By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project
By a 15% margin Denver voters last November soundly rejected an initiative to ban any new fur sales (among other things like display or trades) in the city.
If you thought that this would be enough to convince animal rights activists to rethink their strategy, you’re right.
They did rethink it. According to the Complete Colorado article linked first below, a citizen petition for rulemaking (which is linked second below) has recently been filed with Colorado Parks and Wildlife to effectively do what voters in Denver clearly and obviously rejected.
The difference? This petition, if it goes through, would be statewide and would be decided upon by the 12 CPW commissioners that Polis appointed.
Let me run that past you again. 12 unelected commissioners, appointed by a governor who has a nasty habit ignoring whole swaths of the state with his appointees, will decide for the entire state.
As of this writing, I haven’t seen or heard of this showing up on any CPW agendas. If it does, I’ll update. If you hear and don’t see it on my page, give me a heads up.
Whatever your thoughts on fur, this by rights needs to be something voters or their elected representatives decide. Not something done in an end run around them by a monied out of state group and a board of Governor Polis cronies.
https://completecolorado.com/2025/06/23/animal-activists-push-colorado-ban-fur-sales/
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/carnivore-conservation/pdfs/Commercial-Sale-of-Wildlife-Fur-Rulemaking_Final-06.13.25.pdf
Related:
An article by someone from the Center for Biological Diversity (the group behind the effort to do an end run around voters via CPW I cover above).
This one’s not about fur, rather it’s about how the wolf is key to rewilding the American West. If you didn’t have a handle on what the Center was about, give it a read. It’ll give you a hint.
https://medium.com/center-for-biological-diversity/wolves-are-key-to-rewilding-the-american-west-b0eda7119eb0
Monied interest groups circumventing voters to put in their policy.
In the previous post, I talked about how the Center for Biological Diversity is trying an end run around voters. They’re trying to do by a CPW rulemaking what voters (at least in Denver our most populist and leftist city) rejected. They essentially want to ban fur in Colorado.
When I first read about this, it struck me as yet another example of how well-funded and sometimes out of state (The Center is out of AZ for example) groups have learned to work Colorado’s system of unelected boards to do what likely has little chance of passing when done in more democratic means, via, say, the ballot.
This is not how our state ought to run.
Whether planned in advance or not, our state has exploded with unaccountable boards in the last four years, boards which our governor has stuffed with his cronies.
Advocacy and interest groups know how to work those boards and get done what they’d like, whether voters like it or not.
I wrote an op ed decrying this recently, which I link to below if you’d like to read more (and see yet another example of this dynamic in action).
I’ll end this post the same way I ended my op ed:
“Perhaps it’s time we as citizens start contacting those representatives, senators, Gov. Jared Polis and the unelected boards to do what I have been doing for the last couple years or so: instead of (or in addition to) your thoughts on any particular issue, tell them that you object to policy made by those who you’ve never met, who’ve never darkened a doorway in your town, and who you didn’t get to vote for.”
https://www.coloradopolitics.com/opinion/bypassing-voters-will-via-unelected-boards-isnt-democracy-podium/article_50afffb1-ce97-4420-ad12-032a6c0ad29c.html
READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT THE COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT SUBSTACK
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.