Three weeks after wildlife officials confirmed Colorado’s first livestock kill by wolves in decades, wolves killed a ranch dog in northcentral Colorado.
“Buster was part of my family,” Carlos Atencio told the Colorado Sun. “It’s a huge loss. He was a staple on the ranch.”
Colorado Parks and Wildlife said the attack took place on January 9, 2022, near North Park, a remote community just south of the Colorado-Wyoming border. A second ranch dog survived puncture wounds to its back, side and stomach.
The CPW Commission passed a resolution that allows ranchers to use nonlethal means such as rubber bullets and flagging to haze wolves away from their livestock, however that does not apply to pets.
CPW is still in the process of determining how it will release wolves onto the Colorado landscape after an initiative approving the action to do so barely passed at the polls in November 2020.
“In just a few weeks they’ve killed a heifer and a dog,” Atencio told the Colorado Sun. “What’s going to happen when they start reintroducing these guys?”
(Photo credit: Colorado Parks and Wildlife)