By admin 
Two influential hunting organizations are suing the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission, saying a new rule reducing the daily limits on killing Colorado furbearers violated Colorado’s State Administrative Procedure Act and its statutory wildlife management obligations.
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The daily harvest limit was changed in July from 17 species per day per person to two per day per person. That law requires agencies to give the public notice of proposed actions and an opportunity to comment. The act also requires final actions to remain consistent with the proposals presented for public comment.
Safari Club International and the Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation allege the commission’s last-minute decision to slash furbearer harvest limits failed to provide sufficient public notice or opportunity for comment.
They say the commission abandoned the publicly noticed proposals debated in the weeks before the meeting — and during more than an hour of public comment — before adopting a dramatically more restrictive limit based on a survey conducted by Commissioner Rebecca Niemiec.
Niemiec is one of three new CPW commissioners appointed by Gov. Jared Polis in early June. She is associate professor at the Colorado State University Warner College of Natural Resources and founder of the college’s Animal-Human Policy Center, which is focused on conflict-resolution strategies between humans and animals. Michael Jean, a lawyer for the Sportsmen’s Alliance, accused Niemiec of “rushing” a survey she cited during discussion of the bag limits “to get it out the day before the vote,” he said. “There was no need for the limit at all. The population was always healthy, and things were fine in the state.”
The public had been in an uproar over CPW’s proposed changes to furbearer hunting rules for months before the July 16 vote.
At its March meeting, the commission advanced a petition by the Center for Biological Diversity, which is a national conservation nonprofit working to protect endangered species through legal action, science and media, to ban the commercial sales of furbearer fur despite both CPW staff and Director Laura Clellan recommending against such a ban.
On May 29, the commission issued public notice to consider new daily bag limits for 17 furbearer species, including beavers, pine marten, fox, bobcat, muskrat, coyote and 11 other animals with fur on their bodies. There had historically been no bag limits for the species, and the commission was pitching two proposals.
One option called for a daily bag limit of 15 furbearers per species recommended by CPW staff. Alternative two was a tiered approach with a daily bag limit of four or eight furbearers depending on the species.
During discussion of the bag limits at the commission’s July meeting, Niemiec proposed voting on a new limit of two per species per day, after questioning CPW staff about their justification for proposing limits of four and eight.
The goal of lowering limits was to “maintain social acceptance, to make sure people feel better about hunting and trapping furbearers and about our policy decisions,” she said, “but … what data do we have that the public feels better about the proposed bag limits?”
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Other commissioners raised concerns that the motion was veering off the notice and that the public should receive an additional notice and time to consider the new proposal and provide input.
The commission proceeded and six commissioners voted for the two-furbearer daily limit despite the absence of prior notice, public comment, or “scientific justification supporting the new restriction,” a news release from Safari Club International and Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation said.
Their complaint asks the court to declare that the commission violated Colorado law, vacate the two-furbearer daily bag limit and require the commission to reconsider the issue through a lawful rulemaking process that provides proper notice and an opportunity for public participation.
The organizations say the lawsuit is not just about harvest limits, but about ensuring that wildlife management decisions are made through an open, transparent and legally compliant process.
But Mark Surls, Rockies & Plains coordinator for the carnivore advocacy group Project Coyote said “the lawsuit raises the question of whether the world’s premier trophy hunting organization’s key concern is limiting a hunter or trapper to killing 730 coyotes, along with hundreds of red foxes, badgers, or other ‘furbearer’ species, in a year. Because while Colorado law requires rules that the Commission proposes and adopts to be consistent with the subject matter of a publicly noticed rulemaking, it does not require them to be identical to an agency staff proposal.
Jay Tutchton, chair of the CPW commission and speaking for himself, said in an email his vote to change the regulation “was a vote to stand up for all the people who prefer to see foxes and pine martens alive and frolicking in nature, and for those hunters and trappers who are truly doing it for love of the craft and not trying to make money selling larger amounts of fur.”
“A key fact supporting my position that the new limit only targets selfish, super-killers of furbearers is that the commission was presented evidence by staff that the average furbearer hunter or trapper only kills two animals per season — not per day,” Tuchton added. “The regulatory change will not affect the average hunter or trapper at all — it will only prevent the super-killers from taking an unreasonable amount of animals, likely for their financial gain.”
This is the second time Safari Club International and the Sportsmen’s Alliance have sued the CPW commission since 2024. The first was over allegations two commissioners broke Colorado Open Meetings Law and spread false information about mountain lion hunting in a cowritten opinion piece published in the Durango Herald prior to the November 2024 vote on Proposition 127, which would have banned the hunting and trapping of mountain lions, lynx and bobcats.
The state maintained the commissioners did not communicate outside official meetings or write the piece themselves, noting a third party authored it.
The case was settled in 2025 with the commission agreeing to a small cash payment and the promise that commissioners would be trained in open meetings law and the agency’s rules around hunting lions, lynx and bobcats.