Colorado Reintroduced Wolves. They Might Have the Wrong Personalities to Succeed

When wolves were first released in remote parts of Grand County, Colorado, one year ago, researcher Marc Bekoff noticed differences in the way the individual wolves reacted. While two of the five wolves remained cautious — staying in their holding cages until coaxed out — another bolted as soon as the opportunity arose. A growing body of research says these variations in behavior can be explained by the personality of the wolves in question, but researchers and government officials don’t necessarily agree on how to take these personalities into account.

After a slim majority of Coloradans voted in favor of the reintroduction in 2020, it has been a source of controversy in the state, as ranchers and other groups like hunters oppose the presence of these carnivores. The choice of which wolves to reintroduce has been influenced by farmers who fear attacks on their livestock, a move some researchers have criticized.

Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Boulder, tells Sentient he’s frustrated with the way the Colorado reintroduction was carried out. He believes the wolves should have been carefully selected based on their personalities, and he’s concerned the program will be unsuccessful, which he feels would be a loss for the ecosystem.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) — the agency responsible for the reintroduction — says they did not consider individual wolf personalities when selecting wolves, as they contend “it is impossible to know that type of information.”

“You just don’t have these large carnivore reintroduction rewilding projects very often,” Bekoff says. If it fails, he believes there’s unlikely to be another attempt. But these efforts can have value: the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone Park in 1995 stabilized the ecosystem, highlighting the ecological benefits that these natural predators can bring.

Researchers Question How Wolves Were Picked

Richard Reading, vice president of science and conservation at a non-profit invertebrate zoo called Butterfly Pavilion, located in Colorado, tells Sentient that when it came to selecting wolves for the reintroduction, those involved settled for whichever ones they could capture. “They tried to get wolves that weren’t involved in recent [livestock] depredations,” he says, a plan that ultimately failed. Unlike Bekoff, however, Reading believes the reintroduction will end up being successful.

Reading is a commissioner at Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission, which oversees CPW. He stressed, however, that he isn’t speaking to Sentient on behalf of the Commission, but in his role at Butterfly Pavillion.

The reason that CPW wanted to select wolves that hadn’t attacked livestock, says Reading, is because “it’s no question” that opposition to the reintroduction is primarily coming from ranchers. Historically that’s been true too: gray wolves were native to Colorado until they were eradicated in the 1940s, because they kept killing livestock and game.

The Middle Park Stockgrowers Association launched a petition to temporarily delay further wolf reintroductions during a Commission meeting on November 14th. A total of 26 organizations —  including Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, Colorado Farm Bureau and Colorado Wool Growers Association — have joined the petition.

Under the Colorado Wildlife Act, the “Restoration of the gray wolf to the state must be designed to resolve conflicts with persons engaged in ranching and farming in this state.”

Yet selecting wolves that might be more reluctant to attack livestock isn’t necessarily a good strategy for conservation outcomes, says Liv Baker, a conservation behaviorist at ethics think tank PAN Works. “Maybe there might be fewer predations on farmed animals, but what does that mean for their ability to hunt overall and their ultimate survival?,” says Baker, whose PhD focused on animal personalities in a reintroduction context. “You want diversity of personality because that leads to resilience of the group.”

Since the release of the wolves, the reintroduction program has been mired in controversy. After a wolf was believed to have attacked a string of livestock animals starting in the spring and lasting through the summer, the state wildlife agency announced they’d captured a wolf pack with the intention to move them. Wildlife groups blasted the response as being “driven by politics” and a “death sentence” for the pack’s three pups. The father of the captured pack later died in captivity, though a full necropsy that might determine the cause has not yet been conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“We faced a challenging management situation with the Copper Creek Pack in Middle Park and resolved it through a unique wildlife capture operation that will enable the pack to continue to contribute to wolf restoration in Colorado in the future,” a spokesperson for the CPW tells Sentient. The spokesperson also characterized “wolf-human conflict” as “exceedingly rare.”

Still, the research backs up the warnings from wildlife groups: A study of wolf relocations to reduce wolf-livestock conflict concluded that relocated wolves had a lower survival rate than others, and survivors of relocations often killed livestock in their new locations.

Selecting Animals Based on Personality Could Help Boost Reintroduction Success

A growing body of research shows animal personality can have an impact on the success or failure of a reintroduction. Shier foxes were found to be more likely to survive a reintroduction program than their bolder counterparts, for example; in contrast, bolder mink had a higher chance of success in a similar program than their shier siblings.

It’s not quite that simple, however, at least according to Baker. It’s the mix that matters. In other words, as diversity of personality leads to the resilience of the group, having only shy foxes or bold mink could be detrimental to long term survival.

How an animal acts might be influenced by the stress of a relocation or other environmental factors — but do such changes mean a permanent shift in the animal’s personality? “I think that there’s stability to the underlying foundation of personality, but the expression of oneself can change as a result of environmental events and trauma,” Baker says.

Kristy Ferraro, an ecosystem ecologist at Memorial University, suggests an initial “test” release could offer a path forward, first selecting wolves that are less likely to come in conflict with humans. “Maybe we need to start with animals that can help really build and foster that relationship,” she says. Later on, after humans have adjusted to the presence of wolves in their communities, wolves more likely to come into conflict with humans could then be released.

How Can We Determine a Wolf’s Personality?

Research into wolf personalities is still in its early days. In 2015, Thomas Gable, an ecologist at the University of Minnesota, and his colleagues started fitting wolves in the state’s Voyageurs National Park with GPS collars to investigate, among other things, how wolves hunt, finding some lay in wait to ambush beavers.

Yet Gable also found that wolves within the same social group showed different levels of willingness to wait. The results, published in a 2022 paper, suggested that the differences most likely came down to variations in personality. But Gable was quick to note the limits of his research. For example, he can’t quantify the specific personality traits — like whether waiting longer is a sign of patience or persistence — that explain the different feeding behaviors.

He also sees limits to GPS research. If he had a choice between the data he’d collected, or the opportunity to sit and watch wolves and make determinations about their personalities that way, Gable said he’d choose the latter. “That will never happen in environments like Minnesota where it’s densely forested,” he says.

The Future of Wolves in Colorado

For now, wildlife officials in Colorado are still planning on capturing and releasing another round of wolves, a total of 15 between December 2024 and March 2025. It seems that this time the CPW will try to stick to the plan of selecting wolves who are not known to have been involved in repeated livestock depredations.

Bekoff says that people he’s talked to at CPW think the reintroduction is likely to fail in the long term, with some saying that they regret what they’ve done to the wolves. “There’s no way you’re going to bring in another 15 wolves without there being major problems,” he said.

In response, CPW said they would not comment on “hearsay” but added, in part, that the reintroduction effort has not been a failure. “Our efforts this past year have resulted in seven surviving adult wolves and five pups from the initial release of ten adult wolves in December 2023, which is an achievement from a biological perspective,” CPW tells Sentient.

Reading has a different perspective, however. He sees those who believe the project will fail as tending to be animal rights supporters, whereas conservation biologists and those in upper management at CPW have higher hopes for success. Still, he admits those on the ground seem to have a more jaded view of the chances. “I get the sense that there’s less support in the lower levels of the agency than there is in the upper levels of the agency,” he says.

Francisco Santiago-Ávila, science and advocacy director at Washington Wildlife First, says reintroductions don’t take into account what the wolves want, even though they have the most to lose. “These conversations revolve way too much around the science,” he says, “when they should be about the ethics and our relationships to other beings.”

Baker thinks humans can do more than wolves can do in order to reduce conflict. She suggests the introduction of deterrents like flashing lights or brightly colored flags, which research supports as ways to improve human-wolf coexistence. CPW denied a rancher a permit to kill wolves in May on the basis that they’d “delayed using or refused to use other nonlethal techniques that could have prevented or minimized depredations.”

Both Bekoff and Reading mentioned that the wolves from British Columbia would be killed if they weren’t relocated. For Reading, that means giving the wolves a second chance: “Taking those wolves and putting them into a different habitat and giving them a chance to survive, I think is a better option for them as individuals.”