Colorado’s Constitution Is Not A Wildlife Management Plan - Right to Hunt?

"Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.” —Edward Abbey

Our Constitution should preserve the principles that allow future generations to govern themselves—not prescribe wildlife management techniques that science may someday outgrow.

Colorado has amended its Constitution many times over the past 150 years. But its best amendments have established enduring principles of government—not settled policy debates one side fears it may someday lose.

The answer is surprisingly difficult to find.

Hunting and fishing are legal in Colorado today, just as they have been throughout our state’s history. Colorado law already recognizes hunting, trapping, and fishing as the primary methods for accomplishing necessary wildlife harvests, while Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) manages wildlife through professional biologists, peer-reviewed science, and public accountability.

No court has threatened to outlaw hunting. No pending law would abolish fishing. The closest recent challenge—a ballot measure concerning mountain lion hunting—was resolved exactly as Colorado’s democratic process is supposed to work: voters debated the issue and rendered their decision.

Even Initiative 302’s out-of-state funders insist the amendment “does not expand or restrict any current laws.” If that’s true, why rewrite Colorado’s founding document?

And if something does change, voters deserve honesty about what that change actually is.

Constitutions exist to establish the framework of government. They are intentionally difficult to amend because they are meant to endure. They are not the place to constitutionalize today’s policy preferences against tomorrow’s political uncertainties.

The text of Initiative 302, the proposed Right to Hunt in Colorado, tells a different story.

It does more than recognize hunting and fishing as lawful activities. It declares they are the “preferred means” of managing fish and wildlife populations, protects “traditional methods,” and limits future regulation to what is “necessary for sound scientific wildlife conservation and management.”

Those phrases sound reassuring.

In constitutional law, undefined words rarely remain undefined. Courts give them meaning.

Once those words become part of Colorado’s Constitution, they no longer belong to the campaign promoting them. They belong to judges who will interpret them in future disputes long after today’s advertisements and campaign promises have disappeared.

That matters because wildlife management is not static.

Science evolves.

Constitutions endure.

Wildlife professionals adapt.

If future wildlife managers determine that changing ecological conditions require different management strategies, Initiative 302 invites legal disputes over whether those decisions satisfy newly created constitutional standards. Questions that should be resolved through science and professional judgment could instead become questions of constitutional interpretation.

The principal advocates funding and promoting Initiative 302 have publicly pointed to litigation in Wisconsin and Florida involving similar constitutional language. Those cases—including disputes surrounding Wisconsin’s 2021 wolf hunt and conservation measures affecting protected sea turtles in Florida—illustrate how constitutional hunting and fishing provisions can become central issues in litigation over wildlife policy. Whether Colorado courts would reach similar conclusions is impossible to predict. The lesson is simpler: vague constitutional language inevitably invites judicial interpretation.

Out-of-state backers also ask voters to imagine Colorado becoming Oregon, warning that hunting, fishing, farming, and ranching are perpetually one election away from extinction. That is an argument about hypothetical future politics—not about the language Colorado voters are actually being asked to place in their Constitution.

According to Colorado campaign finance records, the campaign promoting Initiative 302 has already received at least $1 million from the Wisconsin-based International Order of T. Roosevelt. In a recent podcast with Montana-based hunter influencer Randy Newberg, one campaign leader, Dan Gates, said he anticipates backers to spend $10 million to $12 million to pass the measure. Out-of-state organizations have every right to participate in Colorado’s political process. But when organizations headquartered elsewhere are prepared to spend that kind of money to rewrite Colorado’s Constitution, Coloradans have an even greater responsibility to judge the amendment by its actual language—not simply by the campaign built to sell it.

Nor should petition signatures be mistaken for public consensus. Qualifying an initiative simply earns it a place on the ballot. The real decision comes after voters read the amendment itself—not campaign talking points.

Colorado’s hunting and fishing traditions deserve respect. They are an important part of our conservation heritage.

So is the Constitution.

Our Constitution should preserve the principles that allow future generations to govern themselves—not prescribe wildlife management techniques that science may someday outgrow. It should remain a framework for democratic government, leaving wildlife professionals, elected officials, and the public free to adapt as ecosystems, science, and Colorado itself continue to change.

Coloradans do not have to choose between supporting hunting and fishing and protecting the Constitution. We can—and should—do both.

Before casting a ballot, read Initiative 302 carefully. Then ask whether Colorado’s Constitution should be amended to address a problem that Colorado law has already solved. For more information see Protect Colorado’s Constitution.

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David Kane is a wildlife biologist, legal and policy advisor, and co-founder of Coloradans for Responsible Science-based Wildlife Management. He splits his time between the Western Slope and Front Range, and has conducted wildlife research, hunted, fished, mountaineered, and backcountry skied throughout Colorado for more than three and a half decades.