Colorado Voters Refused to Lock Wildlife Rules Into the Constitution

A Wall That Was Never Built

The International Order of T. Roosevelt, the amendment’s largest funder, states that one of its primary goals is to pass constitutional amendments across the country, state by state. Colorado would have been the 25th state with this language. Colorado was supposed to be the next brick in that wall. It was not. On Tuesday, November 3, 2026, 56% of tabulated votes opposed Amendment 83, and 44% supported it. The bar was 55%, because the measure would have changed the state constitution rather than state law. It missed the bar and it lost the popular vote in the same count. Proponents conceded late that night, by text message. The campaign ended there. The argument underneath it did not. A biologist proposes a shorter season for a declining species. The first question is no longer whether the science supports the shorter season. The first question is whether a lawyer can argue that the shorter season burdens a right now printed in the constitution. A judge in Denver, not the 11 citizens who sit on the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission, signs the final order. That was the future the opponents described. Voters declined to buy it.

Amendment 83 was a short document with three moving parts. The first part would have written the right to hunt and fish into the constitution, and it specified that the right includes “traditional methods.” The second part would have made hunting and fishing the state’s preferred method of managing wildlife. Preferred is a ranking, not a permission. The third part set the conditions under which rules could still change. Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the legislature could regulate only “if the law is necessary for sound scientific wildlife conservation and management, public safety, or to preserve the future of hunting and fishing opportunities for all species statewide.” Read plainly, that sentence is a permission. Read as a constitutional test, it is a hurdle every future regulation must clear. The distance between those two readings is the whole fight. State law already protects hunting. What state law does not do is make that protection expensive to remove. A statute is a decision a legislature can revisit in a single session. A constitutional right is a decision the electorate must revisit in a statewide campaign.

The 55% threshold is the mechanical reason the measure lost. It is not the political reason. Constitutional amendments in Colorado need 55% of the vote; a statute can be changed by the legislature. That asymmetry was the product being sold. Dan Gates, executive director of Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management and president of the Colorado Trappers and Predator Hunters Association, described the appeal of durability this way: “This just makes it difficult to change things on a whim’s notice.” [1] After the count, he framed the loss without conceding the argument: “Sportsmen and women didn’t lose anything today. We just fell short of making something sustainable for future generations.” He added: “But we will remain steadfast, and we will continue to stand up for wildlife, hunting, fishing and the agriculture community in the future — because wildlife does not happen by accident.” On the other side, Wayne Pacelle, president of the Center for a Humane Economy and of Animal Wellness Action, read the result as a verdict on the text: “Voters saw through this scheme, despite the trophy hunters outspending the No on 83 coalition more than 3-to-1.” [2] Both statements can be accurate at once. One describes an instrument that was lost. The other describes an instrument that was rejected.

Existing statute is not silent on any of this. Colorado law requires the wildlife agency to “offer the greatest possible variety of wildlife-related recreational opportunity to the people of this state.” It also directs the agency to “utilize hunting, trapping, and fishing as the primary methods of effecting necessary wildlife harvest.” So the preference the amendment sought is already policy. What it is not is entrenched. That was the trade the proponents wanted: less flexibility now, less risk later. It is also the trade the opponents refused: less flexibility now means less capacity to respond later. The mechanics were never in dispute. The price was.

What “Traditional Methods” Cannot Define

A statute is a decision a legislature can revisit in a single session; a constitutional amendment is a decision the electorate must revisit in a statewide campaign. That is why the proponents wanted the amendment. It is also why the opponents asked what else the new text might reach. Where the standard is precise, the measurement is predictable. Where the standard is a phrase, the measurement belongs to whoever is holding the ruler. Colorado’s measure was built around two phrases. Neither one arrived with a definition attached. The first is “traditional methods.” The second is “sound scientific wildlife conservation and management.” The undefined terms are the drafting. Jess Beaulieu, assistant director of the University of Denver Animal Law Program and a member of the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission, wrote an analysis of the amendment that isolates the problem. Her formulation: “The central problem is not that the amendment protects hunting. It is that the terms it uses are so open-ended that no one can predict how courts will apply them.” [1] “Traditional methods” carries no settled meaning in Colorado law. Leg-hold traps are old. Baiting a bear to a shooting position is old. If traditional means old, those bans are exposed. If traditional means customary at the moment of adoption, the answer depends on whose custom is counted. The second phrase has the same shape. “Sound scientific wildlife conservation and management” sounds like a technical standard. It is not one. A court asked to apply that phrase must perform the ranking itself.

The state’s official voter guide flagged the exposure before the ballots were counted. The nonpartisan Blue Book acknowledged the risk of litigation and the potential costs those court cases could incur. The guide also names who would pay. Colorado Parks and Wildlife would carry the bill. Money spent on lawyers is money not spent on counting animals, inspecting licenses or restoring habitat. That is a budget line rather than a slogan, and it is the sort of cost a voter can weigh. The amendment’s supporters called the risk theoretical. To that warning, Gates offered a phrase of his own: “They are using a lot of ‘mights.’” He said that reversing those rules was not the goal of the amendment’s backers and that, if he wanted to challenge those bans, he and other hunters could have done so already. That is an argument about intent. It is not an argument about text.

Colorado Voters Refused to Lock Wildlife Rules Into the Constitution (Image 1)

The text does not resolve the question, and that is where the opponents kept returning. Pacelle put the trap case directly: “There’s nothing more traditional than the use of steel leg-hold traps.” Opponents argue that any change to hunting rules could be portrayed as a threat to a new constitutional right and challenged in court, leaving wildlife management decisions to judges. Pacelle’s organizations have generally not opposed right-to-hunt amendments in other states. He drew his line at these two phrases. His account of the budget follows from that: “We would not be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars now if not for that language.”

Follow the Checks and the Map

The committees supporting Amendment 83 raised $2.6 million, according to the Denver Post’s reporting. [1]. The largest single check, $1.6 million, came from the International Order of T. Roosevelt, based in Wisconsin. The Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, based in North Carolina, gave $350,000. The Texas-based Hunter Action Fund gave $150,000. Safari Club International gave $105,000. Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Bighorn Society gave $25,000, the only in-state money of any size near the top of the list. Most of that came from two affiliated out-of-state organizations: $413,358 from Animal Wellness Action and $108,255 from the Maryland-based Center for a Humane Economy. The results-day reporting put the opposition’s donations at $1.1 million. The gap remained wide, and Pacelle described being outspent by more than 3-to-1. The figures do not settle why any individual voted. They do document who paid to be heard.

The International Order of T. Roosevelt is explicit about its purpose. One of its stated goals is to pass constitutional amendments across the country, state by state. The group takes its name from Theodore Roosevelt and describes the right to hunt and fish as under attack by politicians and “radical activists.” Its own explanation of the strategy is a sentence about durability: “Establishing a constitutional Right to Hunt and Fish is a preemptive defense against anti-hunting forces who constantly push radical legislation and litigation to restrict — or ban — hunting.” The same page continues: “Requiring them to amend the state constitution makes their implementation of anti-hunting policies and rulings a challenging task.” That is a candid description of what a constitution does. It raises the cost of losing for the other side. The group lists hunting outfitters among its sponsors, including outfitters that sell trophy hunting safaris for big game such as lions, jaguars and elephants. Colorado would have been the 25th state with this language. Twenty-four others already carry a constitutional right to hunt and fish. Vermont is the outlier, with a right dating to 1777. The rest is a recent wave: states began adding such rights in the late 1990s, and Utah approved one in 2020, the most recent western state to do so. The model that arrived in Colorado was assembled elsewhere and paid for elsewhere.

The question underneath all of it is procedural rather than sentimental. Who writes the rules? In Colorado, a commission does. The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission has 11 voting members. The governor appoints them, and the state Senate approves them. [1]. The commission sets licensing requirements, allowable methods, seasons, places and bag limits — the number of animals a hunter may take. Agency staff administer and enforce those rules and monitor the populations the rules are meant to track. The commission has used that authority in ways hunting groups dislike. In July, it voted to cap the number of furbearers — species taken for fur, among them beaver and coyote — that a hunter may take in a day. Staff had recommended against a cap on abundant species. The commission imposed one anyway. [1]. This month, Safari Club International and the Sportsmen’s Alliance sued the commission over that cap, alleging the commission violated state law by adopting rules different from those noticed on its agenda for public comment. The amendment would have moved that dispute to a different forum. A judge applying a constitutional standard answers to a text, not to a commission. That was the offer on the table. Voters set it aside. [1].

The record of the last several years explains why the offer was made. In 2020, Colorado voters mandated that the agency reintroduce wolves, and the program is now underway. In 2022, lawmakers killed a bill that would have banned hunting of bobcats and mountain lions. In 2024, animal-rights groups ran a ballot initiative to ban big cat hunting, and voters rejected it. In 2025, Democratic lawmakers ran a failed bill that would have removed the requirement that the agency use hunting to manage wildlife and made it an option instead. At the start of this year, lawmakers introduced a bill to ban beaver hunting; it died without a hearing. [1]. Eric Washburn, president of the committee opposing the amendment, described the underlying shift in a single line: “What you’re seeing now is two different cultures fighting over who gets to decide.” For decades, hunters had the ear of the commission. The state’s demographics and culture have shifted, and new stakeholders are asking for something different from the same land and the same animals. Gates argued that the public does not want to keep voting on wildlife: “The general public doesn’t want to turn around and go to the ballot box every four or five years to make a wildlife decision.” The public also declined to hand the decisions to a courtroom. Both propositions were on the ballot on November 3, and both were answered in the same count. [2]. The hearing room remains. At the next commission meeting, a member of the public will step to the microphone, raise a hand, and begin.

Sources

Denverpost — Quote source (original article)

Colorado Voters Refused to Lock Wildlife Rules Into the Constitution (Image 2)