Colorado Wolf & Wildlife Center

10/31/2026

Good morning and happy Howl-o-Ween!
Today is Pono’s 6th birthday!

Pono is one of our New Guinea Singing dogs, a close relative of the Australian dingo.

10/30/2026

Colorado’s wildlife didn’t recover by accident. Amendment 83 puts that progress at risk.

In the early 1900s, Colorado’s elk population had been devastated by overhunting. The state’s herds had fallen to fewer than 1,000 animals.

What changed? Conservation.

Hunting restrictions, population management, and wildlife restoration efforts helped rebuild those herds. Today, Colorado is home to an estimated 290,000+ elk, one of the largest elk populations in North America.

That recovery happened because wildlife management included limits, regulations, and the authority to make decisions based on science and conservation.

Amendment 83 threatens that foundation.

By establishing a constitutional right to hunt, Amendment 83 opens the door for hunting restrictions and wildlife management decisions made by Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) to be challenged in court as infringements on that right.

What happens when CPW can no longer effectively establish reasonable limits to protect wildlife populations without facing costly legal battles?

We risk undermining the very conservation measures that brought Colorado's wildlife back from the brink.

We cannot protect wildlife by stripping away the tools used to manage and conserve it.

Amendment 83 isn't progress. It's a fast track back toward the wildlife management failures of the early 1900s.

Our wildlife deserves better. Our conservation legacy deserves better.

VOTE NO ON AMENDMENT 83.

10/29/2026

Writing

🐾 Colorado, we need your voice today!

Please take 5 minutes to submit a comment supporting a ban on recreational prairie dog shooting on public lands. Prairie dogs are a keystone species that support healthy grasslands and countless other animals. They deserve protection, not recreational killing.

Every comment counts, and the deadline is tomorrow, October 29, at 11:59 PM!

📝 Submit your comment today: [https://engagecpw.org/pwc-public-comment](https://engagecpw.org/pwc-public-comment)

Please speak up for Colorado’s wildlife and share this post to spread the word! 💚

10/29/2026

Good morning from Krypton!

10/29/2026

Goodnight from Keyni, busy excavating!

Keyni and Katniss both love burrowing under their doghouse.

10/28/2026

🚨 COLORADO — THERE ARE ONLY A FEW DAYS LEFT TO VOTE!
One ballot measure could undo decades of progress in wildlife management. Amendment 83 is a threat to Colorado’s wildlife, and we cannot afford to ignore it.
If passed, Amendment 83 could open the door to bringing back steel leghold traps, snares, bear baiting, wildlife killing contests, and virtually unlimited killing of wildlife — while stripping Colorado Parks and Wildlife of its authority to manage wildlife responsibly.
This isn’t simply about hunting and fishing. It’s about protecting the science-based safeguards, conservation progress, and common-sense regulations that keep Colorado’s wildlife populations and ecosystems healthy.
Once these protections are undermined, getting them back could be an uphill battle — with wildlife paying the price.
🗳️ Your vote matters. Vote NO on Amendment 83.
Don’t wait until the last minute. Make sure your ballot is cast, and remind your friends and family to vote NO on 83!

10/28/2026

This Election Day, Coloradans will cast their vote on Amendment 83, a dangerous ballot measure that would enshrine the right to hunt, fish, and harvest using “traditional methods” in the Colorado Constitution.

“Traditional methods” is a euphemism for cruel and unsporting methods that Colorado voters banned, like steel-jaw leghold traps, strangling snares, luring animals with bait and chasing them with hounds, and killing mother bears emerging from dens in the spring with cubs in tow. If passed, Amendment 83 would allow use of these methods, undoing decades of progress.

Other states where "right to hunt” amendments have passed are already seeing the harmful consequences. Florida, which passed its right to hunt amendment in 2024, opened a controversial spring black bear hunt for the first time in decades, allowing hunters to shoot mother bears with dependent cubs as they emerge from their dens. Efforts to regulate night fishing, which disorients nesting sea turtles due to lights on boats, were also thwarted in Florida due to fishers claiming a right to fish.

Amendment 83 would severely limit Colorado’s ability to pass laws and implement regulations to protect wildlife, instead elevating killing over conservation and undermining progress the state has made on nonlethal coexistence measures.

COLORADO RESIDENTS: Legal methods of hunting and fishing are not at risk in Colorado. Amendment 83 is undemocratic, cruel, and unnecessary. Please help protect wildlife by voting NO on Amendment 83 and encouraging family and friends to do the same!

📸: hildeanna

10/27/2026

10/26/2026

THE ANIMALS CAN’T HIRE LAWYERS. COLORADO, WE HAVE TO SPEAK FOR THEM.

Colorado’s wildlife is already facing a troubling reality: even when wildlife managers establish limits, those protections can become the next target in court.

In July 2026, Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Commission adopted a daily bag limit of two animals per species for Colorado’s 17 furbearer species. That is still a staggering number of lives one person could legally take over the course of a year. Yet now, Safari Club International and Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation are suing the Commission to overturn those limits.

Their October 2 lawsuit argues that CPW’s Commission violated state administrative procedures by adopting a limit that was not among the proposals presented for public comment. The plaintiffs want the two-animal limit vacated and enforcement stopped while the issue is reconsidered.

But buried in this legal battle is a much bigger warning for Colorado—and a reason Amendment 83 should frighten anyone who cares about wildlife.

What happens when the very authority responsible for protecting wildlife is challenged for placing reasonable limits on how many animals can be killed?

Now imagine that fight under Amendment 83.

Amendment 83 would enshrine hunting and fishing rights in Colorado’s Constitution while introducing language about “traditional” and “preferred” methods. Its implications for wildlife regulation deserve serious scrutiny. If passed, it would give opponents of wildlife protections another constitutional argument to take into court whenever the state limits how, when, or how many animals can be killed.

We should be asking a terrifying question: How much harder and more expensive will it become to protect wildlife when every limit is treated as a potential infringement on a constitutional right?

The animals that have no voice in a courtroom, no lobbyists, and no way to defend themselves against an expanding list of legal hunting and trapping opportunities.

They depend on science, responsible management, and regulations that recognize wildlife as more than a resource to be harvested.

And Colorado taxpayers will be left paying the legal bills as these disputes work their way through the courts.

This is not simply about whether someone can take two animals instead of more. It is about the future of wildlife management in Colorado and whether we preserve the ability to establish reasonable safeguards before more animals pay the price.

Wildlife belongs to all of us. It should not take a courtroom battle to give it a chance to survive.

Amendment 83 is not a harmless measure about preserving outdoor traditions. Its constitutional language could have consequences far beyond what voters are being asked to imagine.

Once constitutional language is adopted, changing it is extraordinarily difficult. We need to think about the animals that will live with the consequences long after this election is over.

Their lives are not unlimited. Our responsibility to protect them should not be either.

VOTE NO ON AMENDMENT 83. Protect Colorado’s wildlife. Protect science-based management. Keep wildlife policy in the hands of accountable public institutions, not tied up in endless legal battles.

10/22/2026

Today’s FAQ on 83:

Q: Have other states that adopted similar amendments have problems and unintended consequences?

A: Yes. Other states have seen litigation a policy distortion. Nebraska's biologists were overruled on mountain lion management due to constitutional language. Florida and Wisconsin also have faced lawsuits and conflicts between the courts and wildlife agencies.