While the Colorado legislature is tasked with cutting $750 million from the state’s budget, Colorado Parks and Wildlife is overspending on the “reintroduction” of wolves into the state.

Last week we ran a story about livestock producers submitting nearly $600,000 in claims due to wolf depredation, which would bankrupt the state’s wolf depredation compensation fund.

So far, the state has spent more than $5.1 million over three years to bring more wolves into Colorado.

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It would seem to me that the state has more important work to do and to fund than bringing more wolves into the state and causing more depredation claims.

Maybe they should concentrate on more pressing issues like affordable housing, education and healthcare.

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I believe if the lawmakers asked Colorado residents if they want more money for education or more wolves, they would probably vote for education.

Unfortunately, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission denied a citizen petition asking for a pause in the wolf reintroduction program.

Of course, CPW Director Jeff Davis recommended that the commission reject the petition. In his Dec. 21 memo to the commission, Davis claimed that introducing more wolves would reduce livestock-wolf conflicts, according to a Colorado Politics article.

“Forcing the division to halt its reintroduction efforts indefinitely — as the petition seeks to do — would frustrate the division’s ability to establish a self-sustaining wolf population while likely perpetuating the relatively high conflict rate experienced by some ranchers over the past year,” Davis wrote.

He claimed science guiding wolf reintroduction — and he didn’t cite a source for that information — says individual wolves who are not in packs “move unpredictably” and are more likely to rely on livestock as a food source, Marianne Goodland wrote in Colorado Politics.

“In contrast, once wolves form breeding pairs and packs, they will establish more predictable territories and will hunt as a group instead of as individuals and therefore may reasonably be expected to successfully prey upon elk and deer more consistently,” Davis wrote.

I’m sorry but that sounds ridiculous, and I don’t believe a word of it.

Wolves are wild animals and there is no way anyone can predict what they choose to eat.

These animal activists need to be reined in as they are just choosing which animals should live and which should die. In Colorado, for instance, they choose wolves over livestock.

And in the Pacific Northwest they are choosing one species of owl over another. I recently read a story in Cowboy State Daily that federal officials plan to kill 500,000 barred owls in the Pacific Northwest so they can save the spotted owls. If you want to read more about this go to https://tinyurl.com/ybadk8kb.

This is madness and it needs to stop.