By Eric Washburn

I love to hunt. Every year I try to hunt big game in Colorado and waterfowl in Louisiana.

This year, I applied for five Colorado big game licenses — elk, deer, pronghorn, moose and bighorn sheep. I drew a moose tag and an elk tag and will be chasing them around northwest Colorado this coming October.

So, when I heard about the “Right to Hunt” Constitutional Amendment, I got pretty excited. I certainly don’t want to lose the opportunity to exercise my passion for hunting every fall.

But as I read the language of the ballot measure, I started to ask questions.

I have never felt my ability to hunt in Colorado was ever in any jeopardy, so why do we need to clutter up Colorado’s Constitution with unnecessary language to address a made-up problem?

Hunting and fishing are already legal in Colorado. In fact, Title 33, the legal code governing parks and wildlife in Colorado states, “The state shall utilize hunting, trapping and fishing as the primary methods of effecting necessary wildlife harvests.” C.R.S. 33-1-101 (2026). So, this amendment solves no demonstrated legal problem.

Moreover, the Right to Hunt initiative does far more than recognize a general right to hunt and fish. It would protect the use of “traditional methods,” of hunting in our state Constitution, likely overturning ethical restrictions on hunting Coloradans have previously established. This could mean the return of cruel steel-jawed
leghold traps, which Colorado voters banned in 1996. It could also mean the return of bear baiting with jelly donuts, wildlife killing contests, hunting bears with dogs, and spring bear hunting, which was banned in 1992 because it leads to killing of mother bears and the likely eventual starvation of their cubs. And rather than prioritizing better wildlife conservation, the Right to Hunt measure creates endless opportunities to sue CPW if the agency chooses to limit hunting to conserve and recover our wildlife.

The Right to Hunt measure also declares hunting and fishing the “preferred means” of managing wildlife populations. The problem is that good, responsible wildlife management requires a full toolbox. Hunting and fishing can be important and effective tools, but so are habitat conservation, vaccination to prevent disease transmission, use of non-lethal coexistence measures, relocation and other science-based methods of wildlife management. The Constitution should not tell wildlife professionals which tool is preferred before they have even evaluated the problem, elevating killing over all the other tools.

For example, for two centuries Colorado has been a killing field for beavers. Today, we have 3 million fewer beavers than we need to have healthy ecosystems and to store the hundreds of billions of gallons of water our parched landscape needs. This summer, for the first time, the CPW Commission voted to establish daily bag limits on hunting beavers and 16 other furbearers like foxes and pine martens, which until now have been killed without any limits. This Right to Hunt ballot measure is an obvious attempt to overturn those pro-conservation bag limits.

The Right to Hunt initiative reminds me of the climate-denier approach to climate change –=— locking in traditional fossil fuels as the preferred means of generating energy, while taking important tools like renewable energy and electric vehicles that we need to prevent climate change out of the toolbox.

There are a lot of hunters like me in Colorado who are committed to ethical hunting, the recovery and conservation of wildlife and science-based wildlife management.

We oppose the Right to Hunt Constitutional Amendment.

Many of us have gotten together to form Colorado Hunters and Anglers for Sensible Conservation to educate the public about the problems with this proposed constitutional amendment, in hopes the public will see through this anti-wildlife power grab.

If hunting in Colorado is going to survive, then wildlife management needs to be able to evolve to meet the expectations of the majority of the public. This is not the wild west of the 1800s, and we should not be locked into a system that prioritizes killing over all other methods of wildlife management. Today, we know so much
more about the importance of recovering our endangered wildlife, promoting biodiversity and ensuring our ecosystems are diverse, healthy, and resilient — goals that can only be met using a wide range of tools.

In the end, the biggest threat to hunting will be initiatives like this Right to Hunt Constitutional Amendment that attempt to freeze in place a tired, old, unsophisticated system that is out of sync with modern sensibilities about wildlife conservation and management.

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