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Colorado just took a step towards correcting one of the oldest injustices in the West
November 15, 2025/
This week, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission unanimously approved regulations to implement the Protect Wild Bison Act (SB25-053), giving bison a dual legal classification starting January 1, 2026. Privately owned, fenced bison remain livestock under the Department of Agriculture. But free-ranging bison that naturally enter the state—such as animals from Utah’s Book Cliffs herd—will finally be managed as wildlife.
To understand why this matters, you have to remember why bison vanished in the first place. The West didn’t “lose” its bison. They were eradicated. Between 30 and 60 million animals were wiped out in a few short decades, not by accident but by policy: a deliberate campaign by the U.S. government to starve Native nations, break their resistance, and clear the plains for settlers and cattle. By the late 1800s, Colorado’s last wild bison were gone.
This week’s vote doesn’t undo that history, but it finally acknowledges that when wild bison cross into Colorado—from places like the Book Cliffs herd in Utah—they are not strays or commercial assets. They’re wildlife. They belong to the land and to themselves.
It also exposes a deeper truth about why some special interests are rattled. Cattle and bison are not interchangeable. Bison evolved with these landscapes. They roam widely, keep moving, and graze in patterns that allow grasslands to recover. Cattle, by contrast, cluster along streams and water sources, trampling riparian areas, compacting soils, and driving some of the most widespread degradation across the West. One species shaped these ecosystems over millennia. The other is degrading them in a matter of decades.
For the first time in more than a century, Colorado is preparing for wild bison to exist again. A species once nearly erased for political and economic gain is being recognized—legally and culturally—for what it has always been: wildlife.
