"A small nonprofit with an innovative approach to predator-livestock conflicts is trying to ease Colorado ranchers’ concerns about wolves."
"DEL NORTE, Colo. — On an overcast spring day, Keri Brandt Off was helping her friend, Kyler Brown, move and tag his cattle when a heifer broke loose from the herd. It charged at a cowboy tying down her calf, who just managed to tag the baby cow’s ear before scrambling back to his horse.
“She’s just gonna stomp the shit out of a wolf,” Brown exclaimed in delight.
Like Brown, many other ranchers in the San Luis Valley, an agricultural notch in the Rockies near the border with New Mexico, have been anxiously contemplating what may happen to their cattle if the wolves recently reintroduced to the state reestablish themselves in the surrounding mountains. But a few producers have been buoyed by a little-heralded approach to predator-livestock conflicts: changing how they handle their cattle so that the animals respond differently to predators."
Story and photos by Jake Bolster for Inside Climate News August 2, 2026.
