that we're, we're now being tasked with this reintroduction of, of a species that native to the state historically.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  And we don't have the direct management authority. So we've got to work with Fish and Wildlife Service on, on this process too. And so, um, yeah, so we have all of these different scenarios laid out as to what, what could happen if, if this does pass, if this doesn't pass. And sure enough, it did. And then we began the process to think about, well, how do we, how do we execute what, what the statute now says, right?

• 12:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's, there's a little bit of confusion on that.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:16Steven Rinella?

  Can, can, I'm sure you know it by heart. Can you say what the, the statute said? Cause the statute wasn't,

• 12:24Steven Rinella?

  Colorado needs to immediately release wolves into Colorado. It was something different and more confusing.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  It was, yeah. So it, it was, it said a lot, but fundamentally what it said is that we needed to reintroduce wolves west of the continental divide, right? The continental divides, that north, south line in, in the state, Pacific and Atlantic watersheds, had to release wolves west of the continental divide. We had to develop a plan, we had to, to, to do that. How would we do that? We had to develop a, a method for compensating landowners that were experiencing conflict. We had to develop some, uh, recovery goals, state recovery goals. So not only federally listed species, but also it's also a state listed species. We didn't develop any kind of federal recovery goals. That's for the Fish and Wildlife Service to do. Our role was to develop the state recovery goals. And then we had to do, what it says is take the steps necessary to begin reintroductions by December 31st, 2023.

• 13:11Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  Right? So November, I forget, fourth or fifth, 2020 till December 31st, 2023, a little bit over three years to do all of that. Develop a plan and develop all the compensation programs, all of those different kinds of things that.

• 13:24Steven Rinella?

  So it was very prescriptive.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  It was very prescriptive. Yeah. I mean, it was prescriptive in the sense that it said, these, this is what you have to do. It didn't say this is how you're going to do it, right? That became our role, our responsibilities as the state. And so it wasn't something that they said, you will reintroduce this many wolves, these locations, those kinds of things. That became the, the process that we developed, then developed, our staff, myself primarily, leading the development of what we call our wolf restoration and conservation and restoration plan. Or some wolf restoration management plan is what it's called. And so that's what we've put together. And, and there's a long process to do that, right? We began pretty much immediately after the ballot initiative passed. We can talk more about that, that process, but it involved the public, involved tribes, involved stakeholder groups, involved technical groups, really to try to put together,

• 14:10Speaker 04

  what's the best way to do this? You know, this is a task. This is what you have to do. You have to reintroduce wolves and you have to address these, these points. But how are you going to do that? And so lots and lots of meetings, lots of discussions about, these are the kinds of things that need to be incorporated into what's going to be a good management plan. Knowing that we're not going to get it right exactly the first time. There's going to be, you know, this is the plan for 2020 to 2023 and beyond. And at some point we're going to have to revise this plan as, as things go on. And so.

• 14:37Steven Rinella?

  Help me understand what prevented you guys from being smart asses and saying, okay, we'll put two out.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. Because part of the statute said that we have to develop a self-sustaining wolf population, right?

• 14:50Steven Rinella?

  So that, that as well was spelled out. Okay.

• 14:53Speaker 04

  Right. So I didn't, I didn't elaborate on that, but yeah, we can't, we couldn't do that. We couldn't just say, okay, here's one wolf. We've, we've reintroduced wolves, we've, or two wolves, we've reintroduced wolves to the state.

• 15:02Steven Rinella?

  It was defined enough that it, that everyone knew what it meant.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  That's right. Yeah. It's, yeah. I mean, it was a serious effort and, and you know, it was state law. It is state law, it remains state law. And so that's what, you know, that's what drives what we do as, as an agency is, is the state laws. We have to abide by that. And so, you know, we're, we took that very seriously, but you know, took that responsibility.

• 15:21Steven Rinella?

  At what point did they create? Cause you, you, what was your job? Uh, on the election night, what was your job title?

• 15:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was, uh, species conservation program manager, right? So more general, working on all these other species that, that we've talked about, lynx, wolverine, otters and.

• 15:34Steven Rinella?

  And on what day did they come and go, forget all that, you're the wolf guy?

• 15:38Speaker 04

  Oh, um, it was, I mean, it kind of became, so for a while I was doing both. I was trying to do all the, the species conservation program stuff and the wolf stuff. And it became pretty clear pretty quickly that you couldn't do both. It was really, was, that was two separate jobs, both really high demand jobs. And so then I, I moved into the wolf job. They, that was a, a new job that was created, a new position that was created. And I, I moved into that. And then we've since backfilled that, that position to do all the other.

• 16:06Steven Rinella?

  It seems to me that, that, um, if you'd have gone out and done a call for applications to come run Colorado's wolf introduction, reintroduction, you would have had a boatload of applicants.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  We might've. Yeah, we might've. Well, I mean.

• 16:22Steven Rinella?

  Were you, were you dying to get it? Like, did you want it?

• 16:25Speaker 04

  You know, I look forward to the challenge. I thought, I thought it was, you, you work in, in wildlife conservation. I've been there for 20, at that point, you know, 20, 20 years, 20, 24 years. Wow. 20 years, I guess at that point. And, uh, yeah, I mean, here's this opportunity to, to do something pretty historic, pretty, you know, kind of setting a legacy for, for the work that this agency is going to do. And, uh, yeah, I was excited to take it on.

• 16:47Steven Rinella?

  And did you know that you were going to become like, um, I don't want to draw too much of a parallel, but you were going to become like this Fauci-like character? That all of a sudden everybody was going to have an opinion about.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I tried to avoid that. I tried to make it not about me. I tried to make it about the program and, and the agency and yeah.

• 17:04Steven Rinella?

  Apparently.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I, I wanted this to be, you know, the, the success of the program and this is the success of the agency.

• 17:11Steven Rinella?

  So you decided, you wanted to keep low profile.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I wanted to do the job and I wanted to do it well. And, and you know, I think that it's, and it isn't just me that, that did the job either. Like it, I've gotten a lot of attention for it. I've gotten, my name has been associated with it a lot and I, and I take a lot of pride in that. I did that well.

• 17:29Steven Rinella?

  And you had gotten threats and stuff too, though.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  Well, it was, there was times where it was, it was very tense. Like we would have meetings at, at our commission meetings. We had discussions about, you know, if things go south, this is what you do. And, and that kind of stuff. Nothing ever personal.

• 17:40Steven Rinella?

  But was it, oh, nothing personal? Well, do you feel, I don't want, I don't want to dwell on this too long. I just want to kind of understand for you personally.

• 17:50Steven Rinella?

  Do, do you feel that the public understanding was there that like, you're a guy, you have a job. This is coming from the voters and you're there to execute on the job. Not that you're some, not that you were the one that was like, hey, I got an idea.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:06Steven Rinella?

  Like that was understood.

• 18:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. Like we, we made, we, I made, anytime I had the opportunity to talk about this in front of a stock, uh, you know, a producer group, or, or even the, the wolf advocates or our commission, or just to the general public, it was, it was, you know, we made the effort to say, we're doing this. We're, we're, and we're going to do a good job at this and we're doing it because proposition 114.

• 18:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we're doing it in accordance with the law.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  This is what we have to do, right? I mean, this is, and so, you know, we did not, and, and I think in some ways that helped us. You know, if we go into these, to these small west slope communities and say, hey, we're the agency, we want to reintroduce wolves. That's not a, that's not a winning conversation, right? If we say, hey, state law says that we have to do this. And in fact, this was a, a major point that the chair of our commission at the point was, was saying is that, you know, even though the, the, the vote was carried on, carried largely by the front range counties, right? The, the population centers for Colorado, Fort Collins, down to Colorado Springs, Pueblo, that vast majority. And remember that the, the initiative said that we'll reintroduce wolves west of the continental divide, very much the rural part of, of Colorado. Her statement was, we want to do this with the west slope and not to the west slope. And that was, that rang really, really true, right?

• 19:13Speaker 04

  We, we really wanted to incorporate their opinions and, and you know, it's, we have to look for positive outcomes. We, we can't just say we're, it's a terrible idea. We're not going to do it. We, it's a good idea and we have to do it and we have to do it well.

• 19:25Steven Rinella?

  They would have found someone that would.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  Right. Exactly. And so, so working with the west slope, trying to find, understand what their concerns were, understand how we can address what, what they want to see in, in wolf restoration. What kind of, you know, considering again, federally listed species, how do we manage this federally listed species? That has, you know, certain prohibitions and how do you, how do you do work on that? And we, and we found really good tools to, to do that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, it was a, it was a long, long process. And, and having that, back to your question, like being able to say, this isn't an, an agency initiative. This is an agency, we're driven to do this by state law, by, by the voters. That was very helpful for us to, to be able to do that.

• 20:03Steven Rinella?

  During the, so you had a three year, roughly a three year window to get this.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 20:07Steven Rinella?

  On the ground between election night and wolves are on the ground. You had roughly three years. I, I, I felt in, in watching this play out, it was very interesting to me that during that three years, like something totally unprecedented happened. And wild wolves.

• 20:26Steven Rinella?

  On their own four feet, walked into Colorado.

• 20:29Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 20:30Steven Rinella?

  Out of Wyoming.

• 20:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, and even before election night that had happened.

• 20:33Steven Rinella?

  Okay, even before, okay.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:35Steven Rinella?

  And I, and I get, like, I totally get that the, the piece of legislation that passed did not contemplate that, that occurrence didn't affect, didn't negate it. It wasn't written in that, like, all this doesn't matter if a wolf walks in on its own four feet.

• 20:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 20:49Steven Rinella?

  But it complicated stuff.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Can, can you speak to that?

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, so, so two different things happened, two, two different scenarios happened. One was in, in extreme northwest Colorado, Moffett County, right, truly right on the border of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, right in that, that little tri-state area. We found a carcass, our, our field staff found a carcass of an elk that had been killed by, by wolves. Wolf tracks were there, wolf scat was there. We collected that wolf scat, ran some genetics on it and discovered that it was not just a wolf, but it was several, several different wolves that were related, right? So, meaning that there had been some reproduction. There, there had been a wolf den someplace, nobody ever.

• 21:26Steven Rinella?

  And how far into Colorado is this?

• 21:28Speaker 04

  Miles, not, not far at all. So, it's, it's, it's very likely that this, this pack of wolves, and it, it was a pack because there was.

• 21:35Steven Rinella?

  Flirting with the border.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  Right, it was flirting with those three borders, somewhere Idaho, or, sorry, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado.

• 21:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  And, um, never heard, never saw those wolves again. We get reports from them from time to time. We would see individuals, uh, and then those wolves in Wyoming, wolves are not federally listed, right? They're, they're under state management. And especially in that, that predator's zone, they can be shot at any time. And that's what happened ultimately to, to those wolves there.

• 21:59Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  And so those, you know, that's, that's one scenario, that Moffett County scenario. In North Park, we had a, a black female wolf. We get these reports from time to time and, and a very clear photo of a, a lot of the times those come back as like a German shepherd or a Malamute or something, right? Somebody mistakes it, clearly not a wolf. This was clearly was a wolf, black, canid, you'd see a collar on her. Talked to my colleague in, in Wyoming, got the radio frequency for her and, and started to, to monitor her from the air and we were flying for her.

• 22:26Steven Rinella?

  Just a lone female?

• 22:27Speaker 04

  A lone female, right. And so this was, when was this? I think spring of 2019 is, is when this happened. That fall, and it, so as we're, we're, we're leading up into, um, a lot of the, the ballot initiative stuff, in, uh, 20, let's see, 2021,

• 22:48Speaker 04

  towards, towards the end of 2020, we saw a gray male or another gray animal with her. And so then in, in early 2021, we, we captured that animal, put a collar on him. And so that was the first time, so this is 2021, right after the ballot initiative. And, um, put a collar on him and they, they paired bred and, and reproduced and produced the first litter of pups.

• 23:08Steven Rinella?

  Had they, do you feel that those two wolves knew each other?

• 23:11Speaker 04

  No, I don't think they did. I think they came.

• 23:13Steven Rinella?

  So it was like just a freak, like a freak deal?

• 23:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:16Steven Rinella?

  There's possibly at that time, two wolves in the state of Colorado, they found each other.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  I think that's right. And, and we had had other wolves that had come down from, from the Yellowstone system, from, from Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, uh, and they've come into that, that same general area. So there's some way, I, I don't know how the wolf sees or how it sees the landscape, but that, that general area, that North Park area is where they had come. We had reports from them from, I think, 2007, that, that we'd had individual wolves. And so, yeah, certainly from time to time, wolves are going to naturally migrate into, into the state. And, and it's a gauntlet, you know, getting through southern Wyoming is tough for a wolf. Uh, but, but it happens, right? And, and they've done that. And so those wolves that, that reproduced in, in North Park, we called them the North Park pack. That was the first time that we had had a documented reproduction of, of wolves in 80 plus years.

• 24:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  And then, um, you, you had the same kind of thing happen. They go up into Wyoming and, and they can get shot there at, at any time. And so there's still a few members of that pack that remain, but for the most part, that pack didn't, didn't persist long.

• 24:15Steven Rinella?

  It fizzled.

• 24:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:16Steven Rinella?

  Understood, yeah. And, and again, it just, it had no bearing on what you needed to do, right?

• 24:21Speaker 04

  It wasn't enough, right? Yeah, so, so a few individuals from, from time to time is exciting from, from a wolf restoration perspective, but it's not, it, it doesn't meet the, the letter of the law in terms of what the ballot in the statute says.

• 24:36Speaker 03

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• 24:39Speaker 03

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• 24:43Speaker 02

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• 24:46Speaker 03

  There's a homicide detective down here. Three bodies on the ground.

• 24:49Speaker 02

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• 26:06Steven Rinella?

  When you guys had, uh, I know that there became this, this big issue about, well, how, let's say a fellow wants some wolves, how do you go get them?

• 26:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:17Steven Rinella?

  Um, the legislation didn't contemplate this.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  No.

• 26:22Steven Rinella?

  Can, can you, can you explain? So, like, I mean, just like the whole basics of the question is like, okay, we need some.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:29Steven Rinella?

  And they're not here.

• 26:30Speaker 04

  Where do you get them from?

• 26:31Steven Rinella?

  Like, like, how do you get them? How do you ask? Like, who do you approach? You know, what are the conversations like?

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, well, there, I mean, there's a lot of, there, there's a much longer story to the development of the plan and, and how we came up with what the, what we needed to do to get wolf restoration to happen. I, I think one thing that's really important that, that doesn't get told enough is that there's, because of this federal status, because they're, they're federally listed as endangered, what that means fundamentally is that take is prohibited. And take means a bunch of different things legally, and there's been some new, new kind of interpretations as to what that means. Yeah. But fundamentally means that you can't kill an animal. You can't, you can't chase, harm, harass an animal.

• 27:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And I want to explain, because you alluded to something really quick.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 27:11Steven Rinella?

  Um, we've covered this on the news show, is like, I can't remember what year,

• 27:18Steven Rinella?

  some years back, the language of the Endangered Species Act around take was interpreted to mean,

• 27:26Steven Rinella?

  let's say there's a endangered swallow and it only nests on a cliff. So you'd be like, well, you can't take a swallow, but they would, they define that to be, well, you can't destroy the cliff.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:39Steven Rinella?

  Because that's tantamount to taking a swallow. And now they've, and now the current administration is trying to walk back some of that language and more narrowly defined take.

• 27:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:50Steven Rinella?

  Meaning if you kill, if you destroy a bird's nest, did you take a bird? Right?

• 27:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:55Steven Rinella?

  It's like a philosophical question as much as anything.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, because, because there's, the take has, has habitat implications, right? And so for wolves, that's not really all that, that doesn't really mean that much for wolves, because wolves are habitat generalists, they'll, they'll live wherever. But what, what we learned in, in all of these conversations that we had with other states that are managing wolves, we had many, many meetings with, with the current state managers, state wildlife managers that are dealing with wolves. They say you have to have some kind of tools. You have to have the ability to haze and harass wolves that are not behaving in ways that are good, right? That are, that are getting into livestock conflict. And in some cases, even, even kill wolves. And, and we've done that as, as state agency. And so within that, within that confines, within that, that status of federally listed species, what we developed was called a 10J rule, or what the Fish and Wildlife Service developed.

• 28:42Speaker 04

  And that's something that they've used for many different species, not just wolves, but it allows take in, in certain circumstances.

• 28:48Steven Rinella?

  That's the, that's the experimental population or something like that.

• 28:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's called the non-essential experimental population.

• 28:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  And so that was, that was really important. And, and there's, we, we spent a lot of money and, and took, and did this on a very accelerated timeframe to, to get all of those federal rulemaking processes in place. It has to get published in the federal register and get all the public comment on there. CPW, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, paid for the, the consultants to write that, that, um, the, those NEPA documents, the, the EA and the EIS for that work. Uh, and, and it was done on a really accelerated timeframe because it had to be in place prior to wolves being reintroduced. And fundamentally, what the 10J rule does is that it relaxes those take prohibitions. It allows wolves to be chased and harmed and, and rubber buckshot those, and in, in certain circumstances, even lethally managed, lethally removed. And so that was really important, that, that we did that.

• 29:39Speaker 04

  And, and because if we didn't, then we're reintroducing.

• 29:44Speaker 04

  Federally endangered wolves with no management tools at all, right? And so that's, that's a really challenging situation.

• 29:50Steven Rinella?

  When you were do, when you were pursuing that experimental thing that gave greater management latitude, were you at risk of, of lawsuits from, from, from wildlife advocacy groups?

• 30:02Speaker 04

  You know, I think-

• 30:02Steven Rinella?

  Were they, were they, were they understanding that that would be necessary?

• 30:06Speaker 04

  For the most, I mean, it's, it's hard to generalize, right? There's, there's a whole, as, as much as there's a whole spectrum of hunters and there's a whole spectrum of ranchers, there's a whole spectrum of, of wolf advocate type groups too. Some wolf advocates were absolutely opposed to the idea of, of the 10J rule, the experiment, non-essential experimental rule. Some understood that, yeah, this is, this is how you're going to buy some tolerance. This is, if you have this ability, then you're, you're going to have, you know, some legal ways to, to manage those challenging situations that are bound to arise.

• 30:34Steven Rinella?

  But that was, pursuing that was a decision of the department?

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Was, was a totally a CPW decision. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it wasn't our decision. It was, it wasn't our doing. It was officially, it's a federal rulemaking process. And so the, the US Fish and Wildlife Service-

• 30:48Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so it was the only way to do it?

• 30:49Speaker 04

  It was the only way to do it. Right. And so they, Fish and Wildlife Service had to be a partner in this. And, and through that process, we developed an MOU that gives a memorandum of understanding that gives us a, the status called Designated Agent. So it allows us as the state wildlife management agency to manage wolves in the state. And so what it did, what that 10J rule does is it, it defines that geographic barrier. It says from north to southeast to west within Colorado, any wolf that's there, whether we reintroduced it or a wolf that, that comes in from, from the north, will be considered part of that non-essential experimental population.

• 31:22Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 31:23Speaker 04

  And so that allows that, that management flexibility for, for all wolves in the state. It's, you know, there's no way-

• 31:28Steven Rinella?

  So you didn't need to find out who came from where?

• 31:29Speaker 04

  No, no, exactly. As, as long as it's within the state borders-

• 31:32Steven Rinella?

  Understood.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  We can treat it as a, as a member of that population, that non-essential population.

• 31:36Steven Rinella?

  So if those, so those wolves that came in from Wyoming-

• 31:39Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 31:40Steven Rinella?

  Like doing this, all of a sudden their status would change?

• 31:43Speaker 04

  Right. Well, even, even without 10J, as soon as they cross that state line, in, in Wyoming, it's a, it's a state managed species. It's a, it's a, I don't know exactly what their status is, but it's-

• 31:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I mean, their status within Colorado changed.

• 31:54Speaker 04

  Right. And then they come into Colorado, they're federally endangered, but within Colorado, now they're considered part of that non-essential experimental population. And so that was good, right? And so that's, as, as what, that was one of those things that we really needed to have in place to, to get some of that, that buy-in from, from the states. So back to your question, like, how do you, how do you ask for, for wolves?

• 32:14Steven Rinella?

  I got another one, just, just following in the timeline. Were, during this three-year period, when you're working on this, I'm getting, this has to be true, are there political figures or groups exploring some way to undo this?

• 32:32Speaker 04

  Oh, for sure.

• 32:33Steven Rinella?

  To challenge this, to sabotage this? What was, did any of that ever come close?

• 32:37Speaker 04

  Um, well, yeah. I, I don't know that it ever came close, but it, I mean, we had, there were several lawsuits filed. There was a, there was a federal lawsuit filed the day that we're driving out of the driveway to go to Oregon, which is where we, we sourced our wolves from the first time, that said that we hadn't done the NEPA process to do that 10J rule properly.

• 32:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  And, and so, you know, they were, they were trying to shut it down. The, the, the litigants in that side were trying to shut down wolf reintroduction because they, the, the, on a procedural note. And, you know, we're leaving, we're, we're going up to, to catch wolves to, to do this work, and our agency leadership said, just keep going, we'll, we'll let you know if we, we'll give you a call if you need to turn around. And no, we didn't. I mean, they, they, that all got dismissed through the courts and all of that. So there's, there were a lot of efforts to that.

• 33:24Steven Rinella?

  So there's never a delay?

• 33:25Speaker 04

  No, there, there never was a delay.

• 33:26Steven Rinella?

  No, no. Okay, so now, on to my, my, my earlier question, like, how do you find one?

• 33:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, um, so what, what our plan said is that we were going to reintroduce 10 to 15 wolves a year for three to five years. We, we passed that plan in May of 2023 and presented it to our commission. Our, this is kind of an interesting piece of it too, is that when we started this process, we, we told the commission, this is how as staff, we think we should develop this plan and, and we'll develop a stakeholder group, we'll develop a technical group, we'll have a lot of public meetings, we'll have tribal consultations, we'll have a lot of commission meetings to hear that input and, and ultimately put all that together, developed a plan. And our commission's a broad, broad-based group too, a lot of different representations of hunters and outfitters and, and ranching communities at-large members. And so it parks, and we're now Parks and Wildlife Agency, so we've got some of that

• 34:15Speaker 04

  representation in there too. When, when it came to vote on the plan, the commission gave us unanimous approval, and which doesn't necessarily mean that the commission is all in favor of wolf reintroduction. There were certainly members of that, that commission that were not supportive of wolf reintroduction. But what, to me, what that said is that we did a good process. The, the process to develop that plan was thorough and complete and, and really evaluated a lot of different perspectives in that. And that was, that was important, I think, to, to have that in there. So here it is, May of 2023, the statute says by December of 2023, we got seven months to, to get wolves on the ground. We had a new director that came in right, right at that time too. And one of the first things he did was write letters to his counterparts, the other agency directors in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon.

• 35:00Speaker 04

  Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife was the first agency that, that responded positively that said that, yeah, we'd, we'd be a partner with, with you on this. And so that began that process of developing logistics of how do you, how do you do that? How do you catch wolves and transport and release?

• 35:13Steven Rinella?

  If you, if you get into the heads of, uh, the agencies that said no.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  Okay, yep.

• 35:22Steven Rinella?

  The states that said, no, you can't have our wolves. Some of these states are not under leadership that wants more wolves.

• 35:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:34Steven Rinella?

  What I didn't get is if someone says, hey, you know, these wolves that you guys are somewhat uncomfortable with, some, some political figures in these states are uncomfortable with these wolves presence, I would like some. One, one might think, they would go, have all you want.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  Take them, yeah.

• 35:50Steven Rinella?

  But they, but they were instead were like, no.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:53Steven Rinella?

  Like, what was the game being played there?

• 35:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, in, in, these were discussions that happened at the director's level. I think what, I mean, from, from Wyoming perspective as an example, in order for us to take wolves from Wyoming, we would have had to take them from northern Wyoming and release them in northern Colorado. Very likely, they would go into southern Wyoming. And the director of Wyoming probably was very smartly said, I don't want to create a problem in southern Wyoming, right?

• 36:16Steven Rinella?

  And so, yeah, you're going to create potentially like a big population and then it's going to be, you're going to be dealing from the south.

• 36:22Speaker 04

  Right. And so, so that was Wyoming's rationale. Idaho, Montana, were the other two states that, that really have robust wolf populations, big wolf populations. And, and they both said no, they, they very explicitly said no. I think largely for political reasons, I think that there was some influence that, that they had heard that they did not want, you know, that, that some entities within Colorado didn't want to have wolves. And so they had made contact and communications and, and that, that kind of convinced them from a political perspective that, yeah, we don't really want to partner on this. Despite the fact that we've got very large wolf populations in these states.

• 36:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I, I read it like, I kind of read it like what you're saying, is I read it as a way, it was a way to express disapproval-

• 37:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:03Steven Rinella?

  With how this happened.

• 37:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:05Steven Rinella?

  And my way of expressing disapproval is to deny you-

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Is to say no.

• 37:09Steven Rinella?

  To deny you this thing that I'm not really happy to have anyway.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, right, right. Yeah, and, and so then, so Oregon, Oregon and Washington, and, and the other piece of it too, is that we had to get wolves from federally delisted areas, right? And because of, and it's a lot, it's not that interesting of a story, but the fact of the matter is that they had, in order to take wolves from a listed area where they're federally listed, you have to do more NEPA work, you know, more, more of that EIS and in, in environmental impact statement and environmental assessments to look at what the impacts of those populations are going to be. And so, um, that, that took a lot of those areas out of, of consideration. So wolves are federally delisted, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and throughout those states, and in the eastern portions of Montana, or sorry, of, of Washington and, and Oregon. And so, so that was, it was really those five states that initially we had that, those

• 37:57Speaker 04

  conversations with. And, and Oregon, like I say, said, yes, you can come in. And, and at that time, they said, you can take 10 wolves. Uh, we don't want you to take any breeding pairs, so none of the breeders of the packs, but you can take, uh, you know, essentially the, the, um, yearlings of, of, of the packs. We did not want to take pups, you know, we, and so there's, there's a lot of different considerations for what makes a good candidate. What kind of wolves do we want to take down to, to Colorado?

• 38:23Steven Rinella?

  What of this, what of this story that, first I just want to reminisce, because when Montana did, you know, when Yellowstone did it, it was that they, that they got stuck with these super wolves.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:36Steven Rinella?

  Which is, you know, whatever, pretend, but that they got stuck with these super wolves.

• 38:43Steven Rinella?

  And then the, the popular narrative that I hear, not from officialdom, but I just hear is that you guys got stuck, Colorado got stuck with the cattle killers.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:55Steven Rinella?

  Is there?

• 38:56Speaker 04

  There's not truth to it. No.

• 38:57Steven Rinella?

  So when you, when you hear that, you're like, I don't get where that came from.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  I get where it came from. I, I get where it came from. I mean, it came from the fact that werewolves and livestock overlap, there's going to be conflict, right? So there's, in an eastern Oregon, there's a lot of livestock and there's a lot of wolves too. And, and, and there's history, you know, all of those packs have had some inter, some involvement, some, some not good involvement with, with livestock. And so that was part of our, our criteria is that, you know, not only do we want yearlings, we didn't want the super young, we didn't want the super old wolves. We want somebody that's going to contribute to this population and not be naive to, to know how to hunt. But we also weren't going to take wolves from an area that was, from a pack that was currently depredating in, in.

• 39:39Steven Rinella?

  Currently depredating.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. Right. And so, and we did not, fundamentally what that meant is that we didn't want to take wolves from a pack where Oregon or Wildlife Services was doing wolf control act, actions. There were a lot of scenarios where we had wolves available to us to, to capture. You know, they were, they were in a, a geographically, just a flat, open area, not a treat area. They were on federal lands, but they were wolves that had been involved in, in very recent depredations. And so we passed on those. We said, no, we're not going, we don't want to take that anticipating that that was going to be the kind of, uh, response that we would get is that we're just bringing in these cattle killers. So we brought in wolves from packs that had had wolf livestock history, but nothing that was, that was current, nothing that was active. And so that narrative.

• 40:22Steven Rinella?

  If your challenge had been, if your challenge was to go find wolves that had never, to go find wolves in the lower 48, that had no history of cattle, you'd have been SOL.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  There's no way. I mean, that, well, the, I mean, the only place is, is the park, Yellowstone, right? And, and that's not an option for, for a bunch of different reasons. And so, yeah, within the lower 48, that, that becomes, it becomes near impossible to find wolves. And that's a huge reason why we went to British Columbia in, in the next year, in, in 2025.

• 40:52Steven Rinella?

  Did Oregon sell them to you, trade them to you?

• 40:54Speaker 04

  No.

• 40:55Steven Rinella?

  Give them to you?

• 40:55Speaker 04

  Give them. They, they, they, Wildlife Agencies do a lot of that kind of stuff where we, we've given, uh, as one of the projects I was involved with was Swift Fox. We took Swift Fox and, and put them up in North Dakota and on some of the tribal lands there. And so it's, it's, there's no sale, like we are not buying wolves. We're, we're, we CPW paid all of the helicopter contracts. We paid all of the, all of the fees, all the, the costs associated with capture and, and transport of wolves, but we didn't, there's no exchange, no monetary exchange for.

• 41:23Steven Rinella?

  Were you involved in captures?

• 41:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:24Steven Rinella?

  How'd you guys do it?

• 41:26Speaker 04

  So we contracted all that out. We, we don't do the capture work ourselves, but there are capture companies that, that go out and, uh, dart from the air and, and, uh, so Oregon was, was great to cooperate with their, their wolf program manager was great. She, she had a lot of information. She had been monitoring the wolves really intently for the last several years. And so she would tell us about which packs were available, which individuals were available. She knew which the, which the breeders were and could comment on those based on coat color and collar color, things like that. And so the gunner would go up, the helicopter would go up, you dart wolf, and then they would bring those wolves to us in, in the field and we would do what we do, measure them, weigh them, process them, put collars on them and.

• 42:07Steven Rinella?

  And how'd you, how'd you transport them?

• 42:09Speaker 04

  They were transported in the, um, from, from the field where they were captured to, to where we were in the field was in the helicopter.

• 42:14Steven Rinella?

  Tranquilized?

• 42:15Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah, absolutely. You don't want to put a, a hell, a wolf in a helicopter. That's not.

• 42:20Steven Rinella?

  Well, I know, like tied them all up.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  Oh, they're, they're hobbled. They, they're hobbled. They've got a muzzle on them for sure during transport, but they're out. Yeah.

• 42:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And then, um, they're never held anywhere though, right? So did you put, did you put them in, in, in, in an enclosure in Colorado?

• 42:35Speaker 04

  No. They, so in Oregon, they would be put in, say we captured them on a Tuesday, they'd get worked up in the field. They, they get the collar on and they, they do, we do the blood draws. We do all the genetic samples, all that kind of stuff. Put them in a crate, a, a large reinforced dog crate. Um, and then they're flown to Colorado that, that you, you probably the next day is they're held overnight in those crates and then flown the next morning and then released straight away.

• 43:01Steven Rinella?

  Just flat out.

• 43:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:02Steven Rinella?

  Hot release.

• 43:03Speaker 04

  Call that a hard release. Yeah. Versus a soft release and, and both work. You know, those are two different strategies. That's something that we really considered a lot.

• 43:10Steven Rinella?

  So that sucker wakes up and he's just in a new spot.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  He's in a new spot. Yeah. And so we would release them from Oregon. They were transported three to five animals at a time. And so those animals would all be released together in the same place at the same time.

• 43:22Steven Rinella?

  And they knew each other. You weren't mixing, or were you mixing animals that didn't know each other?

• 43:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, they were mixed. They weren't necessarily all from the same pack. There's probably some that, that did come from the same pack. I'd have to look back at precisely the, the relationships. But for the most part, they were, we, we wanted that genetic representation. We didn't want them all to be, you know, we didn't move entire packs together. They were all individual animals from, from separate packs. And, and really, I mean, that's kind of the way wolf biology works. As they get to a certain point, they disperse out of those packs and, and start to create new packs and, and become, defend new territories. And so that's kind of what we were trying to mimic in, in a somewhat artificial way. But to, to say, here's, here's a, a yearling male, a yearling female from neighboring or separate packs. Let's see if that, if that works. And in some cases it did.

• 44:07Steven Rinella?

  How'd you pick? How did you pick and did, did you make it public where you were actually letting them go?

• 44:13Speaker 04

  So, um, yeah, so we kind of made it public after the fact, like, you know, this is a sensitive issue, right? We've got to protect, got to protect the wolves. We've got to protect our staff too. There were threats that we were getting about, and who knows in, in some of the social media world, how, how real some of these threats really were, but there, that was definitely a concern. Like it's, this is, this is, you know, we, we're, again, this is the responsibility that we're given. This is the task that we're given by state law and we got to make sure that everybody stays safe and, and the wolves themselves too. And so, uh, initially we were very secretive about timing, locations, all, all that kind of stuff. Um, the, the wolves were released on state or private lands. And so we, we didn't do it on federal lands, kind of coming back. And this is a criticism that

• 44:57Speaker 04

  we got is that we took shortcuts, that we didn't do the NEPA, we did not do the NEPA work on releasing on federal lands. If we were to release on Forest Service lands, BLM lands, we would have had to do more NEPA work and that costs money.

• 45:09Steven Rinella?

  That's what's funny, cause I mean, come on, you let, like, if you let it go on, I mean, you're effectively letting it go on public land, whether you do or not on federal land.

• 45:18Speaker 04

  They're going to go, right. They're going, the wolves are going to move.

• 45:20Steven Rinella?

  Hey, stay on this guy's place.

• 45:21Speaker 04

  Exactly. There's never the expectation that you open the crate and the wolf is going to stay on that 10 acres, a hundred acres, a thousand acres. These animals move, right?

• 45:28Steven Rinella?

  Did you put a collar on every one you let go?

• 45:30Speaker 04

  We did. Yeah. And not only just a collar, but a GPS collar. And so, you know, the technology's changed quite a bit. And so we have these collars on that allow us to get points and, and they, they're, they're not super frequent. You can change that, but these catch a point every four hours or so. And so really the, the purpose of those collars isn't to say, look, it's going this, this way. It's going up this drainage and getting minute by minute kind of action on it. It's really just to say, this is the general area where the animal is. It's still alive. It's still doing this. It's paired with this and it's traveling with this animal, those, those kinds of things. And, and so, um, yeah. So they all have that, that GPS collar on. There's some risks with GPS collars. They're, they're technologically a little bit more sensitive. They're, they, we've had some collar failures

• 46:12Speaker 04

  versus the, the more traditional, the VHF collars, which is just the, the signal that you have to be in, either in the field or in a plane and, and, you know, with a receiver and, and getting those, those signals. And so, um, so yeah, every wolf that we released had it, had a GPS collar on it. We will try to keep, uh, with what our plan says is that within each pack, we'll keep two collars active, one GPS and one VHF collar, just for the longevity of it.

• 46:35Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  These, the collars last five, six, seven years, hopefully in, in best case scenario, which is about the life of a wolf. And so we don't want to be replacing collars that much. Catching wolves, collaring them is, it's expensive for one thing. It's, it's, it's risky. Anytime you're up in the helicopter, it's risky to the people, it's risky to the animals too. And so, um, yeah. So, so everything had, had GPS collars on, but, but back to it, we, we, we did not release on federal lands, but knew full well that, that wolves would go on to federal lands. And like you say, these, these things move big distances.

• 47:05Steven Rinella?

  Tell, tell me the numbers. So how many, how many wolves you did and when?

• 47:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. So in year one, in December of 2023, we did 10 animals from, from Oregon. And then 14 months later, January of 2025, we reintroduced 15 animals from British Columbia.

• 47:22Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  And then we had plans to do a third year of releases in, in January of 2026. We would have gone back to British Columbia and, and British Columbia was great to work with. The, the staff there was awesome. That they, we had great cooperation, great facilities to use there. Um, it worked well for their programs. They're, they're in a predator reduction mode for, for some of their caribou recovery efforts. And so that it gave them a positive spin to, to do some of their wolf work. Um, and I, you know, based on that criticism that we heard from the, the animals that we reintroduced from Oregon, there's no overlap with livestock. There are, there are no livestock in, in northern, central northern British Columbia where we're getting these animals from. And, um, so it was, you know, we were addressing that concern that we had heard after year one, that, you know, you're bringing

• 48:05Speaker 04

  in cattle killers. And, and we brought it wolves from, from British Columbia down. And sure enough, they've, they've been involved in some depredation just because that's just what, that's what predators do.

• 48:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Steven Rinella?

  When the 10 hit the ground, the first 10, what were some of the most immediate, what were some of the first things you saw? Um, in terms of, of distances before they settled? I mean, did they wake up and split?

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, so by the time they were released, they were out of the effect of drugs, right? So they're, they're in the crates, you open the crate and sometimes it'll take a few minutes, a minute or two to, to get the gumption to leave the crate. Sometimes they would go right away. And so, um, and they all, you know, in that first wave of five, I think we did five and then we did two and then we did three or something like, I don't remember exactly the numbers on, on how exactly that worked, but, um, they, some animals moved big distances right away and some animals stuck super close within five, 10 miles of, of the release sites too. And so they would, they just, they were all in exploratory mode, right? And some of them I think were, were probably, um, a little confused. I think

• 49:17Speaker 04

  they all probably were at least in some way or another confused about what they had just experienced and, and you're just flown from, from Oregon, uh, driven in a truck and then the crates are open and they're in a different, they're in a different place. One of the things that we really wanted to, to kind of mimic is taking wolves from someplace that is ecologically pretty similar to, to Colorado. And so that, that worked pretty well. They're, they're in, you know, an elk dominated environment. We've got obviously huge ungulate populations in western Colorado. So that was good. Um, and they, you know, some animals moved quite a bit and some, some stuck pretty close. Uh, in that first year, we did have one, one pair and, and they developed a, a litter of pups that produced a litter of pups and started to defend the territory as well. So that was, that was the first, uh, that

• 50:02Speaker 04

  was in, in the spring of, of 2024.

• 50:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 50:06Speaker 04

  At that.

• 50:06Steven Rinella?

  What was the, and I know you're only getting a, you're only getting a ping on them every four, four hours?

• 50:11Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 50:12Steven Rinella?

  How long, do you have a guess? When they, they, so they, they cut loose in Colorado? How many hours or days went by before one of them had a successful hunt?

• 50:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. Great question. So, so we get pings every four hours. We don't get a ping, we don't get the result of that ping every, we get one download a day essentially. So we get to, just to understand how that works. Um, the, I don't, that's a great question. I don't know how, how long it was. I don't think it was, you know, wolves don't eat every day, right? They don't, they don't need to have a kill every day. Probably within the first week that, that we, I don't remember. We were really sensitive to, to not wanting to, to go in when we would see a cluster of points. We didn't want to go in on that because we didn't want to scare them off of that and create conflict, push them off of that, that kill of a deer and elk or something like that.

• 51:01Steven Rinella?

  So you're not, yeah, you, I, I imagine like there's a temptation to go running over there to see what they've been doing every time you get like that he's been in the same place for 12 hours?

• 51:09Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 51:09Steven Rinella?

  You're dying to go see what's up, but you would just stay back?

• 51:11Speaker 04

  We would stay back and then we would go in afterwards, right? After, after they, when they've moved on, then you can go in and we've got some great research that's, that's happening right now. Looking at that, kind of looking at what, what wolf diet looks like. And, and so that's, that's how we'll do that and go in and look for scat and he can, can run some genetics on, on the scat.

• 51:27Steven Rinella?

  How many months went by before you had one killer cow?

• 51:30Speaker 04

  Well, we had a cow, we, we actually had depredation from the, the North Park pack. Before we did reintroduction, we had, we had depredation in there. Um, there was probably depredation from the, the wolves that were released in Oregon. I'd have to look back. I don't, I don't know for sure, but, um, months, month, month or months. Yeah.

• 51:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

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• 53:23Steven Rinella?

  What's your take? Now that you've looked at this so carefully, we were talking about this the other day on the news show, research around this question, but like, what's your take on the degree to which wolves are just opportunistic and remain opportunistic versus

• 53:42Steven Rinella?

  they, they hunt elk, they hunt moose, those animals behave in a certain way. You might get a kick to the head, right? They're fast or whatever. And then you discover cattle. And then, and in the wolf's mind, I don't know if this is true or not, in the wolf's mind, he's like, man, I just prefer to deal with cattle. Like, do you, do you see that switch?

• 54:02Speaker 04

  No, you don't. In fact, I mean, there, in, there were, there, in, in one of the, the first dens we had in that North Park den, there was, there were yearlings right in the field, right, right below the home site, right below where, where animals were. And you would see wolves walk right through the cattle. They, they would not touch the cattle at all. And so, you know, I don't, I think that they, it's not as though they're just bloodthirsty killers and, and will kill whatever. So I think, and those animals were, we know that those animals were killing native ungulates too. And so, so it's, I don't think that they, they get that opportunistic feel. And I think that a cow is probably much easier to kill for a wolf.

• 54:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But I, what I meant more, I, I didn't do a good job asking the question. What I meant more is do you see that a pack or a pair, whatever, will kill a cow?

• 54:55Steven Rinella?

  And then do you see that they all of a sudden go like, that's what they focus on? Or will they kill a cow and not get hazed off it? Just kill a cow and leave on their own? And then go back to elk and deer?

• 55:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:10Steven Rinella?

  And never visit another cow again? Or does it seem like, once they do it, they're headed down a path toward trouble?

• 55:17Speaker 04

  Good, good question. I don't think we have the resolution of data on that yet. I think that, I, I think that there are scenarios where they will find that situation, that they will, they will find a situation that's easy eating, right? And they'll, they will stick with that. And I think that there's other times that they, they will get involved with livestock depredations and then they'll, they'll be gone and they won't come back to livestock, meaning that they're going off and eating something else. I know that, that both those scenarios have happened. Whether they're more inclined to do one or the other, I, I can't say definitively, yeah, that, that, that's the way it works. That's not the way it works. I think that it's, it's probably a mix. Like wolves are all individuals, right? They, they do, they're smart animals. They have personalities. They have different kinds of traits. And that's part of the reason that that 10J was so

• 56:01Speaker 04

  important, right? If we can, if we can document that wolves are getting into livestock and we've got range riders out there, we've got the producers themselves are out there paying attention. If we can see that that's happening and you can try to get involved and try to get some of that, um, behavior modified, you can get in there and hit them with beanbags, hit them with cracker shells, hit them with, you know, noises and different kinds of things that, that kind of scare them away and let them know that's not the right thing to be doing. There's, there's scenarios where that helps and that can change their behavior. And, and that's really good. That's what we're after. And so I, I wouldn't say that, you know, once a wolf has a taste for livestock, that they won't go back to, I don't think that that's a, a true statement.

• 56:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What was the earliest time, what was the first time you guys had to make a decision to go like basically do a recall on one of your wolves, you know?

• 56:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:49Steven Rinella?

  Where you, where you're like, all right, he's, he's coming out?

• 56:54Speaker 04

  Right away. I mean, right away. It was, it was that, that first spring. So it's spring of 24. We had this scenario where, where wolves were getting into a lot of livestock. This was right after we had had documented our first den. So lots of attention on this media attention, social attention on the wolf program has reintroduced these wolves. We've got a documented breeding. We've got a documented den and we've got documented depredations and repeated depredations and-

• 57:19Steven Rinella?

  And those depredations were coming from that den site?

• 57:22Speaker 04

  Nearby.

• 57:22Steven Rinella?

  Coming from that group?

• 57:23Speaker 04

  That group. Yeah. And that was the Copper Creek pack. And that, and that pack's gotten a lot of attention for, for, uh, you know, variety of, largely for this whole, whole effort. And so here we are, faced with this really challenging scenario. And, and we have that 10J rule in there to say that there are, there are situations where we can manage wolves. It was not an intention, I don't think, to, to say from, you know, from day one, we're going to start doing lethal management of wolves, right? We had, we had had so much invested in this, so much, uh, you know, work had gone into getting, sourcing those wolves, transporting, releasing, and, and to say, no, we're going to go in. And, and there was calls for us to, you know, people were trying to get us to, to remove those wolves, remove the pups from, from that pack. Um, there were the two breeders and I believe there were four pups.

• 58:06Steven Rinella?

  How many were removed?

• 58:08Speaker 04

  We didn't kill any of them.

• 58:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you did not kill?

• 58:10Speaker 04

  No. So this is a scenario where, um, there were, there were four, there were actually were five pups in the Copper Creek pack. But, uh, what we ended up doing, because there, kind of as, as the compromise is that we, we captured those animals from, from that private land, moved them to a facility, held them there for a bit of time and then released those, released the Copper Creek packs, those that remained. One of the, the breeder male died. We were only able to capture four of the five pups. We didn't realize that there was a fifth pup at the, at the time. So the, the breeding female and four, and four pups ultimately were at the, at that facility. And then they were re-released in, in January of 25.

• 58:46Steven Rinella?

  Into Colorado?

• 58:46Speaker 04

  Same into Colorado. Yeah.

• 58:48Steven Rinella?

  That had to get a lot of heat.

• 58:49Speaker 04

  It sure did. Yeah. It did. And, and, you know, part of it was some behavior modification work and they were, they were re-released in a different spot. And so it definitely got some criticisms for, for doing that.

• 59:02Steven Rinella?

  So what happened then? Did they give up their cattle killing ways when you, when you let them go the second time?

• 59:06Speaker 04

  Uh, so the, the female then paired again with one of the, the British Columbia males and, and they had another den. It, this different, different part of western Colorado. And there've been some depredation issues with, with that pack still.

• 59:19Steven Rinella?

  Uh, what was the first lethal removal you had to do?

• 59:21Speaker 04

  The first lethal removal was part, was actually, I think, part of, of that. Um, I'm, I can't remember right off the top. I should know this. It was, um, shortly, it was either in, in that pack, one of the, one of the yearlings that was, was part of that, or in another part of the state too. So-

• 59:39Steven Rinella?

  What would be-

• 59:42Steven Rinella?

  What's the decision making process or what are the sort of inputs on that one we'll catch?

• 59:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:50Steven Rinella?

  And we'll try to dissuade it from wanting to do it to be around people and let it go. That one.

• 59:57Speaker 04

  We're gonna remove.

• 59:58Steven Rinella?

  Is gonna, we're gonna lethally remove.

• 59:59Speaker 04

  That, that, well, to, to go back, that capturing animals, transport, you know, to, to re-release them in another place, that we really don't want to do that. That, that whole effort that we did with Copper Creek, that, that first spring, it was, that was terrible.

• 1:00:11Steven Rinella?

  So that was a learning experience?

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  It was a huge learning experience. Like, it was, it was a lot of work. It was a lot of, there's so many different challenges that, that went into that, that effort.

• 1:00:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:00:21Speaker 04

  Wasn't good for anybody. Like, it was, it was really challenging kind of thing. So that's not standard protocol for us to, to do that. And so for us to, to consider lethal management, we have a, a definition for what makes up, we call it chronic depredation. If there's three or more depredations by a, a pack or an individual in 30 days, so three confirmed depredations in 30 days. And, and there's different level, you know, one is, you know, preponderance of evidence. So more likely than not. And one is clear and convincing. Like, we, there's, there's no room for doubt. A wolf killed that.

• 1:00:51Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:00:51Speaker 04

  Sheep, lamb, cow, cattle, um, calf or, or whatever. So three, three events in 30 days. And there's, um, there's been some, some use of non-lethal, some kind of deterrence. The, the producer has done some of that. There's a likelihood that, that depredations are going to continue into the future and, and also that there's no attractiveness, right? So that the producers have removed dead and other carcasses on, in the field too. And so.

• 1:01:16Steven Rinella?

  So there's a little, there's a little checklist.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  There's a checklist. And, and that's, that's formal, formalized in our regulations and, and how we go about that. And it's, it's a process. And it, it's a conversation that involves the local area staff, that our, our local game wardens, our district wildlife managers, our, our area managers, our conflict team, or even all the way up to our director. It's, it's ultimately the director's call as to, to when and how that, that happens.

• 1:01:39Steven Rinella?

  And, and if you have to do a lethal removal, is that, are you contracting that out or were you guys doing it on your own?

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  We do it on our own. Yeah, we, we do it on our own. So, uh.

• 1:01:50Steven Rinella?

  From the air or?

• 1:01:51Speaker 04

  Uh, no, from the ground. It was all done from the ground. So that, there's, there is a way that, you know, if, if the agency doesn't have the resources to do it, we haven't run into that situation. Every, every lethal management situation that we've had.

• 1:02:04Steven Rinella?

  You never had to bring, you never had AFIS do it.

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  Correct. Right. It's always been our own staff to, to do that.

• 1:02:09Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Yeah. How many to date, how many to date have lethal removals have there been?

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  Uh, I think three or, we just did another one. I'm not full on the details of it. I think just this, this last week too. So I think four, I think.

• 1:02:23Steven Rinella?

  And when you guys do a lethal removal, I'm guessing you just get blown up by certain interests.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  Oh, for sure. I mean, you, you, you can't make everybody happy with any, any kind of wolf management decision. You're, somebody is going to not agree with a decision that was made. And that's a challenge. I guess it's one of those things that, you know, it's, you're just recognizing that, knowing that it's the way it is.

• 1:02:43Steven Rinella?

  It's a can't win situation, man.

• 1:02:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's hard.

• 1:02:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. When, uh.

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  It's hard, but what I'll say is that it's important for us to be responsive, right? And I, and I think that we're, we're demonstrating that, like it's.

• 1:02:54Steven Rinella?

  You mean to not brush off criticism?

• 1:02:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. I mean, you, you have to, you own it, right? This is, this is something that we did. This is something that we said what we're gonna do, right? That's part of the plan. That's part of why we have the 10J in there. We, we're in this situation right now where we've, we've only had two years of reintroduction. We had, we had anticipated a third year and the wolf population will grow pretty quick. And, and as, as it grows, then we can be much more flexible in our management. And removing an animal, an individual is, you know, there's, there are some that would disagree with that, that's ever appropriate. But it becomes easier to do that in it, in the long-term picture, the big picture of what we're trying to do is establish a self-sustaining population. That helps us, right? And so we've, we've made the argument a lot that, that getting packs established makes management a whole lot easier, right?

• 1:03:38Speaker 04

  When we've got individual wolves that are moving all around and they truly are moving all around. It's, it's really difficult to predict where that animal is, where it's gonna go. And so it's truly needle in a haystack. Whereas when they're in a pack, when they're in a, defending a territory, they're still moving big distances, but they're moving in a much smaller geography. And so it becomes a way easier to deploy those tools.

• 1:03:59Steven Rinella?

  I can see it gets easier to get your arms around the whole thing once you see them all in place.

• 1:04:03Speaker 04

  And, and as that, the number of the population size goes up, when, when there are problems, it's, it's a lot more palatable. I'm not gonna say a lot more palatable, but it's more palatable to say, we can, we can remove animals. The, the population can sustain that from, from the conflict side of things. Especially if that can reduce that conflict.

• 1:04:20Steven Rinella?

  You might not think of it as a problem. I do. But, uh, have you had the problem in Colorado of celebrity wolves? Like we have in, in the greater Yellowstone area?

• 1:04:32Speaker 04

  We've, we've worked to avoid that. Right? We give our wolves.

• 1:04:36Steven Rinella?

  They, at the park, man, they, they, they court it.

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39Steven Rinella?

  They love it.

• 1:04:39Speaker 04

  We, we have, I mean, we give our wolves a number, right? There, there's a four-digit number. The first two numbers are the year that it was collared. The next two numbers are if it was male or female sequentially, right? So, so the first male captured in 2025 would be 2501. Males get the odd numbers, females get the even numbers. And so, so we, you have to have that, right? You have to know individuals that you're talking about. There have been campaigns, some of the, the advocate groups tried, wolf advocate groups tried to, to name, have naming.

• 1:05:07Steven Rinella?

  To make celebrities.

• 1:05:08Speaker 04

  And we don't want to do that, right? We don't do that for any of the wildlife species that, that we do. There are some interesting behaviors and we've seen some of our animals make huge movements or in, and, you know, there, there are very interesting things that we're learning, but we're really not into that.

• 1:05:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that like the wolf celebrity thing gets leveraged, right? It, it, it gets politically leveraged.

• 1:05:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Steven Rinella?

  Cause then it becomes, well, you wouldn't want that to happen to old Betty.

• 1:05:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:36Steven Rinella?

  You know, and then it brings in this whole other conversation.

• 1:05:38Speaker 04

  Makes it much more challenging. Right.

• 1:05:40Steven Rinella?

  What was, did there wind up, maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like I remember this. Did it wind up being that there was some legal problem with the feds around the decision to get them from British Columbia?

• 1:05:51Speaker 04

  Well, that's their interpretation. And, and the state has a different interpretation of it. And, and it all comes back to that 10J rule, right? And so remember that, that 10J rule talks about how wolves are managed in the state, north to southeast to west. They, we can, that relaxes those take prohibitions. Fish and Wildlife Service's interpretation on it is that, that the 10J is explicit into where wolves can be sourced from. And, and we don't agree with that. To us, and, and generally the, the 10J talks about management within that, that geographic boundary. And so, you know, we, we, we don't feel like we, anything was violated by, by us going to, to British Columbia. We had all of the federal permits. There, there were federal importation permits that we had to, to get from Fish and Wildlife Service, just like any, any kind of wildlife

• 1:06:34Speaker 04

  that comes across international borders. We had to get cites permits in, uh, Convention of International Trade of Endangered Species. We had provincial permits. We had Environment Canada permits. We had our Collar Department of Ag. So we were buttoned up.

• 1:06:47Steven Rinella?

  You were permitted up.

• 1:06:48Speaker 04

  We, we, we had everything we needed in place. And, you know, all the way up until we, we got back from there in January of, of 25, we had planned to go back in January of 26, all, all the way up until October of 25, leading up to it, that was our plan. And then we get the letter from the Fish and Wildlife Service telling us.

• 1:07:04Steven Rinella?

  Well, don't you feel that when they pointed that out,

• 1:07:12Steven Rinella?

  that it was probably the result, I mean, however one feels about the reintroduction, but that bit, them calling legal fault on getting them from B C was probably the result of someone saying, I want you to go over every decision that was made and see if you can find me a problem.

• 1:07:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Steven Rinella?

  And then they got creative and found a problem.

• 1:07:38Speaker 04

  They found what they found, what they thought to be a problem. We, we don't think it was a problem.

• 1:07:41Steven Rinella?

  And that's what I'm saying, but they might even know they're being creative.

• 1:07:43Speaker 04

  Right. No, I think that that's true.

• 1:07:45Steven Rinella?

  I mean, that happens all the time, man. You're like, dude, there's gotta be a problem. Find me a problem.

• 1:07:49Speaker 04

  And, and to follow up on that.

• 1:07:50Steven Rinella?

  Some lawyer is like, I got it.

• 1:07:52Speaker 04

  Well, and, and to follow up on that, then after that, after we got that cease and desist letter, then we had had a wolf. We have, we have agreements with other states, Arizona, New Mexico. If a wolf goes into Arizona, New Mexico or Utah, those wolves can be recaptured and, and brought back into, into Colorado. And that's really to, the long story, but that's fundamentally to protect Mexican wolf recovery. All the investment that's happened there. And so that happened. We had one wolf that, that went down in New Mexico, New Mexico, captured it, transfer, transferred it to us. We re-released that animal in Colorado.

• 1:08:20Steven Rinella?

  I, I, I don't, I don't want to get into names. I have, I have some dear friends that, that, um, uh, that are

• 1:08:30Steven Rinella?

  very invested in the, the Mexican wolf.

• 1:08:34Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:08:35Steven Rinella?

  Project.

• 1:08:37Steven Rinella?

  And I understand this, that this desire, that there's so much time and energy put into recovering the Mexican gray wolf in New Mexico and Arizona, right?

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  Yep. Um, in Mexico.

• 1:08:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And that, that bringing wolves from B C or bringing wolves from Oregon and putting them into Colorado. And then they're gonna go in and, and, and then by some definition corrupt these lineages.

• 1:09:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:09:07Steven Rinella?

  Down there. Um, earlier I used the word like something seeming academic.

• 1:09:15Steven Rinella?

  One would could look and say, well, historically wolves were present on the landscape.

• 1:09:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Steven Rinella?

  From way into Mexico to the Arctic.

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  That's true. Right.

• 1:09:29Steven Rinella?

  And there wasn't a line anywhere. It was all just bleeding in, right? There was, I mean, there was, there was lines here and there because of desert ecosystems. I'm saying like, any of these populations, I don't, I can't tell you this empirically, but I'm just assuming. Any of these populations is being infiltrated by individual animals coming from the north or south at any given time. Right? They're not like, they're not like fenced. There's not walls divided. It's not like, there's a wall that says, okay, this wolf group is here. And then over the wall is the next wolf group and they don't breed. They don't interbreed. So, so what's your take on that? Like, like what's up with wanting there to be a line now where there probably wasn't a line historically?

• 1:10:14Steven Rinella?

  Is it just because of, because of the politics?

• 1:10:17Speaker 04

  No, it's not. It, I mean, it's scientific. There's, there's evidence. I mean, and so wolf taxonomy is, is super interesting. Okay. To those that are interested in that kind of stuff. There've been lots of different subspecies of wolves defined over time, up to 25. Now there's five different subspecies recognized. And throughout all that time, Mexican wolves, Canis lupus baileyi, has been recognized as a separate subspecies. They're smaller. They're just, they're different.

• 1:10:40Steven Rinella?

  Like they had a barrier.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  They, they're the barrier between northern wolves and as far south as Colorado and Utah and Arizona was a substantial desert. Right? It's, it is not a great.

• 1:10:50Steven Rinella?

  And you feel that it functioned as a barrier?

• 1:10:53Speaker 04

  It, it must have because of, because there is a different subspecies. It was something that moves so much. The, the idea of subspecies is that they, they are isolated for a long enough time consistently enough. There's not this infiltration of other genes coming in that they develop another subspecies. And so that's because baileyi, Canis lupus baileyi, has been recognized as a subspecies for as long as it has, always independent. There's, there's, there is some influx. Northern wolves can breed with, with Mexican wolves for sure. And so it's happened, but they are also unique in, in their, and there's also the, the political side or the, the, the policy side of, of it. Is that Mexican wolves are listed separately under endangered species.

• 1:11:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's when I, that's what I say. I could see that someone might say, I could see that a manager, a wildlife person might say, I get the point. Historically, they were all over. They're not now.

• 1:11:46Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:11:46Steven Rinella?

  We have different management practices in place. And for that reason, and that reason alone, we don't want them to mix because it's going to cause confusion of management strategy.

• 1:11:54Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:11:55Steven Rinella?

  Like I'd accept that.

• 1:11:56Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:11:57Steven Rinella?

  But it does seem to me as like, if what, if what wolf advocates are striving for is restoration of the wolf. I feel like that would mean that they're striving for a situation where there's just like wolfness.

• 1:12:10Speaker 04

  Continuity. Yeah.

• 1:12:11Steven Rinella?

  Wolfness running, like running up and down.

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:15Steven Rinella?

  The continent and they just move all over hell.

• 1:12:17Speaker 04

  And, and that in, in time, that might be the scenario. I'm, I'm not the geneticist to, to ask this question, but you know, there, there may be a point in time when having northern wolf genetics infiltrate, integrate with, with Mexican wolves.

• 1:12:29Steven Rinella?

  Maybe it'll be a time when that's appropriate.

• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  But that's a real, like what they're doing is so intensive with Mexican wolf recovery. They're, they're taking pups that are born in captivity and putting them in wild born litters, which all requires incredible timing and incredible coordination with that. Like that, there's huge efforts to, to do that. That, that Mexican wolf population, just like a lot of these endangered species stories, started with a really, really small population. Seven to 10 animals, something like that. And so there's, there's genetic inbreeding concerns and they're very, very, very deliberate about how that works. And so to, to have northern wolf genes come into Mexican wolf population now would undo a lot of that really important work. That's, that's happened. And so, so that's, that's an important thing. Right?

• 1:13:10Speaker 04

  And, and so I think, I mean, that, and we got off on a little bit of a sidetrack, but that's why when that wolf came down into New Mexico, we have that, that MOU to, to kind of keep that from happening. The same thing. If, if Mexican wolves come out of their experimental population area, then they'll, they'll be captured by those, those states and brought back into that area.

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• 1:15:01Steven Rinella?

  Let's say they go and, let's say during the current administration.

• 1:15:06Steven Rinella?

  I'm going to give you my viewpoint. I know it's probably not your viewpoint. I don't know. I'll just, I'll just tell you mine.

• 1:15:14Steven Rinella?

  From a wildlife, from a wildlife conservation perspective, there's not a ton. This is me talking. Like I want everybody to know this is me talking, not Mr. Odell. There's not a ton that one can be hopeful, like from a wildlife and conservation perspective, perspective, under the current administration. There's not like a bunch of guy could root for. But a thing I would root for is I would like to see lower 48 wolves just delisted. Right? And there's a movement to do this.

• 1:15:44Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 1:15:45Steven Rinella?

  What would that mean for Colorado?

• 1:15:48Speaker 04

  It would, what it would mean, well, fundamentally what it would mean is that the Fish and Wildlife Service is, is no longer a partner. Right? I mean, they're, they're a stakeholder in it, but they're not a man, they're the MOU that we have that gives us designated agent. All of that kind of goes away and wolves are managed like many of the other wildlife species in the state managed solely by, by the state.

• 1:16:06Steven Rinella?

  But there'd be a state endangered, what do you guys call your own endangered?

• 1:16:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, it would be state endangered until we meet and our plan describes what those recovery goals. So it'd be state endangered until we meet the, the threshold and then it would be downlisted to, to state threatened. And then it becomes a non-game when it's delisted.

• 1:16:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But don't you feel like, this is a crystal ball and shit a little bit here, is when we,

• 1:16:32Steven Rinella?

  when we did the grizzlies and wolves and put them under endangered species act protection, federal ESA protection. And we came up with a recovery objective.

• 1:16:44Steven Rinella?

  There were a lot of players involved in that conversation that were not being honest brokers. Like there were people, protectionists, wolf advocates, grizzly advocates, absolute protectionists, like protectionist absolutists. That gave a verbal sign off on what recovery would look like.

• 1:17:05Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:17:06Steven Rinella?

  But then once recovery was achieved, they reneged.

• 1:17:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:17:12Steven Rinella?

  And now they sue and sue and sue to prevent delisting because they're not really interested in the recovery question. They're interested in protecting wolves from lethal removal or recreational harvest.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:17:28Steven Rinella?

  Right? And this is, and, and these battles are taking place in states that are politically red or politically purple. Okay. I mean, varying degrees of bluish. Michigan, Wisconsin, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota. Right? And then you have like very red states, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho.

• 1:17:55Steven Rinella?

  Then you go to like deep blue Colorado.

• 1:18:00Steven Rinella?

  It just seems to me that whatever was agreed to about recovery in Colorado is a lie. And that, and that there are factions in Colorado that will never accept delisting or non-game status. They will never accept it.

• 1:18:18Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, so there, so a couple of things about that. One, there's never been recovery, federal recovery goals for Colorado, right? And so the recovery goals are for other parts of, of the country. And so that there are not specific federal recovery goals for, for Colorado. There's some in, in the

• 1:18:35Steven Rinella?

  But no, I'm talking about in the event that, that the feds, I'm saying like

• 1:18:39Speaker 04

  The feds delist.

• 1:18:40Steven Rinella?

  Let's play this out that like, say, it's, it's if on if the feds move and they delist lower 48.

• 1:18:46Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:18:47Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:18:47Speaker 04

  Remain state listed.

• 1:18:48Steven Rinella?

  And at this point, but it's state listed. What I'm saying is, or, or, you know, never mind all that. Let me just say, let me ask what I'm saying more bluntly. Can you picture in Colorado, a situation where they are ever in, where there is ever a world where they are issuing like wolf hunting tags?

• 1:19:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Steven Rinella?

  Like are issued in Idaho and Wyoming and in Montana, like were issued in Michigan and Wisconsin and Minnesota. Like that ain't happening. I mean, that's my crystal ball.

• 1:19:19Speaker 04

  There's, there's a couple of things to that. One, one is that the statute, that the ballot initiative, the statute that passed defines them as state endangered species. And so, so right now, and there's some, some uncertainty as to, to how, how much influence that has truly on the state status of, of them. We have another process.

• 1:19:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh, because, but, but, so the ballot language didn't spell out how they would become not state endangered.

• 1:19:44Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:19:44Steven Rinella?

  They're definitionally state endangered.

• 1:19:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:19:47Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:19:47Speaker 04

  And so our plan, or the, the plan that we wrote has criteria. If we meet 50 animals for four years, it gets downlisted to state threatened. If we get to 150 animals for two years or 200 animals, they become delisted and, and just have the non-game status. Then if the commission ever, a future commission ever made the decision to, to change that status from non-game to game, that's, that's a decision down the road. And who's to say whether that's likely or not?

• 1:20:13Steven Rinella?

  I'll say it'll never happen.

• 1:20:14Speaker 04

  Maybe. I don't know. It's not going to happen right now. And then, I mean, very clearly right now is not the time.

• 1:20:19Steven Rinella?

  Every Texan would have to move to Colorado before that happened, man. Not just a, not just a trickle, but all the Texans would have to go there.

• 1:20:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's, it's, it's not, I mean, we're, we're several years away. Like we, we just don't know what it's like to live. We know what it's like to live with 32 wolves, right? That's what we've got right now in, in the state on our, our annual report that comes out of each spring. 32 wolves was our, our count last year. What's it look like for 300 wolves, 320 wolves?

• 1:20:44Steven Rinella?

  What do you think's the maximum?

• 1:20:45Speaker 04

  It's a social question.

• 1:20:47Steven Rinella?

  What do you think is maximum? Well, let's look at it. Let's take the social out of it. Okay. Let's just look at, let's look at acres.

• 1:20:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:55Steven Rinella?

  And deer and elk. If you had to guess.

• 1:20:59Speaker 04

  I'm not, no one's going to hold you to this.

• 1:21:00Steven Rinella?

  No, thousands, thousands of wolves.

• 1:21:02Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:21:03Steven Rinella?

  The landscape could support thousands.

• 1:21:05Speaker 04

  We have a huge amount of public lands, wilderness areas. We have huge native ungulate populations that we, so biologically, we could have thousands of wolves.

• 1:21:14Steven Rinella?

  But not thousands for a long time.

• 1:21:16Speaker 04

  No. I mean, that's what I'm saying is that it's the socially.

• 1:21:19Steven Rinella?

  I'm leaving social out of it.

• 1:21:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21Steven Rinella?

  Let's, let's explore non-social for a minute.

• 1:21:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Steven Rinella?

  Like you have a ton of elk.

• 1:21:26Speaker 04

  Maybe thousands is probably over.

• 1:21:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, you have a ton of elk, maybe.

• 1:21:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:30Steven Rinella?

  Because you don't have many wolves.

• 1:21:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:21:32Steven Rinella?

  Right? I mean, what do you think is gonna, so just leaving the social acceptance element out of it and just looking at like, like, let's say Colorado could host a thousand or

• 1:21:42Speaker 04

  Say a thousand.

• 1:21:43Steven Rinella?

  Or more wolves. Um, in your mind, does that mean, with your expertise, does that mean that its elk herd stabilizes at 50% of current? Its elk herd stabilizes at 80% of current? Like, what is it?

• 1:22:00Speaker 04

  I, I don't know. I, I don't know what that, what that looks like. I think, I mean, it's, wolves eat, right? And any predator eats. And so there's, there's going to be, there's going to be some impact to, to ungulate populations. But it's in the, the Yellowstone wolves get credit or get blamed for all the, the effect on the northern range. And there's so many different things that are happening at that point that, that it's hard to say, you know, it's, it's impossible really to say that's cause and effect. Because of the wolves, the, the elk populations went down. There's so many other things that were happening at that point in time. The more wolves you have, the more prey they're going to consume. That's a fact, right? What, what it looks like in time, I don't, I don't, I really don't know. I, it is, it would just be a guess to say what, what that looks like.

• 1:22:43Steven Rinella?

  Job, or is it nobody, like in Colorado, is it nobody's job to model out what it might look like for the deer and elk herd? If there are a thou, 200 wolves, 500 wolves, a thousand wolves? Like, no one's curious about this?

• 1:23:02Speaker 04

  Curious for sure. We're not at that point where we're, we're deep into that. I mean, I think we're, we're many years away, a decade away.

• 1:23:09Steven Rinella?

  From wondering about that.

• 1:23:09Speaker 04

  Well, not for, I mean, starting, we're starting to wonder about it, but we're a decade away from the reality of, of that happening.

• 1:23:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:23:15Speaker 04

  And so in time, we will get there. You know, we're, and I say we, I'm, I've, I'm not with the agency anymore, but it's, it's, um, yeah, I think that that's, that's where we, the, the agency will start to look and say, how, how do we manage?

• 1:23:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Speaker 04

  For native ungulate populations, how do we manage for predator populations as well?

• 1:23:34Steven Rinella?

  Let's bring in social.

• 1:23:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. The social side of things. So I think that that's, that's part of the reason that it's an interesting question, but I don't think it really matters fundamentally because socially, I don't think that we can, we can hold that, that number.

• 1:23:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. No, yeah. It's the, the non-social thing was a fantastical experiment, right?

• 1:23:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:51Steven Rinella?

  I get it. I get it. With social pressures. I mean, and I know you can't put numbers to it, but like you got 36 now, right?

• 1:23:58Speaker 04

  32.

• 1:23:59Steven Rinella?

  32 now. Considering that humans are here too.

• 1:24:02Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:24:03Steven Rinella?

  And people are feeding the country and agricultural interests, right?

• 1:24:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:24:08Steven Rinella?

  Um, not to discredit them, but they, they

• 1:24:11Speaker 04

  No, not at all.

• 1:24:12Steven Rinella?

  They have, they have needs and they provide a service to people with producing food and all that. Like, so when you add that in, are you more comfortable with a, with a, with spitballing a number as a retired guy?

• 1:24:28Speaker 04

  I mean, I, half of that maybe, maybe 500, 500 to a thousand animals, somewhere, somewhere in there, I think is a reasonable population to, to kind of have as a target.

• 1:24:38Steven Rinella?

  Said to you, if someone, if someone from the future, from 20 years in the future came to you and said, Mr. Odell, there are 500 wolves and we've been at that for quite some time. We got about, Colorado supports about 500 wolves. You would, you would think to yourself, wow, that's more than I thought. Or you'd think, I, I thought it'd be more.

• 1:25:02Speaker 04

  No, I, I, I think that that's probably, you know, we, we, we never set an objective in, in the plan because we just didn't know. Like we just don't know what it looks like. I think that that's a reasonable number to have in, in Colorado. I mean, it's, it's crowded. There's, there's a lot of people in Colorado. There's a lot of people that recreate all year round there. It's not the same as Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, where the, you know, here in Montana, that it's just much more rural. There's, there's a lower population density. And so there's, there are more people in Colorado, but you, you fly over, you see the landscape, there's a lot of, there's a lot of good wolf habitat. And so I don't, I don't totally buy the argument that people say that Colorado is too crowded

• 1:25:42Speaker 04

  for wolves. I, I think that it's, we certainly have the capacity to, to have a self-sustaining, fairly large, I think, self-sustaining wolf population in, in the state. What number that looks like? It's, it's too soon to tell, especially when you incorporate that, that social metric into it. But I think it's, it's probably in that 500 to maybe to a thousand. I, I don't know. Something like that.

• 1:26:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. When you review the whole thing in your mind, what do you, what do you wish would have gone differently?

• 1:26:11Speaker 04

  Hmm. You know, I think one of the things that we learned is, is the communications and how to outreach, how to, how to share information is, is really, really critical. And, and that's one of the things, all, all different kinds of information. How, especially from, from day one, how we share information about how we're doing the releases, where, where that happens. And so, you know, we, we took a very precautionary approach that, that first year. And I, I don't, I don't regret that at all. I think that that was very wise of us to do.

• 1:26:40Steven Rinella?

  When you say precautionary, meaning undersharing or oversharing?

• 1:26:42Speaker 04

  Undersharing. We were very, you know, likewise.

• 1:26:44Steven Rinella?

  You're quiet.

• 1:26:45Speaker 04

  We were quiet. We didn't say where we were going to release animals and we didn't say when. We only talked to, to people after the fact. And I think that, that we learned from that, that that was not acceptable. And, and we needed to be a bit more, uh, you know, still protecting, but of, of really sensitive details, but a little bit more open with that kind of stuff.

• 1:27:02Steven Rinella?

  And you feel like that maybe lost some, that maybe cost you politic, not politically, cost you publicly?

• 1:27:08Speaker 04

  I think so. Yeah, I think so.

• 1:27:10Steven Rinella?

  With, with voters?

• 1:27:11Speaker 04

  I think so.

• 1:27:11Steven Rinella?

  Stakeholders.

• 1:27:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think, um, so, and, and then, you know, the communications about depredations. We've changed a lot of that. We've gotten a whole lot better at that.

• 1:27:20Steven Rinella?

  Was there, was there a tendency within the department to under represent depredations?

• 1:27:27Speaker 04

  No. No, not, never. I mean, I, we've, we have a, a website on, on our, a page on our CPW website that, that is very explicit as soon as we get

• 1:27:36Steven Rinella?

  So you were frank about that information?

• 1:27:38Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:27:38Steven Rinella?

  If it happened, you were just like, here's the facts.

• 1:27:41Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:27:41Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  I think one of the things that we could do better is the, is the media communications. Like you, you look at the media and the, the local media really emphasizes the negative, right? They, they

• 1:27:53Steven Rinella?

  Local media?

• 1:27:53Speaker 04

  Local, local statewide media that in, in Colorado. When we get, when something happens about wolves or the personnel, it gets, it gets talked about a lot in the sense of, well, here's another chink in the armor of, of the wolf program. Here's, here's another example of how the wolf program is failing. And it, it is not failing. The, the wolf program is, is doing well. And it, even with my leaving of, of the program, I think that we've got a really good, strong staff that's there. I think that we've got really good biologists, researchers, field staff that are able to address a lot of those concerns. But the media would have you believe otherwise, right? And so if we could be more proactive in, in that and tell the good stories and, and, and have the media tell those stories. And we've tried that. We've, we've tried to reach out to some of the media and say, hey,

• 1:28:37Speaker 04

  look, I get it that this is what sells a lot of your ads, but there's, there's other, other sides to that too. And, and some, some have taken that opportunity and, and done well and, and told some of those, those good stories. But still we, we struggle with that.

• 1:28:50Steven Rinella?

  Well, because the people that

• 1:28:55Steven Rinella?

  The people that announce and amplify the missteps are the people that feel burned.

• 1:29:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:05Steven Rinella?

  They wanna find a problem.

• 1:29:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:29:08Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like, if you're just, if you're just, like, a lot of buddies of mine, they love to hunt elk.

• 1:29:14Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:29:15Steven Rinella?

  And I'm, and in other social circles, it'd be people that like, they love to run cattle. And they don't like it. And they don't like that it came from voters. And they don't like that they feel those crammed down their throat by Denver.

• 1:29:24Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:29:25Steven Rinella?

  Right? And so, yeah, when something negative happens, they're gonna be all over it because they wanna amplify it as a way of expressing discontent or a way of hopefully subverting the whole thing because they feel it was an assault on them.

• 1:29:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, one of the, one of the most poignant conversations I had was early, early on in this process. It was at a, it was at an open house that we had in, in Boulder, Colorado, very liberal part of, part of the state, very much a pro-wolf state. And we had a rancher come all the way from, from western Colorado. He brought his daughter to, to this. And not because they wanted to fight the whole thing. They just wanted to hear that perspective. And this rancher's been, been very involved with, with this whole work, the, the wolf planning work. It's been great, really great to work with. And his daughter, I don't know, 20 years old, 25 years old. I got in a conversation with her and she's, what she said to me is, I don't, I don't care about wolves. I, they, I don't care if they're here. I don't care if they're not here. All I wanna do is ranch. That, that's what's important to me.

• 1:30:19Speaker 04

  And to me, that was, that, I, that's stuck with me throughout, for the last six years is like, we have to figure out how to reintroduce wolves. We have to figure out how to develop and maintain a self-sustaining population of wolves by the state law. And we have to work with the people of Colorado. We have to find a way to address those conflicts and, and to allow, not, the idea is not at all to keep ranching from happening or to stop ranching from happening or to stop hunting from happening, not at all. I think that that's, that's a misconception that's out there is that wolves are just an avenue to, to make that happen. And that's, that's not the case. That's not the case at all.

• 1:30:53Steven Rinella?

  You're out of it now and you were never the, you were never the mouthpiece, you were never meant to be the guy selling everybody on it. But I think that, like, if you're curious and you say, you, you know, you, you have opinions about how news is shared. You have opinions about how the public is engaged. Like a hot tip, that if I was gonna offer your former colleagues, a hot tip is wolf advocates and protectionists have a bad habit of, of, I never use this word, but they have a bad habit of, uh, gaslighting people

• 1:31:35Steven Rinella?

  to say, so when a guy says, so there's gonna be a lot less elk, right? They, they, they, they don't wanna have that conversation. They're reluctant to do it. I think that if they would come and say, you're right, man. You're right. It ain't gonna be like it is.

• 1:31:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:52Steven Rinella?

  They can't bring themselves to do it. The same way they can't bring themselves to acknowledge to a rancher, this shit's gonna come kill your cows.

• 1:31:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:32:00Steven Rinella?

  They can't bring themselves to do it. They act like he's a, he's a dumb redneck.

• 1:32:03Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:32:03Steven Rinella?

  The hunter doesn't understand the science, right? And they cannot just say, buddy, I know. It sucks for you. You're losing a lot of these elk. It's gonna be harder for you to get an elk tag. I get it. I understand. I don't really care, but I understand. You're right. I'm doing what I'm gonna do anyways. But the fact that they cannot bring themselves to just say the truth.

• 1:32:26Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:32:27Steven Rinella?

  Bugs the shit out of people.

• 1:32:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, and we, and we, I mean, we tried to be straightforward with, I mean, the, I remember at the, the very beginning conversations that we had with the commission. I said, wherever wolves and livestock share the landscape, there's going to be conflict. But it's not, it's not as though they're, they're doing all these great things for the environment and it's, there's no challenge to, to life. That, that's gonna be a challenge. It's, that's proven to be true.

• 1:32:50Steven Rinella?

  But the advocates, and you're, I'm not saying you're one of them, but the, the advocates and the absolutist protectionists, that's the narrative they spin and it infuriates people. And in some ways, I think that a, a better strategy or more harmonious strategy or a strategy that would lead to a more harmonious disagreement would be a higher level of acknowledgement about certain realities. And again, just tell them you don't care.

• 1:33:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:20Steven Rinella?

  But don't tell them they're wrong.

• 1:33:22Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah. I mean, it's infuriating. I can imagine. Being, being, I'm not a rancher, being in a rancher's shoes and having a wolf advocate say, this is, you're, you're not right.

• 1:33:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:33Speaker 04

  There's nothing more infuriating than that.

• 1:33:34Steven Rinella?

  Tell them, you're right. I don't care.

• 1:33:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:36Steven Rinella?

  He would, he would sleep better at night, or an elk hunter is gonna sleep better at night if you go, you're right, I don't care.

• 1:33:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. You, you have, you see it this way, I see it this way.

• 1:33:44Steven Rinella?

  Telling him that he's wrong.

• 1:33:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:33:47Steven Rinella?

  That's a hot tip. What, uh, when you left on Friday, you retired. Like, it just, the people, I mean, you, you hit, like, retirement.

• 1:33:56Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:33:56Steven Rinella?

  You didn't, like, storm out, you know?

• 1:33:59Speaker 04

  No, it's, no, it's totally, totally my call. There's no political influence. You get, a lot of people ask about that. No, it's, is, long career with the agency, very satisfied. And, uh, it was just the right time to.

• 1:34:10Steven Rinella?

  Did you, did you, um, because what you've been doing is so high profile, man. Did you, did you go home one night and just, like, sleep? Like, what did it feel like to walk out the door?

• 1:34:18Speaker 04

  It feels good. Well, it's, it's kinda been a, a, a process. And we've, we've got, like I said, a really great team in there. We've got a backfill in, into that position. And so we're, um, you know, it, it, it's been a lot of work to get to that point. And you're right. And once you're done with it and you're not thinking about it and you're not, you don't wake up and have an inbox full of emails about the latest conflict and all of that, that kinda stuff. It's, it's nice.

• 1:34:42Steven Rinella?

  You know, I, no, I wanna, I want viewers to understand, I'm in no way drawing a parallel. I, I'm drawing a light parallel, but I'm not drawing a serious parallel between the war in Afghanistan and the wolf war in Colorado. But when we, when we finally pulled out of Afghanistan, I have a friend that did many tours in Afghanistan. He lost friends in Afghanistan. Like, he gave a significant, I mean, he went in the military as a young guy and, like, came of age.

• 1:35:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:07Steven Rinella?

  In Afghanistan. And we finally pulled out of Afghanistan and I text him, I'm like, what are you feeling right now? He said that we should've left a long time ago.

• 1:35:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:15Steven Rinella?

  Right? If, if, which is not what I expected to hear from him. But if, if all of a sudden there's like some, I know it can't happen, or I know it won't, but if all of a sudden there was some referendum, you know, and it comes to a vote and they're like, scratch the whole thing, and they send some helicopters out and

• 1:35:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:31Steven Rinella?

  all the wolves are gone. What would, like?

• 1:35:35Speaker 04

  Well, that would be, that would be, I wouldn't want that. I wouldn't wanna see that. I've, I've got so much.

• 1:35:39Steven Rinella?

  Would you be like, huh, jeez, wasted all that time?

• 1:35:41Speaker 04

  Exactly. I mean, there's so much has been invested in. I mean, that, and like I say, the conflict is there. Conflict is gonna happen. But it, we can also, there's, there's a lot of stories about wolves not getting into conflict. Like, what, what you hear about are, are those scenarios where it's not gone great. But there's a lot of scenarios where it has gone great that just, that aren't getting that, that story. So I don't think it's necessary. I think it's, I think it would be a bad idea to, to, to kill all the wolves that, that we reintroduce. I think that they're, they are doing what wolves do. I think, part of what the Wildlife Agency does is not only manage for deer and elk and trout and, and game birds and waterfowl, but also for all of our non-game species as well. So this is really important responsibility for, for all state wildlife agencies, but for, for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

• 1:36:24Speaker 04

  I think it's an agency that's really proud of, of the work that, that we've done there. And so I don't, I don't think, you know, reversing what we've done is, is in the cards. I think wolves are, wolves are gonna find their way. They're, they're gonna do well. And, and the program, the program's gonna do well. The species is gonna do well. And, and, you know, the people of Colorado will do well with it as well. Like, we, we will find ways to make that, that whole, all the, that, that challenges that, that go along with managing bears and lions and wolves, all, all of that together is, uh, is part of it. And I think that we'll, we'll get there and we'll do a really good job, as the agency will.

• 1:36:58Steven Rinella?

  I went out of my way, not out of my way, but I, I was careful to articulate a perspective held by a lot of hunters that I know. But, um, in all fairness, the perspective I was given isn't the full perspective. And it's the thing I've always observed with people, um, with my, like, you know, my sort of community, right? Of outdoorsmen and hunters is, um, no matter how anybody feels about wolf politics, I never meet anyone who isn't really happy to see a wolf.

• 1:37:34Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:37:34Steven Rinella?

  You never talk to a guy who comes back and he's like, damn, damn it. Worst night could've had, saw a wolf.

• 1:37:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Steven Rinella?

  People come back and they're like, dude.

• 1:37:48Speaker 04

  I know. We're starting to hear that. Right.

• 1:37:50Steven Rinella?

  And so, what's so funny is like, it's like, it, there's, in that way, it doesn't line up with, it's just one of those, it's just one of those contradictions. That it doesn't line up and like, and, and, and no matter what someone's stated view is, they hear it howl and they get happy. They see it and they get excited.

• 1:38:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:09Steven Rinella?

  And it's like, their, their brain isn't totally aligned on what they're after.

• 1:38:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Steven Rinella?

  Like, people struggle.

• 1:38:16Speaker 04

  Right. No, they, I mean.

• 1:38:16Steven Rinella?

  Do I hate them or love them?

• 1:38:18Speaker 04

  I should hate these animals. I should be afraid of them. But in reality, it's, I mean, and that was very intentional. We, we, we brought people to, to these releases. We, or, you know, to see wolves within the, the agency that were somewhat skeptical of this. And, and let's, let's get them exposed. Let's let them see a wolf, handle a wolf, hear a wolf, like, any of, and, and then from the public, we hear those reports too. Like, I was camping, I was hunting, I heard, I heard the howls and they, people get excited about it. Right? It's, it is even for those, like you say, that feel like, for whatever reason, they should, should or shouldn't love or hate these animals. It, it, there's something, there's something pretty magical about it.

• 1:38:55Steven Rinella?

  I remember hearing, it would've been 98 or 99, 1998 or 1999, hunting elk, bow hunting elk. And, um, not far from Yellowstone. And thinking at dusk, it registered in my head that I was hearing a bugle. Like, the second it started, off a ways, was like, it's a bugle. Then I'm like, oh my God. It's a howl, you know?

• 1:39:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:26Steven Rinella?

  And, and that being like the first.

• 1:39:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:29Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 1:39:29Speaker 04

  People remember that. Yeah. The first time you hear a wolf, the first time, even, maybe you don't hear it, maybe you don't see it, you see the track in, in, on the trail. And it's, it's unmistakable. And it's, you know, you, you understand there. We even hear from hunters that are, that are in some ways happy to be around wolves and, and say, hey, I'm, I'm hunting ungulates, I'm hunting elk or deer, moose in, in an environment that has the, the component, you know, the added component of wolves to, to the system. And, you know, it's not everybody that agrees with that perspective, but, but we've heard that. I've heard that. It's interesting.

• 1:40:01Steven Rinella?

  I keep saying it's just, it's just important to me that, that again, I want to return. I don't know why I just feel very compelled to return to a point that I know will come. Is it'll come if it's like you said, and it's a successful program and they really take off and it gets to be where there's hundreds. And there's in like, there's gonna be a decline. There's gonna be an elk decline.

• 1:40:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:23Steven Rinella?

  I'm wondering if they're gonna tell people that that's not what it was. They're gonna be like, it was climate. It was, you know what I mean?

• 1:40:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:40:34Steven Rinella?

  They're gonna obfuscate it and they're gonna tell them that's not really what happened.

• 1:40:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:39Steven Rinella?

  It was other factors.

• 1:40:40Speaker 04

  I don't know. I, I mean, I think that we maybe it's, it's hard to say how, how the story will be told.

• 1:40:45Steven Rinella?

  I'm telling you they'll obfuscate it. It'll be that it was other, it was climate.

• 1:40:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. It could be like, there's, there's so many things happening.

• 1:40:53Steven Rinella?

  A prediction. Hey Nate, go to the, get us on one of those prediction markets and put my bet down. But man, I appreciate you coming on and talking about it all.

• 1:41:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, appreciate the interest.

• 1:41:05Steven Rinella?

  Dude. Yeah, I mean. I like, like wildlife management is, I mean, it's, it's beautiful. So I mean, it gets people riled. It's like, it's complex, but just the thing in and of itself is gorgeous.

• 1:41:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's what we get into this field for. Like we, we love it. It's as biologists, this is, this is so meaningful, kind of, kind of.

• 1:41:27Steven Rinella?

  Our country for a long time tried. Well, just let everybody go do what they're gonna do and see what happens and it don't go well.

• 1:41:33Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:41:34Steven Rinella?

  So the fact that, I mean, even the fact that, that even the fact that like, that there's all these sort of opinions and, and people wanting what's best for animals. You know, we're like spending money on these questions and, and thinking about them. It's like a big positive from where we were.

• 1:41:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Steven Rinella?

  In the late 1800s when it was like.

• 1:41:58Speaker 04

  Do what you want.

• 1:41:58Steven Rinella?

  Guess all that shit's gone.

• 1:42:00Speaker 04

  Right, no, it's, there's something to be said that the, the state wildlife management agencies have a really important role and, and the hunters and fishermen too. I, I think that there's, there's a, a, all, all of these pieces play together and, and work to, to manage and conserve all of the wildlife species that we've got.

• 1:42:16Steven Rinella?

  And I do, man, like just to close, I, I appreciate this, like, I appreciate the position that you as an individual found yourself in. That, that it was, it was, you had a job. You worked for the people of the state of Colorado. Voters handed a thing and you like, in good faith, took the will of the voters and, and put it into practice.

• 1:42:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:45Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:42:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:45Steven Rinella?

  I mean, that's big.

• 1:42:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:47Steven Rinella?

  That's like, that's public service.

• 1:42:49Speaker 04

  I appreciate you saying that.

• 1:42:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I just want to acknowledge that. Like I don't want you to think that I'm, that I have an adversarial viewpoint to the situation. You as an individual were in, we're like, you did your job, man, you know?

• 1:42:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, appreciate you saying that.

• 1:42:59Steven Rinella?

  As handed to you and the whole department.

• 1:43:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're, I mean, we're, we're professionals. Like we, we take our jobs very seriously and, and yeah, we have a mission that to, to drive and, and we work, work to get that done.

• 1:43:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it was at that time, it was the will of the people.

• 1:43:14Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:43:14Steven Rinella?

  And you like, did your job as a carnivore guy or predator guy and, and, and, um, I don't know. Thank you for doing, thank you for doing your job at a state wildlife agency.

• 1:43:27Speaker 04

  Thanks, thanks. It's something I'm really proud of. You know, it's, it was a great career. It got me to all corners of the state and beyond. I'd travel quite a bit throughout the country and, um, yeah, it's been, it's been truly a privilege to, to be able to, to do that and to, to call this a, a career for the last two and a half decades. It's, it's something that's, that I'm really, really proud of.

• 1:43:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, well, good luck on what comes next.

• 1:43:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, thanks.

• 1:43:48Steven Rinella?

  Uh, ladies and gentlemen, again, Eric Odell from, uh, former, I'm saying your last name correct, right?

• 1:43:54Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:43:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Former, um, employee of Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

• 1:44:00Speaker 04

  Or how's it, where do you guys go by?

• 1:44:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Parks and Wildlife, right. Thank you very much, man.

• 1:44:04Speaker 04

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:44:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:32Steven Rinella?

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