Colorado ranchers want Trump's help fighting back against urban interference in rural communities
Editor's note: This is the third and final story in a series about Colorado's wolf reintroduction efforts and the effects on agricultural producers. Read part one and part two.
GRAND COUNTY, Colo. — Merrit Linke pitched hay off the back of a moving trailer as his tractor trundled across the frozen field. Around three dozen hungry Corriente cows followed close behind.
"Wireless, autonomous solar energy harvesting units," he calls them. The climate and soil in this part of Colorado make it difficult to grow crops, but the sun grows plenty of grass. And unlike humans, cows can eat grass.
"There's areas that are not suitable for farming," Linke said. "Animal agriculture is still an important part of how we feed the world."
The Grand County commissioner and fourth-generation rancher is one of the many rural residents trying to preserve their way of life in the face of growing urban interference. Several lifelong ranchers told Fox News Digital how state officials are threatening their livelihoods with the reintroduction of gray wolves to the region.
THIS RED STATE IS BECOMING AN ‘EXPAT’ COMMUNITY FOR FAMILIES FLEEING WESTERN LIBERAL BASTIONS
"This feels like something being done to a specific demographic of people — people that raise livestock in Western Colorado," Linke said. "They're the ones that has to deal with the negative implications of this."
Colorado voters passed Proposition 114 in 2020, directing Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) to develop a plan to reintroduce wolves. The initiative passed by a margin of 50.9% to 49.1%, mainly with the support of Front Range counties that include the cities Boulder, Denver and Colorado Springs.
Voters in rural areas, where wolves would be released, largely opposed wolf reintroduction.
"It's just a really tough situation because it has been mandated upon us here in the Western Slope by urban voters who will never be affected," Caitlyn Taussig, who runs a cow-calf operation with her mom, told Fox News Digital. "It really highlights the rural-urban divide issue."
Voter support for Proposition 114 strongly correlated to support for President Joe Biden, according to 2022 research from Colorado State University. Younger, urban voters also tended to support the initiative more, researchers found.
"They're the tech people. They're the people working in the industries," fifth-generation rancher Tim Ritschard said. "We rely on them, they rely on us [but] I think people don't understand where their food comes from."
Ritschard added, "Urban country thinks their food comes from the grocery store. Well, it has to come from a farm or a ranch somewhere. When you go to Costco or places, there's a chance you could be eating our family beef."
CPW has released 25 wolves since December 2023. In April 2024, wildlife officials confirmed the first depredation of livestock. A pair of wolves that settled near Kremmling, Colorado, killed at least 18 sheep and cattle before being relocated, local media reported.
And while Proposition 114 requires the state to pay ranchers up to $15,000 per animal for losses if wolves kill or injure their livestock, ranchers told Fox News Digital it can be difficult — if not impossible — to prove that a wolf was responsible for an animal's death.
"It's affecting every rancher. It's affecting marriages. It's affecting family businesses," said Conway Farrell, who reported dozens more calves and sheep missing last year than in a typical season. "We don't have the room for these animals in this state."
But wolf advocates accuse the ranchers of ginning up outrage rather than working with wildlife officials to mitigate the risk to livestock.
"If wolves hadn't been eliminated in the early 1900s, we wouldn't be having this interview," Rob Edward of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project told Fox News Digital. "They would just be another carnivore out there that everybody had figured out how to deal with."
All four ranchers Fox News Digital spoke with said one of the worst casualties of Colorado's wolf reintroduction project has been the erosion of longstanding relationships with wildlife officials.
"Private ranch lands are really important wildlife habitat," Taussig said.
Ranchers used to let CPW staff onto their property to perform work like collecting data on deer and elk populations, Ritschard said. The wildlife agents are part of their communities as much as the ranchers are, he said.
"These guys are people we go to church with. Our kids go to school together, they hang out," he said. "It's people that we know and trust."
But when wolf releases began in undisclosed locations and, according to ranchers, without any heads up to the local communities, that trust evaporated.
Now, landowners are "shutting the gates and not allowing [agents] onto the property anymore," Ritschard said.
"It's become really a mess because it's the situation that was mandated upon us and mandated upon CPW by urban voters," Taussig said.
CPW Deputy Director Reid Dewalt, meanwhile, told legislators last month that his agency has been "pretty heavily threatened" during the reintroduction process.
"We’ve been followed during the operation. We have people staking out our offices. There's been threats of violence on social media and through phone calls," Dewalt said. "It’s just unfortunate that that is occurring out there. I don’t think any CPW staff member should be threatened with violence because they’re doing their job."
Farrell blamed much of the division on Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat he accused of being "so against agriculture in the state."
Polis angered ranchers in 2021 when he declared a "MeatOut" day, encouraging omnivores to embrace a plant-based diet to help the environment.
Then at a conference of counties in December, Linke asked Polis about the ballooning cost — nearly $5 million — of wolf reintroduction. Polis accused ranchers of driving up the cost by pressuring nearby states not to give Colorado wolves, and forcing CPW to source the animals from Oregon and British Columbia instead.
"I don't know how they can blame us because we had nothing to do with calling other states," Ritschard said.
Statements from Idaho and Wyoming officials also contradict Polis' accusation, according to reporting from The Colorado Sun.
While state officials have continued to ignore them, ranchers looked to the federal government for help. A group erected a giant banner on the side of a Grand County highway in December reading, "Gov. Polis is throwing us to the wolves! President Trump, please help!"
A group took initial steps to repeal Colorado's wolf reintroduction program on Jan. 3. If they meet all the requirements — including gathering enough valid signatures — the measure could appear on the 2026 ballot.
Fox News Digital asked Edward about the repeal push on Jan. 6, just days after the news broke. He said the measure was in its "nascent stages."
"It's a temper tantrum by a very radical subset of the agricultural industry," he said. "They would rather spend — and will spend — millions of dollars getting that question on the ballot … than helping their fellow ranchers adapt to the presence of a native carnivore on the land again."
Ritschard said he felt there was "a little bit of buyer's remorse" as voters saw the effects of wolf reintroduction, but feared a ballot measure would be expensive and difficult to bring forward. And it wouldn't address the wolves already released.
"What do you do with [the wolves] here already?" he asked. "They're going to breed. It's going to take off now."
Edward said he is "extremely proud of Colorado" and the state's progress with reintroduction so far. While it "appears like there's a bunch of controversy," he said "most of that is bluster."
"The fact is people are living with wolves in other places in the United States, in Canada and around the world, and they're figuring it out," he said. "There is a lot of room for us to work together to make this work."