Colorado Stop The Wolf Coalition With Denny Behrens

The issue over the reintroduction of wolves into the Colorado landscape is a hot topic right now in the hunting community. Debates between the pro and anti have both been going strong. Here in support of the hunting heritage is Denny Behrens, Colorado Regional Director for BigGame Forever and Co-Chairman of The Colorado Stop the Wolf Coalition. Denny joins us in this episode to give an overview of the issue, bringing in data and numbers that show its possible impact on humans, the ecosystem, and the hunting industry. He encourages you to join the fight against the reintroduction of wolves and preserve the hunting heritage for future generations.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Colorado Stop The Wolf Coalition With Denny Behrens

I have Denny Behrens on the show and he is the Colorado State Director for BigGame Forever and also the Cochair of Colorado Stop the Wolf Coalition. Denny, welcome to the show.

Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be on with you, Bruce.

A good friend of ours Mia Anstine suggested we get together and the wolf issue was here as we talked. Wolfs are already in the state so I’m scratching my head. How can you reintroduce something that’s already here? You can certainly release breeding pairs. We talked about the Mexican Wolf that there are already laws on the books that we’re going to talk about. One question I have starting out, the gray wolf isn’t the indigenous wolf that was in the state of Colorado and became extinct. Can you bring me up to speed on what type of wolf we do have here in Colorado?

Historically, the wolf that was here was a smaller wolf when most of us called it the timber wolf back when you talk to the old-timers. It’s the same wolf that was up in Montana and Idaho prior to the wolf introduction. The wolf that they brought into the Yellowstone ecosystem in Idaho was the Northern Canadian gray wolf which is a much larger, more aggressive wolf. Back in the ‘40s in Colorado, they basically eliminated the wolf in the state of Colorado, so that was a lot smaller wolf, granted it was very aggressive and killing livestock and that’s why they eliminated it back then.

The thing that we see in the state of Colorado is that the wolves that were released into Yellowstone and have propagated into Wyoming are migrating across the border into Colorado. There was a black wolf with a collar up in Grand County that came across the border and it was tracked by Wyoming Fish and Game, and then once it was spotted in Colorado. Colorado Parks and Wildlife wanted to know where this wolf came from and so they contacted Wyoming and they got the digital codes to be able to track that wolf. The last conversation I had with CPW Northwest Regional Manager was that periodically they’re trying to get a plane up to track that wolf and that wolf was still in Colorado at that time.

It’s a single wolf, is that correct?

That’s what they saw was a single wolf. People need to understand that wolves have been migrating into the state of Colorado, documented wolves since 2004. The first wolf was killed on Interstate 70 west of Idaho Springs and that was a female. Since then, there has been a wolf. If you go on to CPW’s website, click on wolves, you’ll see a video of a black wolf in the snow up in Northern Colorado which they videoed. In 2011 there was one that was accidentally poisoned between Meeker and Craig, and then in 2015, there was one that was shot by the coyote hunter up by Kremmling, Colorado.

The Colorado Stop the Wolf Coalition was created by concerned sportsmen, farmers and ranchers, businesses and individuals to fight the effort to release wolves in Colorado. Share on X

In August 2016, there was a wolf that was being monitored by Wyoming Fish and Game and it came across the border and was traveling around the state. We have the digital map of that where we can see it came from Northern Wyoming and traverse across Wyoming and then down into Colorado spent quite a bit of time. It headed toward Estes Park and then turned around and came toward Kremmling, Colorado. It lost its collar which we found out is probably a natural occurrence because if their collared when they’re small, that collar can’t choke the animal. Anyway, it fell off and that prompted Wyoming Fish and Game to contact CPW and APHIS. They went and found the collar, but what was interesting was the data that we found out afterward from investigating that particular wolf was that APHIS said it was traveling with seven other wolves.

There was a pack established someplace.

Wherever it went, and so that particular wolf was something that caused a huge problem in the state of Colorado. President Trump was elected on the 16th of November in 2016. On the 18th of November of that year, the Obama administration through the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared a wolf conservation area inside the state of Colorado. Most people don’t know that. We have a map that shows that and based on that particular wolf that lost its collar. You come down out of Baggs to Craig, Colorado, if you were to take a black marker and follow the highway, you come from Baggs to Craig you go over the steamboat. You go all the way down through Oak Creek all the way down to I-70, and then all the way East to I-25, and then all the way back North I-25 to the Wyoming border. That’s a huge area.

They did not tell any county commissioners that they were going to do it and they sure didn’t tell our state legislature that they were going to do that. That’s caused a major problem for APHIS as far as managing coyotes in that area to protect livestock and there are a number of sheep ranchers within that boundary. If you get ever a chance to look at it, you’ll see how big it is. They’re limited on the size of traps, there are no snares that they can use. The main thing is there’s no aerial gunning, but that particular portion when wolves have pups is usually August, September and October are right around there when the pups get to be about the size of a coyote. They don’t want them to be accidentally aerial gunned by APHIS, but APHIS doesn’t do much aerial gunning during that time period, it’s always done on the snow, so that’s not that big of an issue.

Can you define who APHIS is please for our readers.

APHIS is the animal damage control of the Department of Agriculture. They’re the professional trappers and hunters that take care of problem animals such as coyotes that depredate on livestock, bears or mountain lions. They are a federal agency under the Department of Agriculture. They are some good guys and they do a great job at trying to maintain populations of coyotes when having problems with them. That particular situation how rendezvous point is established or a den is found, there will be an eleven-mile radius around that area where APHIS cannot do anything, but it pertains to APHIS. It doesn’t pertain to a rancher or for grazing or oil and gas development at this time, but the problem is it has been established.

Was it established by an Executive Order by Mr. Obama?

It was done through US Fish and Wildlife Service under his administration.

Who signed off on it, the director of Fish and Wildlife?

Yes.

Without any oversight at all somebody requested this be done. I don’t think he came to work one day and said, “I’m going to go to Colorado and set up this Colorado wolf conservation area,” or maybe they did. How do you think he came about?

There has been a push for a long time that people within that agency want to see wolves into Colorado. Most sportsmen know that within US Fish and Wildlife Service, there have always been people that have not been supportive of hunting. I guess that’s the best way to say it. Their agenda, their ideologies have been pushed within that agency. During that particular time period of that administration, those people were looking at every opportunity they could to be able to expand the range of the wolf.

Are you now talking about gray wolves?

Yes.

The wolf is simply a ploy, a biological weapon to end hunting, to take over public lands that you and I own. Share on X

From Canada, not indigenous to Colorado, Wyoming, Montana or Idaho.

Correct.

That’s one-point people should understand, there are differences. The other thing is as Denny already pointed out, there are wolves already in Colorado. How many breeding pairs? We have no data on that. We have empirical evidence that there was a pack with the collared wolf, so we’re not talking about a reintroduction at all. We’re talking about supplemental augmentation of the existing wolves, and is that a sticking point or not? Is that something that people should be aware of? Help me out with that, Denny.

It is a valid point because CPW back in 2004 created a wolf working group of members from the environmental community, the agriculture community, sportsmen’s community and some biologists that sat down and put together a document. It’s called Recommendations Concerning the Wolf. If you go on to CPW’s website, you can click on wolf, click on that document and read it. In that document it says that Colorado will allow the wolf to naturally migrate into the state. It’s pretty tough to have a wall built across the Wyoming border to keep the wolf out, so we knew they were going to come in. Within that document it says that naturally the wolf can migrate into the state.

In 2016, the Wildlife Commission with staff recommendation put forth a resolution. This was basically the third one that they’ve done that said, “No introduction of the gray wolf or the Mexican wolf into the state of Colorado, but they will allow migration of the northern wolf into the state.” That document still stands and people need to understand that the wolves are going to be allowed to migrate into the state, but to do an introduction of wolves into the state CPW and the Commission are opposed to that. Even if they were to do some introduction it still has to go partly through legislature. A wolf plan which is a fully documented wolf plan talking about thresholds and management. All that still has to be developed that has not been done and it’s spelled out in that recommendations that plan should be done. It’s important for the public to know that we already allow wolves to migrate into the state. There’s no need to do an introduction of wolves into the state. It’s the same wolf they’ve already introduced into the Yellowstone ecosystem in Idaho that is already migrating into the state of Colorado. Why would you want to do something that the Commission on Parks and Wildlife have said, “We’re going to allow them to migrate in, but we don’t want a full-blown introduction?”

By full-blown introduction, how many breeding pairs does that represent?

The Rocky Mountain Wolf Project put on the last part of November in 2018 in Durango, Colorado a wolf symposium. We went down and we’re in the audience watching that presentation. During that presentation with Mike Phillips and the rest of his staff, they made the statement that they wanted to see 250 wolves released into Western Colorado in four locations. The Routt National Forest which is the Flat Tops, the Grand Mesa National Forest which is outside here of Grand Junction, the Uncompahgre National Forest and the San Juan National Forest. If you take that and we develop some maps based on their presentation and if you take 250 wolves and divide that out that’s 62-plus wolves in each location. Understand that when they introduced wolves into the Yellowstone ecosystem in Idaho, the total wolves that were released was 66. Within twelve years they had expanded to over 1,600 wolves.

It doesn’t take much to do the math to think about the number of wolves that would be in the state of Colorado on the Western Slope within ten years if you start to release wolves according to what they wanted. That would be a mega population of wolves plus when you’re talking about releasing wolves that’s close to the proximity of people, you think about Colorado as 5.6 million people and the Western Slope is heavily populated with people. There isn’t any room for the wolf. They like to use an example that Yellowstone area population of density of acres and then they look at the public lands of Colorado on the West and they want to compare that to be the same. We all know living over on the Western Slope that all are elk and deer populations even some moose populations in certain areas, when winter hits they come down to the winter range.

The winter range is mostly populated by ranchers, farmers, towns, scouters and skiers. There would be a major problem right away, conflicts if that was to be done. You can’t be releasing that number of wolves into Western Colorado. It’s like the old cartoon between the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, there was always signs that those two read, but I don’t think wolves also read signs that say, “No trespassing,” or “You can’t cross this highway.” They’re going to go where they’re going to go and they’re going to follow the prey base. If the prey base leads them into livestock areas, livestock is a lot easier to get than what elk and deer are. There will be major conflicts and they won. It’s not fair to the wolf to take him from Canada and bring him down here and release them into Western Colorado. It will be conflict from day one.

Tell me about this issue and I did read The Fence Post. You can reach out to me at [email protected] and let me know your thoughts. I welcome your thoughts. The conversation is good. When we release breeding pairs into an area, they’re going to raise their pups and then the males are going to be kicked out or they’re going to be killed by the alpha male. It doesn’t matter where you put them, the same lands or kickass bad country. If I was a grizzly bear that’s where I would live. Denny brought this up, it’s simply the elk don’t stay in the high country all year round. They go to the south-facing slopes and they go where food is because they have to eat. When green up comes, they go back the other way, but they don’t stay there as they found on Yellowstone. Yellowstone was a great experiment, but it turned into a horrific experience because the wolves don’t know where the park ends and public land or private land begins.

They are prolific because a wolf doesn’t have any enemies as the grizzly bear, not a lot of those in Colorado if any, and so they’re top. They’re the alpha predator. When you have the alpha predator, he does whatever he wants to do. We have people that are stirring up the pot and it has nothing to do with the wolves and that’s where people are going to go, “What? No.” The wolf is simply a ploy, a biological weapon to end hunting, to take over public lands that you and I own. You might think I’m a little off my rocker, but I don’t give a rip because you have to understand there are people in this country that do not want you to hunt. Ergo if there is no elk, Parks and Wildlife can’t sell outtakes, Parks and Wildlife will basically implode. The thing that gets me about this whole process with the wolves because the wolves will come to Colorado because there is no water, they are in the Rocky Mountain system and they will come as we’ve already discussed that.

The thing is the Parks and Wildlife are going be charged by the governor of the state of Colorado to fund this. They don’t have the money. My whole angst if this should pass, then the whole state, every single citizen in the state should have skin in the game and pay a dollar or whatever it causes to have this introduction. In no way, shape or form should Colorado Parks and Wildlife fund an introduction of wolves to wolves that are already here and where they’re on record of saying that wolves cross the border. We’ll set up a management program, we’ll manage it, and we’ll go from there. Tell me about Fence Posts and you know that data better than I do. As I learned a long time ago, follow the money and you’ll find the end game. We followed the money in this and there is a great article that Denny shared with me but talk to me about the article in Fence Post.

There was a very courageous lady who’s done a lot of background research concerning the whole wolf issue, the environmental issue, the agenda of the environmental people, and she did her homework. She went out and investigated this. What we found out was that the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project who’s been basically working in Colorado for a couple of years promoting the introduction of wolves into the state of Colorado was not a 501(c)(3) or (c)(4). When you went to the Secretary of State’s website to find out who they were, all of a sudden you come up with a group called the Tides Center. That put up a red flag because who is the Tides Center? Why is the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project working under that name? This particular lady did her homework and started to follow that trail and that led back to George Soros.

The Tides Center is a money-laundering group for environmentalists for George Soros. I don’t want people to think that I’m sitting here with aluminum foil cap on my head with antennas that I’m a conspiracy guy. This is documented proof of a trail that leads back to that person. It’s interesting that all those groups that were within the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project including the Ted Turner Endangered Species Fund who Mike Phillips works for, have been getting major funding from out-of-state. The first documented report that they have to do with the Secretary of State showed that the majority of the money that they have raised to help gather signatures came from out-of-state. Over $100,000 from one organization to help pay for people to go out and gather signatures.

People need to understand how serious the whole situation is about bringing wolves into Colorado. Share on X

It is a major push by the environmental community outside the state of Colorado to come in here and use this biological weapon of the wolf and to cause havoc, chaos and harm to the people of Colorado, especially Western Colorado. There are a number of issues pertaining to the wolf and we talked about the fact that it’s not fair. Colorado Stop The Wolf Coalition created our first video with Dick Ray who is an outfitter and passed CPW Wildlife Commissioner. You can view that video on StopTheWolf.org. As a matter of fact, there are a number of videos that we’ve done on that page that you can view, but that particular video talks about the fact that wolves will not stay in Colorado.

If wolves are released into the San Juan and especially into the Weminuche Wilderness area, all the animals on the south side of the Weminuche area migrate into New Mexico. You have northern gray wolf which will follow those herds into New Mexico. We have spent, when I say we, sportsmen, US Fish and Wildlife Services, $44 million in trying to bring back the Mexican wolf into Arizona and New Mexico. According to the documents there are supposed to be no Mexican wolves above Interstate 40, but the northern gray wolf I don’t believe can read and so when he crosses the border into New Mexico then you’re going to end up with the same problem that you had in Idaho and Montana. The proponents of wolves want to allow the Mexican wolf and the northern gray wolf to breed and become this bastard wolf, but according to the Endangered Species Act you cannot take one species and cause harm to a species that is listed as endangered. Why do these people want to do that? There is an agenda and that’s what you see in the document that was put forth in the Fence Post. That in a nutshell is basically what that’s about.

Soros wants to take over the land or wants to end hunting, bottom line what’s his end game?

We know that most of those organizations, defenders of wildlife, they have always had an agenda to do away with hunting and some of those other groups. If you go online to the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project you will see their partners, click on their icons and it will take you to their page. You can start to read through this. You’ll find out that a number of those organizations would like to see hunting go away and they’re working very hard at making that happen. Defenders of Wildlife especially has sued numerous times over the wolf issue which in 2010, 2012 there were delisting that was supposed to take place. Because of lawsuits that did not happen and so that’s where we are at now with the wolf. The wolf has migrated into Washington, Oregon, Northern California causing major problems up there.

One issue that I’d like to get in a little bit on the discussion is the fact that the disease that the wolves carry. This whole agenda about causing havoc, getting ranchers off the property, stopping grazing, stopping oil and gas production is all part of the radical environmental movement and that’s what you’re seeing is being played out. It is a biological weapon. The wolf has been used like that. People in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho will tell you that, even biologists will tell you that. It wasn’t an experiment to see if wolves could make it. It was an actual attempt to introduce an animal that would cause havoc and harm. Therefore, expand their agenda so that they could continue to do away with hunting, grazing, oil and gas exploration, and any mineral extraction.

I don’t want to dwell a whole lot on the conspiracy aspect of it, but people need to know the truth and that document in The Fence Post opened a huge door to the reality of what’s happening across the West. My friends in Idaho, in Montana, even in Wyoming have said it to me over and over again. If Colorado loses this ballot initiative to the wolf, we will lose the West to the wolf. That is very disheartening. You think about that. States like Utah, Nevada, Nebraska, Kansas, they already have sightings of wolves. If you lose Colorado to this issue and wolves are placed into here even if they only release 50 wolves, you can look at the population growth of what happened in the Yellowstone ecosystem, 66 wolves in twelve years, 1,600 wolves. Where are they going to go? They’re going to go into Utah, over the Rocky Mountains, and into Estes Park area. You start looking at the conflicts between wolves and people when we already have conflicts with bears and mountain lions in the state that we can’t control. You put that apex predator in here and in twenty years you can kiss hunting goodbye in the state of Colorado. That is a very serious situation.

Our hunting heritage is at stake in the West. If sportsmen don’t wake up and get involved and help us defeat this issue in the state of Colorado, and I’m talking about sportsmen across the nation. Many of them come and hunt here in the state of Colorado because you can buy an over-the-counter elk license in the state. To me, it’s been the only state where a father can say to a son who lives in the Midwest or the eastern part of our nation and says, “Do you want an experience? Do you want to understand what the romance and the heritage of our hunting heritage are all about? I’m going to take you to Colorado and we’re going to go here elk bugle. You’re going to be able to get a license at the age of twelve. Get your hunter safety and come out here and experience what it is to see the heritage of the North American model of conservation that sportsmen have done.” That will vanish. That’s serious.

It’s up to us. My generation and your generation have tried to protect that. There is a younger generation of hunters in the nation that I don’t think grab the concept of our heritage. They think about, “I want to be able to go and enjoy hunting. I want to have the best equipment. I want to have the best camouflage. I want to go out there and harvest an animal and put a picture on Facebook and say, ‘Look what I did,”’ but they don’t think about what it means to be a hunter. They don’t think about our heritage. They don’t think about the future of the six-year-old grandson that I have that loves to shoot his bow in the backyard with me. The fact that I’m 70 years old, I don’t know if I’ll be hunting by the time I’m 77 years old, but I’d love to be able to take him on his first hunt in the state of Colorado.

If wolves are released in 2023 according to the initiative, in twenty years you can kiss it goodbye. That grandson of mine might hunt for a few years, but after that he’s going to turn to me if I’m still alive and say, “What happened? Why didn’t you fight so that I could continue to hunt like you did and my dad did?” That’s a responsibility that we have and we can’t deny that. We have to engage each and every one of us and get on the website StopTheWolf.org. Donate your $25. Fred Eichler did a fabulous video for us, asking every elk hunter in the state of Colorado to donate $25. You can go to Cabela’s or Bass Pro and probably buy the best pair of socks that you can get to make sure that you can get out there and be comfortable hunting and you’ll spend $25. I can’t say it enough, I know how you feel, I know how my generation of people that hunt feel, and we have to reach out to that younger generation of the hunter and tell them you’ve got to get involved.

Where does somebody go to donate $25?

You go to StopTheWolf.org. That’s the website that we’ve created and you can click right there and make a donation. You can watch the videos that we’ve created. We had Ron Velarde who is the past Northwest Regional Manager do a video for us concerning our moose in the state of Colorado. Most hunters don’t know that in Wyoming, they put out a document in 2018 and it’s their wolf report for 2018. The Shiras moose in Wyoming in 1996 was over 10,000 moose. By 2017, it was barely over 1,300. The majority of that problem Wyoming Fish and Game says is contributed to the wolf. All those videos are on that site that you can watch and we ask that you share them. All that stuff is available to share. You can put it on your phone and you could share it with your friends.

The other thing we’re asking them to do is to volunteer. We need a volunteer from every county in the state of Colorado who is willing to come and join us to get out there and educate the public as to the harmful consequences of wolf introduction. Before we leave, I do want to come back to this issue about disease. The wolves that were released into the Yellowstone ecosystem in Idaho, when they were brought from Canada, had to go through inspection as far as disease is concerned. What we found out, there is a gentleman by the name of Scott Rockholm out of Idaho who made a core request to the nation of Canada and got the reports from the veterinarians who checked those wolves. We have that document. Those wolves were tested and treated for disease. The only disease they were treated for was rabies. There were a number of diseases that wolves carry.

One of the critical diseases is called Echinococcus granulosus or in the layman’s term hydatid disease. It is a tapeworm disease. The strain of that disease was prevalent in the lower 48 in the G2 strain which is very minute, but the wolves that came in that were brought in to the Yellowstone ecosystem carried the G8 and G10 strain of that disease. That disease is fatal to livestock, wildlife, pets and especially humans, and a lot of people say, “That’s fearmongering.” It’s not fearmongering. If you go on to the website of the World Health Organization, over one million people have that disease at any one time. It’s carried basically by canines and the wolf was the one that was brought in.

I went up to Idaho and we heard that a lady had contracted that disease. We went up and did a video interview with her about the fact that she contracted hydatid disease from the wolves. She lives in Custer County which was ground zero for the release of wolves in Idaho. Wolves have killed elk on her yard in the wintertime. She would open the door in the wintertime and there will be wolf tracks on her doorstep. When a wolf defecates on the ground and the scat is filled with eggs of hydatid disease, it becomes airborne. She was probably in the yard working or she was running on a four-wheeler and ran over it and she contracted that disease. You can watch that video on the same website StopTheWolf.org, click on disease.

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We also heard that there’s a gentleman in the state of Washington that they believe has come down with that disease. It’s serious. Why would we want to introduce wolves that carry a disease that can cause harm? In 2017, there was a moose in the northern part of the state here in Colorado that was falling down and running into stuff. The rancher called the Colorado Parks and Wildlife and said, “There’s a moose up here that’s sick. It’s falling down.” The DWM went up there and found the moose, shot the moose, cut its head off, took it down the CSU because they thought it had CWD. It didn’t have CWD. It had hydatid cyst in the brain and it was dying from the disease. Wolves have been migrating across the border since 2004.

People need to think about this. If wolves become populated in the state and especially a ranch dog goes out and everybody knows what dogs do, they roll in the scat. People have to wash their dogs, but if they don’t and don’t know that their dog has rolled in scat, they can bring that disease right into the house. That’s concerning because little kids pet dogs and put their hands in their mouth. People need to understand how serious this whole situation is about bringing wolves into Colorado. We have over 5.6 million people and between 2040 and 2050, we’ll have over eight million people in the state. How can we have another apex predator in the state and not have conflict? It will be a conflict.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a fly fisherman, a hiker, ridge runner, kayaker, run the rivers in your river raft or mountain bike. If you’re using natural forest or other public lands where elk, deer and antelope roam with the wolves already here, but with a hyper supplementation of wolves. They start breeding pairs. Males go find a lady. They start breeding pairs exactly that because they can run the numbers. They know X number breeding pairs times X factor, and you leverage it out and do the trend. All of a sudden in X number of years, there are not hundreds, but there are thousands of wolves, and unfortunately we already have issues in Southwestern Colorado with the recruitment of elk, and it doesn’t work.

This man says I don’t care if you’re in Mississippi, Boston, Massachusetts and like to fly out to Colorado to your private ranch and hunt elk. You’ve got a ranch in Ohio Creek and you live in New York City and you fly your G5 to Gunnison and take your clients out to hunt elk. You’re like some of my friends, you put $1,000 in your pocket and a couple of guys are getting a pickup truck and drive 30 hours and go elk hunting. There is something magical about the West that’s why I live here. I could live in any place I want to live, but I live in Colorado. It’s magical to be up in a mountain to watch the sunrise, cast the new race on a high-altitude base, hear a bugle and the mists come out of his nostrils, and that sound. It’s purely magical.

To me it’s a spiritual experience, I’m not going to start crying, but I’ve seen it so many times that I know that’s priceless to me. You might not agree with me. You could care less about hunting, but the fact of the matter is if you enjoy anything in the outdoors, this is a threat to that enjoyment because cougars have killed people. We already have situations outside of Denver where a cat came into the backyard and fortunately, they fought it off, but more and more of these conflicts are rising. More and more people live in the front range and they’re pushing into the mountains. More and more people live in the Western Slope and then throw in the skiers, and the elk love, the sulfation slopes of skiers because it’s warm, there’s food there for browsers and they can eat it.

Wolves go to these places. Someday in the future with wolves released in Colorado, there will be a video of wolves chasing somebody on the ski hill, taken down and ripping them apart. Unfortunately, I’ve seen videos of wolves ripping throats out of calves after they’re born and they don’t eat it. They kill it because the mother is training the wolves how to kill. Not unlike African lions, and you might say, “That didn’t happen.” It does and you can’t refute that, but since the state of Colorado Parks and Wildlife has already said wolves are going to come in and we understand that.

We’re going to manage the situation and that’s already on the book. We have a group of people for whatever their agenda want to hyper supplement wolves to take away my freedom, and I call it a biological weapon of ecoterrorism. That’s a strong statement, but I think there’s enough data out there that show the people will go to any length for their own ideology. That’s my thought and I’d like to hear your thoughts. Reach out to me [email protected]. Denny, any last thoughts?

I’d like to emphasize the fact that we’ve got to have help to defeat this issue. We have to educate the front range people as to the harmful consequences of this so-called insane ballot initiative and that’s what I call it. They need to go to StopTheWolf.org, pull out their credit card, debit card, whatever, donate the $25 or more and then volunteer to help us defeat this issue. There’s enough of us, the coalition is building unbelievably. We’ve got snowmobile associations, trail associations that have joined the coalition and of course cattle groups, sheep groups, and sportsman groups and stuff, but it takes a huge coalition to defeat this. We’re reaching out to everybody and say come help us. If you want to protect our hunting heritage and our wildlife, then get engaged.

Thank you so much, Denny, for being a guest on the show. If you have any questions, get a hold of me or get a hold of Denny Behrens and he’d love to talk with you. Thank you.

You bet, Bruce, and you have a great day.

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About Denny Behrens

Denny is the Colorado Regional Director for BigGame Forever, and is an avid lifetime sportsmen and bowhunter. Wildlife and hunting has been his passion since the age of 10 when he bought his first bow. He enjoys fly-fishing, wildlife photography, and bowhunting. He’s been an outfitter and guide and is a strong advocate of mentoring youth and ladies in the sport of hunting. He’s been involved in wildlife politics in Colorado since 1986. Denny believes balanced wildlife management and a strong sportsmen’s voice is key to protecting our hunting heritage.