A bill that sought to remove hunting and fishing as the main tools for wildlife management and instead replace it with “the best available wildlife and ecological science,” will not advance in the Colorado state legislature. Members of the Colorado House Agriculture, Water & Natural Resources Committee voted it down12-3.
Prior to the hearing, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation distributed a call-to-action email to its Colorado membership, which sent nearly 600 messages to lawmakers urging them to reject it. RMEF warned the legislation would change state wildlife statutes, frustrate the practices of Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) biologists and game managers, and fly in the face of the North American Wildlife Conservation Model.
The hearing included nearly four hours of public testimony including many speaking out against the measure.
“The very nature of the bill suggests that CPW is currently intentionally dismissing the application of best available science, which is an assertion that I am sure the hundreds of scientists and wildlife biologists at CPW would contest,” said Gaspar Perricone, RMEF representative. “In addition, because best available science is often subjective and is not defined in the bill, it likely would expose the agency to frivolous lawsuits from third-party entities on the occasion that particular scientific reports were not incorporated in CPW decision-making. HB 1258, in my opinion, with all due respect to the sponsor, is a bit of a social solution in search of a scientific problem that doesn’t appear to exist within CPW.”
One Colorado man warned of the bill’s potential economic implications. Justin Nolan, a fly shop owner and RMEF volunteer, said 3,200 anglers visit his business annually, which sells about 1,000 licenses each year that generate $40,000 for CPW.
“What’s lost in these numbers that shops like mine provide is the additional dollars that are afforded to CPW through Pittman-Robertson dollars,” said Nolan. “Those dollars are calculated based on the number of hunting and fishing licenses sold here in Colorado and it’s an exponential factor. According to the 2023 fiscal year, $32 million through excise taxes were provided to Colorado Parks and Wildlife through Pittman-Robertson dollars. This bill, 1258, seeks to upend the funding.”
Nolan also said the bill’s contents combined with some of what he heard during the hearing equated to more attacks on wildlife management and was “nothing more than a re-litigation of Proposition 127.”
Proposition 127 was a November 2024 ballot initiative that sought to ban the hunting of mountain lions and bobcats. Colorado voters rejected it by more than a quarter million votes, giving state wildlife management practices, bolstered by hunting, a clear and decisive victory.
“We use hunting as a tool simply because it seems to be the most effective, not just for funding, but also for scientific wildlife management, meaning that when we’re managing certain game species, we do it in concert with managing other game species, non-game species and species of all kinds,” Luke Wiedel, lead RMEF policy volunteer in Colorado, told the Post Independent.
RMEF has a long conservation history in Colorado. Dating back to 1987, RMEF and its partners completed 904 conservation and hunting heritage outreach projects in the Centennial State with a combined value of nearly $213 million. These projects conserved or enhanced 512,504 acres of habitat and opened or improved public access to 120,252 acres.
(Photo credit: Colorado Parks and Wildlife)