US judge to weigh cattle industry request to halt Colorado wolf reintroduction
abcnews.go.comA federal judge is set to consider a request by Colorado’s cattle industry to block the impending reintroduction of gray wolves to the state under a voter-approved ballot initiative
A federal judge is set to consider on Thursday a request by Colorado's cattle industry to block the impending reintroduction of gray wolves to the state under a voter-approved initiative.
State wildlife officials plan to capture up to 10 wolves from Oregon and begin releasing them in Colorado by Dec. 31 as they race to meet a deadline imposed under a 2020 ballot proposal that passed by a narrow margin.
The animals would be among the first gray wolves in Colorado in decades.
The Gunnison County Stockgrowers’ Association and Colorado Cattlemen’s Association filed a lawsuit Monday to halt the releases. They claim the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service failed to adequately review Colorado's plan to release up to 50 wolves onto state and private land over the next several years.
Judge Regina M. Rodriguez scheduled a 10 a.m. hearing at the federal courthouse in Denver to hear arguments in the case.
Gray wolves were exterminated across most of the U.S. by the 1930s under government-sponsored poisoning and trapping campaigns. They received endangered species protections in 1975, when there were about 1,000 left in northern Minnesota.
Wolves have since rebounded in the Great Lakes region. They've also returned to numerous western states — Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington and, most recently, California — following an earlier reintroduction effort that brought wolves from Canada to central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s.
An estimated 7,500 wolves in about 1,400 packs now roam parts of the contiguous U.S. Their return to the
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