Colorado has become a battleground for disputes over hunting and trapping

This story was originally published on the Substack Public Domain, to which you can subscribe here.

The agenda for Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission’s March 5 meeting included few controversial issues—mall alterations to grouse hunting regulations, tweaks to the big game draw and, perhaps most contentiously, an update to the state’s wolf reintroduction program.

But when general public comment opened, those topics were quickly overshadowed. The commission spent the next few hours getting an earful from carnivore advocates demanding limits on the trapping of bobcats, foxes, coyotesm and other furbearers.

“The public needs to understand that you do not support this killing spree that sees wildlife as commodities,” advocate Rainer Gerbatsch said. “Glorifying trapping as conservation is a slap in the face of evolution.”

Colorado has emerged in recent years as one of the key battlegrounds for the future of wildlife management, with a growing movement of activists aiming to swap the state’s emphasis on maximizing deer and elk for hunters with a more holistic approach that prioritizes ecosystem health. 

The movement scored one of its biggest wins in 2020, when a referendum to reintroduce gray wolves squeaked through on a 51 to 49 percent vote, over the impassioned objections of ranchers and outfitters on the western slope who saw wolves as a threat to their livelihoods. But a separate vote last year that would have banned mountain lion hunting and bobcat trapping failed by a wider-than-expected margin, 55 to 45, leaving activists struggling to find their footing. 

While they have yet to unify behind a single demand, the movement is taking aim at trapping as its next major target. “Unlimited trapping is not aligned with the public’s values,” Samantha Miller, senior carnivore campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity, told Public Domain. “This just flies in the face of responsible wildlife management.” 

Those who spoke out against trapping at the hearing objected to killing animals to sell their pelts. Some asked the commission to end trapping entirely. Others suggested a reasonable limit for all 16 furbearers, whose populations vary widely, might be two specimens per species. Several raised concern that non-target animals like eagles or the state-endangered lynx might perish in traps. 

A few questioned the wisdom of indiscriminately trapping beavers , given that the ponds they create can help mitigate wildfires, or swift foxes, which the state had until recently classified as a Tier II species of greatest conservation need.

And many described the lack of trapping limits as a conservation threat to bobcats specifically, with several denouncing the use of strangulation to kill them, at times in gory detail. 

At least three commission members expressed concern about strangling bobcats to death. But current state regulations already prohibit it, Colorado Parks and Wildlife Assistant Director for Field Services Ty Petersburg later told them, though it wasn’t easy to understand from the convoluted descriptions in the regulations. 

CPW plans to field focus groups later this year and identify stakeholders in response to strong public interest in trapping. A spokesperson acknowledged beavers’ beneficial impact on groundwater recharge and wildfire mitigation, but noted that low levels of harvest, about 600 on public land last year, was unlikely to have a major impact. Swift fox populations have remained stable for 20 years under current management, he added.

Trappers say the activists’ concerns are overblown, noting that the state already passed a referendum in 1996 outlawing snares and foothold traps, leaving only the most passionate hobbyists in the field. 

“We’ve got box traps and that’s it—it pretty much gutted the entire trapping community as a whole,” Colorado Trappers and Predator Hunters Association President Dan Gates told Public Domain. “This is an anti-hunting campaign… They don’t want you to harvest anything, period.”

With trappers limited to expensive and less-effective cage traps, they are less likely than hunters to kill several species of furbearers, according to Gates. Hunters have accounted for at least 40 percent of the annual bobcat kill since 2019, state data show.

Only 212 of the 1,524 coyotes sold at the Colorado Trappers and Predators Association’s fur auction last year had been killed in the state of Colorado, Gates said. An even smaller portion of bobcats, 14 out of 145, came from within the state. Many of the Coloradan animals made their way into the auction after getting trapped at the request of landowners to deal with nuisance animals or control damage. The most common requests came from industrial firms like airports and power plants, or suburban homes. 

“People tell me that we’re extirpating populations and they have no idea what is harvested nor any idea of what is sold,” Gates said. “Nobody goes out and traps skunks for the hell of it. They do it for damage and they do it for nuisance.”

Box traps make by-catch a non-issue, said Adam Warren, the organization’s vice president. One time he caught a mountain lion in a trap intended for a bobcat. He simply opened the door and let it scamper away. 

“I let go a couple of bobcats this year because they were young,” Warren said. “I’m not in the business of trying to wipe them out. I want to conserve the population—I don’t want to destroy it.”

CPW says bobcats do not face conservation concerns, though the state does not survey the population. A pending citizen petition asks CPW to collect more robust data, Director Jeff Davis said.

Hunters and trappers killed fewer than 1,000 annually in recent years over a three-month season running from December to February, according to CPW. About 20,000 people bought a Colorado license to hunt or trap furbearers in the 2023-24 season, the most recent for which the state has published data. By contrast, the state sold more than 200,000 licenses to pursue big game like deer and elk. 

Still, many wildlife activists view fur trapping as the lowest-hanging fruit for a movement pushing for more carnivore-friendly policies. 

Trapping to sell pelts conflicts with one of the basic tenets of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, which uses hunting and fishing license sales and excise taxes on firearm and ammunition to finance wildlife management and habitat restoration. The hunter-conservationists who developed the model early last century aimed to eliminate the profit motive from wildlife management, after unregulated hunting to feed urban markets for meat, hide and feathers pushed virtually every animal with commercial value to the brink of extirpation or outright extinction. 

But unfettered fur trapping for profit lingered on, largely because it focused on animals widely viewed as pests, or carnivores that prey on ungulate species prized by hunters, like deer and elk—though in practice, pelts do not fetch high enough prices to employ many full time trappers, especially with Colorado’s limitations. 

Some carnivore activists want to revise the state’s endorsement of the North American model. House Bill 25-1258, authored by Democratic Colorado Reps. Tammy Story and Elizabeth Velasco, proposed nixing a statute that commits the state “to utilize hunting, trapping, and fishing as the primary methods of effecting necessary wildlife harvests.”

Instead, the bill proposed that the state “may authorize hunting, trapping, and fishing in accordance with the best available wildlife and ecological science to benefit wildlife, whole ecosystem health, and all Coloradans.”  

“This is not an attack on hunting,” Rep. Velasco told the committee during last week’s meeting. “We’re not restricting or limiting hunting in any way. But we do want to make sure that the science is up to par and science is being utilized wherever we are managing our public spaces.” 

Supporters viewed the short bill as a new, more holistic mission statement for the agency. Some of them used the committee hearing to air grievances about furbearer trapping specifically. Two children testified, trading verses for the committee: “Trapping is cruel—please vote yes,” they said. “I feel sad that an unlimited amount of bobcats can be trapped each year in Colorado.”

But several commenters saw the bill as an attack on hunting that threatened to create new problems without solving any. Liz Rose of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a conservation group, told the committee that she had asked the authors to provide evidence of how the law might help the state address a practical conservation problem. She said they didn’t provide any.   

And etching the impossible-to-define standard “best-available science” into statute would pave the way for legal challenges to virtually any wildlife commission decision, according to former CPW Commissioner Gaspar Perricone. 

“I don’t perceive this bill as offering any additional tools to the agency that they don’t currently possess,” Perricone told the committee. “What is the necessity of this legislation at this point in time?” 

The committee voted the measure down, with only three members supporting it—including the two authors.