Colorado wildlife officials on Wednesday revisited the agency’s handling of violations involving protected species, prompting renewed debate over whether current penalties are sufficient.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commissioner Rebecca Niemiec on Wednesday urged the agency to impose stronger penalties — including the possibility of criminal charges — against the hunter who admitted accidentally killing a wolf in northwest Colorado.

The commission reviewed the case involving a hunter who shot a wolf last January after mistaking it for a coyote. Following an investigation by CPW and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the hunter was fined $139.50 and assessed five license-suspension points.

After the incident, the hunter promptly reported it and cooperated with law enforcement during the investigation, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Laura Clellan.

The wolf killed — a female known as #2504 — was among the 15 brought to Colorado from British Columbia in January 2025.

The wildlife agency had two options to consider. One was regulatory, which would allow the case to be settled outside the courts. The other option — statutory — would have resulted in an automatic court summons, fines of up to $100,000 and a year in jail.

The penalty is not enough, Niemiec said at the meeting Wednesday at Otero College in La Junta. She told the commission that she questions whether the penalty assessed truly served “justice.”

Niemiec said such a low penalty would not be enough to deter people from killing wolves in the future.

She asked whether Colorado Parks and Wildlife had reached out to the district attorney to find out if charges would be filed against the hunter — a question that Ty Petersburg, the state agency’s lead law enforcement official, could not answer.

He hinted that such a case would likely be a low priority for a district attorney and said he fully stands behind the decisions of wildlife officers on the case.

“There’s some danger in putting fines so high for an accident where people just walk away from it,” Petersburg said. “We really have no compliance and we want people to do the right thing.”

This hunter did all the right things in reporting the incident, he added.

Niemiec pressed the issue again, saying she was not satisfied with the explanation and asking a second time whether the case had been referred to the district attorney — and, if not, why not — given her view that the incident constituted a statutory violation.

Petersburg repeated the answers about the difference between regulatory and statutory violations and added that the wildlife agency chose the regulatory option because officers believed it was the most effective way to cite the hunter for the violation.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife does not have any discretion about the penalty, Petersburg told the commission, because it’s set in statute.

“Reasonable minds can disagree on what the right thing is, and a human being made a mistake here that he was truly remorseful for, so I hope that we all would avoid wanting to air each other’s worst moments out in the public and when somebody comes to us remorseful, when they do everything right, we want to incentivize that behavior,” Petersburg added.

He also noted that U.S. Fish & Wildlife had handed the case back to Colorado Parks and Wildlife because it was not a federal prosecution priority.

Niemiec responded that the penalty imposed was not a huge one and doesn’t send the message that there would be large penalties for killing a wolf.

“We want to reserve the hammer” for people who are doing nefarious things, Petersburg replied.

Commission Chair Jay Tutchton suggested Colorado Parks and Wildlife ask the Attorney General to step in as the prosecutor if the local district attorney passes on cases like this and try to avoid a scenario, in which, he said, the local district attorney does not take action due to “local political pressure.”

That is also not likely, according to Petersburg.

“They have a very small window for when they will participate,” he told Tutchton.

Niemiec joined the commission after the legislative session ended in January and has not yet been officially confirmed by the state Senate.

Wednesday was her second meeting as a commissioner. At her first, she presented a study on hunting bag limits — research she conducted and funded by an anonymous donor to the Center for Human-Carnivore Coexistence and the Animal-Human Policy Center at Colorado State University, where she is an associate professor.

The study was published just one day before the CPW meeting. The company that conducted it pays its respondents, who sign up online, for their opinions.

The commission voted, 6-5, to approve the hunting bag limit proposed by Niemiec, which was not on the commission’s agenda and was announced after public comment had ended. That kept members of the public from commenting on a much lower bag limit than the one before the commission.

That led to a complaint from two hunting organizations that the vote violated the state’s Administrative Procedures Act. The commission is slated to discuss the legal challenge in an executive session on Thursday.