The recent reporting on Colorado’s wolf depredation payouts exceeding $700,000 highlights a critical problem with the current approach to wolf recovery: current mainstream systems focus on compensation and ineffective reactive non-lethals. These systems are not designed to prevent conflict but attempts to appease tensions after losses occur. This is coexistence, but we can co-thrive. 

As a range rider and founder of Project GRIPH (Guarding the Respective Interests of Predators and Humans), I’ve spent more than 13 years working directly with ranchers in Washington state to prevent wolf–livestock conflict before it happens. The work is hands-on and demanding, maintaining a consistent human presence on the landscape, monitoring livestock, removing carcasses that attract predators, and promptly hazing wolves when nearby. These tools require a specific mindset, but they work. On the ranches where we’ve consistently applied them, we’ve eliminated wolf depredation and conditioned wolves away from developing patterns of preying on livestock.

When proactive prevention is prioritized, ranchers and wolves can move past the current status quo of coexistence. When there is no conflict, ranchers do not suffer from the presence of wolves nor do wolves suffer the consequences of ineffective non-lethal tools.

The debate in Colorado has largely focused on whether compensation payments are too generous or not generous enough. The question should be why are we not choosing to prevent conflict and instead paying for conflict after it happens. 

The compensation money given to ranchers to coexist could have been used to create an effective program to prevent conflict. Prior to wolves ever being released I have met with numerous ranchers, wildlife commissioners and advocates who all wanted help and wanted to see Colorado succeed. The only person who did not want to meet was the Director of CPW, Jeff Davis. 

Conflict is a choice. Director Davis made Colorado’s choice clear: pay for conflict, not prevention.

Daniel Curry

Colville, Washington

Executive director, Project GRIPH

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