By Eric Washburn

Winston Churchill once said: “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because, as has been said, it is the quality which guarantees all others.”

Until this year, Colorado Parks & Wildlife has allowed hunters to kill as many so-called furbearers, including beavers, foxes and pine martens, as they liked, with no limits. In the face of a lot of pressure from CPW and furbearer hunters, recently a majority of CPW Commission courageously voted to establish, for the first time, ecologically responsible limits of two per person, per day to help guarantee the future health of all 17 of Colorado’s fur bearer species.

The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation — the foundational principles of wildlife management in the United States — requires wildlife be managed using science. For furbearer bag limits to be scientifically valid, they need to be set at levels designed to achieve scientifically determined ecological population targets (e.g., ecological carrying capacity — the maximum population level the habitat can support).

To set such bag limits, CPW would need to know 1) the current population levels, 2) the ecological carrying capacity for each of the 17 furbearers (the population targets), and 3) how much mortality the population of each of these species can absorb and still sustainably maintain ecological-carrying-capacity population levels.

Beavers are a great example. We know the statewide beaver population is about 50,000 animals, where it has been for at least the last 85 years because we kill so many beavers each year. CPW itself stated in its beaver strategy its population goal for beavers is ecological carrying capacity. We also know from a 2022 study published by researchers at CSU, Utah State and the Colorado Natural Heritage Program ecological carrying capacity for beavers in Colorado is at least 2 million to 3 million beavers, and probably more. If we had that many beavers, they would store roughly another half-a-trillion gallons of water behind their dams — exactly what Colorado needs now. The North American Model requires the setting of science-based bag limits that will allow Colorado’s beaver population to grow from about 50,000 to 2 million to 3 million. Consequently, the only scientifically valid daily bag limit for beavers in Colorado is zero.

Though CPW has furbearer population estimates, it does not have good solid data on actual furbearer population levels, nor does the agency know the ecological carrying capacity for each of these species, and thus cannot set defensible, science-based bag limits.

In cases where regulators do not have the data necessary to establish science-based regulations, they apply the well-established “precautionary principle.” This means regulating conservatively to prevent potentially harmful consequences. This is the way we scientifically regulate vaccines, in theory pesticides, as well as other activities that have the potential to produce harmful environmental effects unless carefully controlled.

Since CPW’s recent bag limit proposals of 15 per day, or alternatively eight for some species and four for others, are not based on any of this data or analysis, the limits have no more scientific validity than if they had been produced by a random number generator. Those limits were proposed to appease the politically powerful conservative Colorado hunting lobby that simply wants the unfettered ability to kill as many fur-bearers as is physically possible each day. This is a clear violation of the North American Model and a disservice to our wildlife and to the millions of Coloradans who love our wildlife.

To justify its extremely high bag limit recommendations, CPW indicated there is no scientific evidence that current levels of furbearer hunting is causing population declines among furbearers.

The problem is there is also no scientific evidence showing hunting is not causing population declines.

There is almost no scientific evidence, period.

The only furbearer species for which there appears to be significant data — beavers — shows the statewide population is dramatically below ecological carrying capacity — by millions of animals, in fact. Given this finding, it would not be surprising to find that most, if not all, of our furbearer species are significantly below their ecological carrying capacity levels and thus should not be hunted at all until their populations rise.

Colorado is demographically changing, and along with it, the expectations of the public are changing with respect to wildlife management. There are a lot of hunters like me in Colorado who value effective, transparent, science-based wildlife conservation and regulation of hunting and trapping. We support limits on hunting to recover our beavers and taking other steps to recover the hundreds of other native species that have declined dramatically over the past century, many of which are now headed toward extinction.

Recently, the Animal Human Policy Center conducted a poll of Coloradans on this issue:
• 69% of respondents believed a daily bag limit between 0 and 2 would be most reasonable.
• 63% of respondents indicated their trust in Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) would increase if the agency implemented a daily bag limit of one animal per species.

The vote to approve new fur bearer bag limits by a majority of CPW commissioners reflected the values of the majority of the public over the objections of a narrow range of conservative special interests that represent the 6% of Coloradans who have driven wildlife management policy in Colorado for decades and decades.

Gov. Polis deserves great credit for appointing these commissioners, and of course the commissioners themselves deserve great credit for taking this courageous step to conserve our wildlife.

Eric Washburn is a fifth-generation Coloradan and big game hunter. He lives in Steamboat Springs.