2 westword.com WESTWORD MAY 29-JUNE 4, 2025 | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | W ® 5 HAS DENVER GONE TO THE DOGS? The city’s rolling over for our four-legged friends. BY WESTWORD STAFF 12 GROWING SEASON Local artists are creating amazing looks out of trash for Meow Wolf’s next trashion show. BY KRISTEN FIORE 14 RISE AND SHINE Start your day at one of the ten best breakfast joints in Denver. BY MOLLY MARTIN 17 THE MOUNTAINS ARE CALLING Festivarians will soon be heading to Telluride for the 52nd annual Bluegrass. 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FBI PHOTO, DESIGN BY MONIKA SWIDERSKI “WOLF WATCH,” CATIE CHESHIRE, MAY 15 T H E W O L F ’ S A T T H E D O O R As a fourth-generation rancher from the Sandhills, I was surprised by the payouts to impacted ranchers. Ranching is hard and the profi t margin low, even with 4,000 head. One winter blizzard killed about 100 head, maybe half a dozen killed by coyotes, no compensation. I fi rst voted no against the wolf restora- tion, but then yes when I read that ranchers would be compensated. Paying market value for a dead cow or calf seemed fair. Weight reduction due to a wolf in the area seems questionable. The state paying $370,000 in claims makes no sense. Bill Vieregg Denver I wish all you Denver people could come out to a real ranch and see what your votes have done. Wolves are not poodles or doodles or all the kind of cute dogs you walk to the parks and sit with on patios. They are wild animals, and we do not want them on the loose. Thanks a lot. John Martin Grand County Welcome to the wolf dialogue. After studying Biology at the University of Den- ver, and Forestry and Wildlife Manage- ment at Colorado State University, I began a career with the National Park Service at Rocky Mountain National Park that took me in 1980 to Yellowstone. There, from 1985 to 1997, I was a member of the Yellowstone Center for Resources team that restored the wolf to the park. As the principal educator for wolf recovery, I gave 400 talks and responded to thousands of inquiries about the process. After I retired in 1997, I led wolf fi eld courses for the Yel- lowstone Institute. More recently, I have been working with the Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Project. At CSU, I was introduced to “the father of wildlife management in America” Aldo Leopold’s 1949 book of essays, A Sand County Almanac. His essay “Thinking Like a Moun- tain” relates his killing of a wolf, and then over his long career as forester and wildlife management professor, he recognized the essential role of wolves in preventing de- struction of forage plants by deer. Eighty years ago, the annihilation of wolves was chronicled in Young and Gold- man’s 1944 The Wolves of North America. In his review of the book, Aldo Leopold wondered how it happened that Young and Goldman hadn’t acknowledged the deep history of the subject. He wrote: “If wolves were as destructive a force as they implied, why had the continental wolf population failed to wipe out its own mammalian food supply millennia before Europeans arrived?” He also asked, “Are we really better off without wolves in the wilder parts of our forests and ranges?” And he wrote, “Why, in the necessary process of extirpating wolves from the livestock ranges of Wyoming and Montana, were not some of the uninjured animals used to restock the Yellowstone?” Fifty years later, we returned wolves to Yellowstone. I have been watching the results in the park and in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming ever since. Unfortunately, the thirty years of data available from the park and the states has been ignored by opponents of wolf restoration in Colorado. The anxiety about the notion that wolves will wipe out Colorado’s elk is misguided; in all three northern Rocky Mountain states, elk are more numerous today than they were in 1995. Data from the northern Rocky Mountain states could ease the concern about the demise of the livestock industry, if anyone paid attention. Over a fi fteen-year period, wolves killed one head of cattle per 10,000 present, and three sheep out of 10,000 per year, on average. Hardly a threat to the industry, Now, that is how wolves affect those activities. What is far more important is a key statement from John A. Vucetich’s 2021 Restoring the Balance: “The health of ecosystems inhabited by large herbivores depends on the cascading trophic effects of predation.” Norman A. Bishop Bozeman, Montana
