The rare baby boy was born Sunday after seven hours of labor and is doing well, said Matthey Lenyo, the zoo’s curator of primates and carnivores. The baby, who has not yet been named, weighs between three and four pounds.

He is the first male orangutan to be born in captivity in the United States in 2026. No males were born in the U.S. in 2025, Lenyo said.

The baby’s father, 18-year-old Jaya, lives at the Denver Zoo but has not been introduced to his offspring.

Hesty, who was born at the Denver Zoo in 2010, has not needed human assistance with nursing or caring for the baby, Lenyo said. She is a first-time mother.

“She’s doing it all,” he said. “That’s the best case scenario.”

Hesty’s life had a difficult start after birth and required help from the animal care staff before she was reunited with her mother. So her caretakers prepared for a similar situation.

The orangutan care specialists to have the baby, using positive reinforcement to convince her to cooperate with testing and other needs. They trained her to hand a stuffed animal through a specially designed crate in case something went wrong, Lenyo said.

Hesty’s baby, however, has not needed human assistance, according to .

“It’s important to know that’s what orangutans do,” Lenyo said. “They have a natural instinct and they learn from other females.”

Unlike Eirina, another orangutan at the zoo, Hesty did not have extreme morning sickness that required daily cups of tea.

Hesty traded her placenta after birth for her favorite treats so the zoo’s veterinary staff could examine it for any signs of health problems, Lenyo said.

Hesty is known among zoo staff and visitors for the long, swooping bangs that hang over her face. The zoo frequently posts portraits of her on its Instagram page.

Lenyo said the new mom managed to maintain her fashionable locks during childbirth.

“Even during labor, she looked beautiful,” he said. “Her hair was everywhere it needed to be.”

It’s too early to tell whether her son will share that trait.

“We see some little blond sideburns,” Lenyo said. “We are very curious to see what he looks like when he grows up.”

The zoo will wait until mid-June to introduce the baby to the public. The exact timing will depend on when Hesty is comfortable with it. The zookeepers will also follow Hesty’s instincts before introducing the baby to the other orangutans at the zoo.

The zoo is seeking the public’s help in choosing between three names: Rambutan, Oka or Jamartin.

live in the rainforests and swamps on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. There are fewer than 14,000 in the wild.

The operation was coordinated with the Colorado Bureau of Animal Protection and the Colorado State Veterinary Office.

The release stated that over the past month, the Moffat County Sheriff’s Office has been working with the owner, Daniel Martin, in an effort to “remediate ongoing concerns regarding the care and condition of the animals.” Despite those efforts, investigators determined that further action was necessary to protect the welfare of the animals involved.

During the investigation, one mule was determined to be suffering to the extent that euthanasia was necessary and was carried out by the Moffat County Sheriff’s Office.

Read more at .

A flare up of a disease that����ap especially lethal to wolf pups took a toll on Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park wolf numbers in 2025, reducing biologists’ counts to a level last seen when wolves were still reestablishing following .

“It was the lowest number of wolves in 20 years,” Wyoming Game and Fish Department wolf biologist Ken Mills told WyoFile. “That was definitely during the population creep stage, so they were still establishing in the state.”

All signs point toward canine distemper being the primary reason Wyoming’s statewide wolf population plunged to a minimum count of 253 wolves and 14 breeding pairs at the end of 2025, Mills said.

Distemper was detected in 64% of animals in the northwestern Wyoming zone where wolves are classified as “trophy game.” While adults can survive the contagious virus, which is a measles-like affliction in canines, it����ap “quite lethal” for pups and only an estimated “31 to 34” of the 87 documented born pups lived to the end of the year, a survival rate of just 37%, according to .

In the past, distemper was a density-dependent disease that surged when populations were high, Mills said. It , which wasn’t long after a two-year period where wolves were protected from hunting by the Endangered Species Act and populations — — were higher.

The 2025 flare up was the first time Mills documented lots of distemper when wolf numbers were not particularly high. The occurrence has him searching for alternative explanations.

“Could it be cyclical? Yeah,” the Pinedale-based biologist said. “However, these are potentially eight-year cycles, and it takes a lot of time to collect data and understand what����ap going on.”

There’s cause to believe that distemper will abate in Wyoming wolves this year. When , the event lasts a year and then there’s recovery, Mills said. And the Wyoming population now has more antibodies and resistance built up and so is in good shape to recover itself, he said.

But in 2025, distemper hurt Wyoming wolf numbers, which was a first.

Before that, “we really haven’t had a canine distemper outbreak that has caused a population-level effect,” Mills said.

In 2024, Mills and his biologist counterparts detected 330 wolves and 24 breeding pairs statewide. The estimated 253 wolves and 14 breeding pairs in 2025 means the raw wolf count tumbled by 23% and the reproductive segment fell by 42%.

Of those, 132 wolves in 22 packs that included 10 breeding pairs dwelled in the mountainous portion of northwest Wyoming in the “trophy game” area. There were nine wolves in three packs and no breeding detected on the Wind River Indian Reservation. And in the zone where Wyoming manages wolves as predators — where without limit — there were 28 wolves in five packs, including one breeding pair.

The remainder of Wyoming’s wolves — 84 wolves running in seven packs that included three breeding pairs — dwelled in Yellowstone National Park, according to the state’s monitoring report.

The park’s public affairs officers, whose office has been inundated with inquiries about a recent , did not respond to WyoFile’s request for an interview before this story published.

The overall number of Yellowstone wolves has dipped into the 80s twice before, in 2012 and 2018. But by other measures, 2025 was a tough year that the park population had not experienced since the reintroduction era. The distemper outbreak appeared to be “synchronous” in Wyoming and Yellowstone, and pup production and survival was also dismal in the national park, Mills said.

“Seventeen pups survived in Yellowstone,” he said, “which was the lowest they ever recorded.”

Outside of Yellowstone, Game and Fish will consider the lower wolf population when its biologists and wardens are setting fall 2026 hunting seasons (hunting isn’t allowed in the park, ). That proposal isn’t public yet, but Mills anticipates that there will be a “surplus” of animals and a wolf hunting season, even if mortality limits are reduced.

Wyoming’s relatively few wolves have and a degree of predictability, although the surge of distemper interrupted a long run of population stability. Still, the unexpected disease outbreak left Mills feeling good about Wyoming’s plan for managing its wolves.

“We set up the population objective of 160 wolves to be able to accommodate an event similar to what we experienced, and still meet our minimum recovery criteria,” Mills said.

That recovery criteria includes 10 breeding pairs outside of Yellowstone in Wyoming’s trophy game area. Mills’ 2025 surveys detected exactly 10 packs with pups in that zone.

“We met the minimum,” Mills said. “It actually worked exactly as we intended.”

This story was originally published by and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

Once it goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2028, will only allow pet stores to host animals from adoption or rescue services, so long as the stores don’t charge fees and the animals are sterilized. It otherwise prohibits those stores from selling dogs and cats in an effort to curb commercial breeding and sales from “puppy mills.”

, there are seven pet stores in the state licensed to sell the animals and five more that serve as brokers.

As Polis prepared to sign the bill, five black-and-white, 13-week-old puppies — Benedict, Daphne, Violet, Eloise and Hyacinth — lounged, climbed over one another, leaned into a reporter’s mic and cuddled in a pair of pens on the Capitol foyer’s floor. All of them .

The governor also brought his dog, Gia, who hopped off her chair and wandered under the bill-signing table to investigate the newcomers.

“We’re sending a very powerful message with this bill — first of all: Adopt, don’t shop. Little Gia is here, we adopted her 16 years ago,” said Polis, who had scooped up the little brown dog. His husband, animal rights advocate Marlon Reis, stood beaming nearby.

“If you do want to purchase … some people want (a) purebred or a specific breed, (and) there are many wonderful home breeders, legitimate breeders in our state, people who have a litter of dogs in their home and sell them,” Polis added.

The new law will not apply to the sale of specially trained animals — like those used by law enforcement, hunters or people with disabilities.

The bill took eight years to pass, according to Polis and the bill’s primary sponsor, House Majority Leader Monica Duran. Duran officially named the bill after her late Pomeranian, Pistol.

Polis said 26 jurisdictions in Colorado have banned puppy mill sales in retail stores. Denver joined them when its City Council passed an ordinance last year, though the city had no stores selling dogs and cats at the time. Several other states, including and , have adopted similar bans.

HB-1011 was also sponsored by Democrats Rep. Karen McCormick and Sens. Robert Rodriguez and Dylan Roberts. The measure passed the Senate earlier this month on a 19-16 vote, with all Republicans and some Democrats opposed. It had cleared the House 44-21, with only one Republican — Rep. Rick Taggart — voting in support.

“Today, this bill has lived in my heart for eight years,” an emotional Duran said. “Eight years of conversations, eight years of setbacks, eight years of (the time for this law) being not yet, not now and maybe never. But here we are.

“And today, I don’t stand alone. I stand here with every voice that refused to give up on the animals who could not speak for themselves.”

Ahead of the bill signing, the Best Friends Animal Society hailed the legislation and expressed hope it would help reduce euthanization of shelter pets in Colorado by increasing adoptions. In a news release, the group cited recent data showing a nearly 16% increase last year in the killing of shelter pets across the state, though the vast majority of shelters are considered “no-kill.”

“Best Friends has been working to make the country no-kill and it����ap incredible to see the continued momentum in Colorado to help save every healthy and treatable dog and cat,” the society’s CEO, Julie Castle, said in a statement.

Pixar creators studied Ginger, formerly a resident of the in Colorado Springs, as part of their research for the beaver-centric film with an eco-friendly message.

Ginger retired to the big dam in the sky in 2022 when she was nearly 14, but her legacy endures. Stick around to the end of “Hoppers” and catch Ginger’s very own movie credit.

Ginger was the first rodent the Pixar team studied when making “Hoppers” — and you never forget your first beaver.

“We think about her often,” said John Cody Kim, Pixar’s story supervisor on “Hoppers.” “We talked about her every now and then, especially during production. ‘Remember Ginger?'”

“Hoppers” documents a young girl’s fight to save a treasured habitat from development by transferring her mind into a robotic beaver to communicate with the surrounding animals.

But “Hoppers” actually started out as a movie about penguins, Kim said — until Pixar executives said there were too many penguin movies already.

They needed to pick a new animal, one that was still cute and fluffy, Kim said, but had not yet had its big break on the silver screen.

Enter the industrious beaver.

Pixar creators take time to study the subjects of their films to portray them accurately. But the early days of “Hoppers” coincided with the early days of the pandemic, so travel and time spent face-to-fur were out of the question.

The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo was leaning into video content at the time, booking personalized video chat encounters with various animals, said Jenny Quinn, lead education keeper at the zoo.

Pixar creators reached out and asked if they could schedule a video chat with a beaver. Non-disclosure agreements were signed. The zoo was in.

Move over, Ginger Rogers. Ginger the beaver made a dam good leading lady.

She was a bit of a diva. Ginger required daily allergy medicines because she was allergic to most trees — not a great intolerance for a tree-chomping rodent. But she took her pill-stuffed banana like a champ, Quinn said.

“Ginger was pretty perfect,” Quinn said. “She was the epitome of a grumpy old lady who is sweet, but also does what she wants.”

In early 2021, Kim and a few members of his team hopped on a Zoom call with Quinn and Ginger.

“It was a little bit crazy,” Quinn said, recalling hovering over the beaver with a phone while animators several states away sketched Ginger’s movements and behaviors, and asked questions about the animal.

Ginger was a curvaceous gal. Kim likened her to “a waddling chicken nugget” and went on to advise animators stuck on a particular beaver pose to think of the animal as a loaf of bread or a potato.

“I remember seeing Ginger waddling around, dragging this branch behind her, and that was like a very visceral image for me,” Kim said.

When Ginger sat, Kim noted that her tail tucked forward between her legs like a little seat. That pose is modeled multiple times throughout the movie.

During the video call, Kim watched Ginger build dams in a casual, nonchalant fashion, almost as if she were absent-mindedly twirling her hair during a conversation. That behavior made it into the movie, too, Kim said, as animated beavers start to dam up random objects when they get frazzled.

“We got to learn so many great facts about beavers and observe so much about Ginger and her personality and the way she would behave,” Kim said.

Kim learned that beavers are a keystone species — an organism that holds an ecosystem together. That fact plays a pivotal role in the plot of “Hoppers” as the main character tries to lure beavers back to a habitat to save it.

Quinn hopes the movie makes viewers fall in love with beavers like Cheyenne Mountain Zoo visitors fell in love with Ginger. Visitors can pay their respects to Ginger by visiting her sister and niece, Acorn and Hashbrown, who now reside at the zoo.

“The biggest thing people should know is how much of a huge impact for good (that) beavers can have on the environment,” Quinn said. “They create homes for everyone else.”

Over the years, Quinn said the video call with Pixar and Ginger would pop into her mind, and she’d wonder whether it was all a beaver fever dream.

She was thrilled to finally see the and know that Ginger was a muse.

“It’s cool that Ginger did this interview five years ago, passed away four years ago, and now there is this resurgence of appreciation,” Quinn said. “We get to think about Ginger again and she’s inspired millions of people over her time at the zoo, either on social media, online, people visiting — and now, even after her passing, she’s still part of something that is helping people learn about beavers and learn to appreciate them, and leading to more education.”

Manuel went after the dog in their Colorado Springs neighborhood. A stranger ran with him, trying to help, and when they reached the startled animal, the dog bit the stranger.

Law enforcement showed up. Manuel was given a court hearing for the dog bite.

The case was later dismissed. But when Manuel left the courthouse in September, he said two cars followed him. The 23-year-old stopped for gas and was quickly surrounded by federal agents from .

The undocumented immigrant, who had come with his parents from Mexico when he was 3 years old and had never been in trouble with the law before the dog bite, was detained in the state’s only immigration facility in Aurora for the next two months.

“It was not very pleasant,” he said. He spoke on condition that he only be identified by his middle name to speak candidly about his experiences with the federal government. “I’ve never been in trouble before. It really takes a toll on you mentally.”

As federal authorities pursue President Donald Trump’s goal of arresting and deporting millions of immigrants without legal status, they moved last summer to block longtime U.S. residents from requesting bail in immigration cases, and they have kept others, who would have been released under previous administrations, detained indefinitely.

Caught in that cycle, Manuel was only released after his attorneys filed — and a judge granted — a habeas petition in federal court.

Once a technically complicated legal rarity used to challenge improper incarcerations, habeas corpus petitions have become the predominant avenue for immigrants seeking release from detentions that increasingly end only with a deportation order.

With bail sharply curtailed and other avenues of release all but closed off, Colorado has seen an explosion of habeas cases: In the first 100 days of 2026, more than 370 detained immigrants have asked federal judges to either grant them bail hearings denied by ICE, or to release them altogether. The surge is an unprecedented increase from 2025’s total of 104 and 2024’s total of a bare dozen.

In his first 19 years as a lawyer, Denver immigration attorney Hans Meyer said he’d filed six habeas cases. In the past six months, his firm filed 60. When ICE first moved to withhold bail from a broad swath of detainees last summer, few people in detention were aware that filing habeas petitions was an option.

“The first three months, very few people understood the issue,” Meyer said. “For the next three months, people might know it was an option, but didn’t know much more. But now people in detention always go to habeas first.”

So significant is the crush that attorneys from the , which oversees ICE, have stepped in to help federal prosecutors deal with the cases. The highest-ranking federal prosecutor in the state, U.S. Attorney Peter McNeilly, has also personally handled some of the petitions. It’s the only time this century that a U.S. attorney has made personal appearances on such cases, The Denver Post found.

The declined to comment for this story. Jeffrey Colwell, the clerk for the , confirmed The Post’s case data.

“It does put a significant burden on our judges and chambers,” he said. “It’s 300-plus cases that we haven’t historically seen.”

In an unsigned statement, the Department of Homeland Security said it abides by court orders and was unsurprised by the habeas surge, claiming “no lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been treated better than illegal aliens in the United States.”

Peering inside the ‘deportation machine’

Habeas petitions have been a part of American law since the nation’s founding, and they’ve been used in immigration proceedings in past years, too.

They’re used generally to challenge someone’s detention or incarceration, though not necessarily the underlying case that led to that confinement. Immigrants who are released or given bail hearings through habeas cases are still subject to deportation proceedings — like Manuel, whose immigration case remains underway.

But these petitions offer an avenue out of detention, and their prominence is surging, particularly as — which fall under the authority of the federal government — bend to the Trump administration’s goals.

The assumption that immigration courts can resolve detention questions “no longer holds,” the . Instead, immigration lawyers are taking their arguments out of immigration hearings and into federal court, where appointed judges can’t be removed on a whim. Indeed, they’ve shown a “striking willingness to intervene” in detention cases, the association wrote.

Because habeas cases are complicated — but the need for them is now enormous — immigration attorneys have also worked to train more lawyers on how to file them. Laura Lunn, of the , said she’s hosting a “massive training” at the end of April with the to bring non-immigration lawyers up to speed on writing and filing habeas petitions.

For this story, The Post reviewed scores of habeas petitions and hundreds of pages of court filings, along with publicly available arrest and court data detailing ICE practices. If the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is a “deportation machine,” as Meyer describes it, then the habeas petitions provide a glimpse into that machine’s inner workings. The filings describe both how immigrants end up in detention as well as the efforts that Trump officials have undertaken to keep them detained.

One man was arrested at an Ace Hardware. A Colombian father was arrested in Lakewood the same day he and his wife were set to close on a house. Several said they were arrested after they showed up for routine immigration check-ins at ICE offices in Colorado. A man from Guinea arrived at his case worker’s office to have his ankle monitor removed and found ICE agents waiting for him instead.

One man showed up for work at the , where he was directed to wait for a new ID badge in a side room, his lawyers later alleged. ICE agents came instead.

Upending nearly three decades of federal law, Manuel and many of those who’ve filed habeas petitions were denied bail during their detention proceedings. That about-face is the primary cause of the habeas crush: Since the mid-1990s, federal immigration authorities and the court system that oversees them would release immigrants who had no criminal record and were arrested within America’s interior.

Under the Trump administration, however, ICE and the courts have moved to keep those immigrants in custody, denying them bail under a separate federal law previously reserved for people arrested at the border.

The that ICE is now employing to block many immigrants from bail also requires mandatory detention — which attorneys argue is the point. Detention centers are like prisons, and 65% of immigrants arrested in Colorado over the past year have never been convicted of a crime. They’re likely not used to facilities like the one in Aurora, where the lights stay on at all times and the food, Manuel said, is often soggy or inedible.

Without access to bail, many detainees choose to leave: Aurora has seen a jump in deportation orders in the past year, including an unprecedented surge in immigrants asking for immediate removal.

Surging cases tied to size of Aurora facility

The increase in Colorado habeas filings is also partially driven by the size of the Aurora detention center, which can hold more than 1,500 people at any one time. It’s one of the largest facilities in the United States and attracts arrestees from across the country — meaning more people seeking release.

Attorneys for a Maryland man said he was arrested after ICE checked license plates in his neighborhood and discovered he had a “derogatory immigration history.” A teenager in New York, brought to the U.S. as a minor, was arrested after he got into a fender-bender in a snowstorm. Several men were arrested during traffic stops in Florida. All eventually were brought to the detention center in Aurora.

The filings detail myriad other ways the Trump administration has sought to keep immigrants detained.

When bail is granted, ICE appeals, prolonging detention for 90 more days. Some people with years-old removal orders have been re-arrested. For years, deportations could be indefinitely delayed if an immigrant successfully argued that they’d be tortured or persecuted if they were returned home. They would often be released and told to check in regularly with federal authorities.

Now, however, ICE will hold those individuals — who are often religious or political minorities, or members of the LGBTQ+ community — while they try to find another country to send them.

The Post reviewed more than a dozen habeas petitions filed in recent months by those immigrants detained in Colorado. Several detainees were transgender and feared they would be harmed or killed if they were returned home. One gay man from a country in North Africa was nearly deported to Cameroon, , before his habeas petition was granted.

If another country won’t take the detainees, then they languish in detention.

For those cases, as well as for detainees seeking bail, “habeas is the only way that most folks are getting out of detention, and more folks are being both arrested and held in detention than ever before,” said Shira Hereld, an attorney with the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network.

Indeed, immigration arrests in Colorado surged nearly 300% during Trump’s first year in office. The Aurora detention center has also flexed to its maximum capacity, and by the end of 2025, the facility regularly housed more than 1,400 people at a time.

Federal judges push back

As the flood of habeas petitions washed into federal courtrooms in Denver, judges have repeatedly rejected ICE’s effort to rewrite federal law and have ordered bail hearings or the immediate release of immigrants. They’ve also ordered the release of some people held indefinitely while ICE searches for a country to take them.

Of the more than 100 habeas petitions that have already been closed this year, a federal judge rejected only one, The Post found, while a few dozen more were duplicates or were dismissed voluntarily.

One attorney wrote to a Colorado judge that ICE’s position has been rejected more than 1,500 times nationwide. In their petitions, some attorneys have taken to listing the individual habeas cases that the Trump administration has lost, a tally that stretches over multiple pages.

In its unsigned statement, the Homeland Security Department said it was “applying the law as written. If an immigration judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period.”

In January, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson wrote that “the court has concluded, many times over,” that ICE’s interpretation was incorrect. In March, U.S. District Judge Regina Rodriguez granted another petition and wrote that she was “once more (joining) the chorus of courts in this district and around the nation that have overwhelmingly rejected (ICE’s) position.”

“Sometimes it is difficult to arrive at conclusions or resolve issues, due, perhaps, to an issue’s complexity, or the lack of guidance available to help resolve it,” U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney wrote in another case from January. “Neither circumstance is present here.”

Still, the lower-court rulings have not shifted ICE’s posture, and immigrants arrested in Colorado are still routinely denied bail.

A class-action lawsuit challenging the practice, filed by Meyer, the Denver immigration lawyer, and the , earned an initial favorable ruling but is now awaiting a higher court’s intervention. A judge in California struck down ICE’s new bail policy in December, but that ruling has also been held up as a higher court considers it. Another federal appeals court has backed the policy.

The regional rulings point to a prolonged legal battle.

“This is an alley knife fight,” Meyer said. “It’s going to play out circuit court by circuit court, and then end up at the Supreme Court.”

Until the Supreme Court weighs in, “we’re all running around like chickens with our heads cut off every day,” Lunn said, “because the law changes every day depending on which court rules. And we’re having to bring individual challenges for each and every client when the fundamental issue is these massive policies that impact everybody across the country.”

‘A dream that ended up becoming a nightmare’

In the meantime, the number of habeas cases filed in Colorado will only grow. For people like Javier Campos, it offers the only way out.

In July, ICE agents pulled Campos over in Aurora and arrested him. He spent nearly 100 days in the Aurora detention center before he was released last fall. He lost weight because the food was inedible, he said in an interview. He struggled with Bell’s palsy, a neurological condition that causes paralysis in facial muscles.

Through a translator, Campos described his experience in the immigration system as “disgraceful.” A citizen of Mexico, he’d been in the U.S. for 30 years. He worked in the construction industry. He had a wife, and four children who were U.S. citizens. In another time, detention would have been unlikely, and bail a given.

He was initially granted bail in August — $10,000, a sum far higher than what was typical in previous years, immigration lawyers said. Attorneys for the Department of Homeland Security immediately appealed, blocking Campos’ release for three more months. That prompted the habeas filing.

He was finally released shortly before Thanksgiving, but his immigration case continues.

“A lot of the people would just give up their rights and leave because it gets really difficult to not have money to pay for an attorney,” Campos said. “A lot of people would just give up and leave and be deported. It was very sad seeing the things that went on there because a lot of guys came here for a dream that ended up becoming a nightmare — such a bad nightmare that it would cause stress and nightmares we couldn’t wake up from.”

Colorado has some of the strongest laws for pets in the country. But a bill in the legislature, , would undo protections for pets by banning the sale of cats and dogs at licensed pet shops.

As a lifelong animal advocate who has run animal shelters as well as the national ASPCA, I once advocated for this policy. But I believe now it is a mistake.

The goal of this legislation is to target puppy mills — irresponsible dog breeders who don’t provide for animal welfare. But banning pet sales at pet stores doesn’t actually accomplish that goal.

Pet stores in Colorado must be licensed and must get their dogs from professional breeders. These breeders are licensed and inspected by the USDA and typically have additional licensing and inspection requirements at the state level, as well.

Puppy mills, meanwhile, sell their dogs through different means. You may see signs in the median at a stoplight offering puppies with a phone number. You may see a post on Craigslist. Or, increasingly, you’ll see sellers on TikTok or social media offering puppies for sale.

If we want to target puppy mills, we shouldn’t focus on licensed and inspected professional dog breeders. Those breeders do occasionally have issues, but that����ap the point of the inspections. They catch problems and fix them. They hold violators accountable.

Puppy mills, by contrast, operate entirely outside this system — and the only way to shut them down is through targeted enforcement and investigations into the black markets where they thrive.

There is no evidence that banning retail dog sales has ever closed a puppy mill. Nearly 20 years ago, advocates claimed we needed these laws to fight back against an estimated 10,000 puppy mills. Since then, several states and hundreds of localities have passed such laws. Yet advocates today still claim there are 10,000 puppy mills.

Not only would banning pet sales at pet stores fail to stop puppy mills, it would actually help these bad actors.

Consider: If this bill passes, and a family wants to get a certain breed of dog, where are they going to look?

Having run animal shelters and been an early leader of the “no kill” movement, I have long advocated that people adopt from shelters. But shelters don’t always have the breeds that people are looking for or sometimes require.

Prospective pet owners, then, will naturally look on the internet, where puppy mills thrive. That����ap exactly what happened after California passed a statewide pet-sale ban a few years ago, with a media investigation finding “a network of resellers — including ex-cons and schemers — replaced pet stores as middlemen.”

Driving pets and people into a black market is wrong. There are fewer protections for pets, and fewer for consumers, as well.

There needs to be well-regulated choices for people to get pets. Pet stores provide one option.

House Bill 1011 has a final contradiction: proponents say that it����ap OK for people to buy from licensed breeders, just not through a pet store. Instead, if this bill passes, families would have to drive to a breeder, probably many hours away, or even travel out of state.

This is obviously impractical for many families, which is why they will look for a dog online instead.

But more importantly, if a breeder is doing everything right, then what is the problem with that breeder selling through a local store in Colorado? As long as dogs are well cared for, there shouldn’t be any objection.

That����ap especially true given that many breeders are now signing up for third-party certification called Canine Care Certified. This program was developed by animal welfare scientists at Purdue University in Indiana. House Bill 1011 would prohibit dogs from even these top-of-the-line certified facilities.

A good animal protection policy should focus on making sure animal welfare objectives are met. While House Bill 1011 is well-intentioned, it will cause more harm than good.

Ed Sayres is the former CEO of the ASPCA and former president of the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, whose career in animal welfare spans four decades.

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The bill is now being considered on the Senate floor and would still allow buyers to purchase pets directly from breeders or adopt them from rescues and shelters. Pet stores could provide free space for adoption organizations to showcase their adoptable animals.

Encouraging people to adopt rather than shop is a laudable goal, and Colorado is home to a number of exceptional shelters and rescue organizations that help animals and humans.

Humane Colorado, formerly the Dumb Friends League, provides affordable veterinary care at its CSU Spur location. When a friend’s dog needed surgery this month to remove a cancerous tumor, I knew just where they should turn.

I had brought a stray kitten there several years ago. I was underwater financially, and the kitten, Spicy Moustache, so named for the attitude and little dark mark above her upper lip, was in worse shape. Skin and bones after being abandoned on a country road, she needed vet care and Humane Colorado was there for us both. Moustache joined my plump tortoiseshell Toffee, the progeny of frisky barn cats, an elderly rabbit rescued from neglect, and my best friend Bacon, a good dog adopted from Lifeline Puppy Rescue years before.

Humane Colorado turns 116 years old this year. This wonderful organization was originally named Dumb Friends League to denote support for four-legged friends who cannot speak for themselves. As the meaning of the word “dumb” shifted over the century, the organization needed to find another name to capture its mission. With four adoption locations, three of which are outside of Denver, and one vet care facility at the innovative CSU Spur campus, the name Humane Colorado fits its broader mission.

Humane Colorado isn’t the only organization to change its name to reflect an expanded vision. As of this month, the 38-year-old Max Fund is now True Companions Animal Shelter & Clinic. This shelter found a placement for my friend’s puppy, whose destructive separation anxiety was more than she, a recent widow, could handle. He went to live with a couple whose kids and dogs gave him the constant company he needed to thrive.

Other shelters, municipal pounds, and animal rescue organizations need people to adopt and people who can be a way station for pets on their way to permanent homes. Fostering Mocha, an adorable pit-Catahoula hound mix, and helping her find her fur-ever home through Karl’s Canine Krew was one of my best experiences of 2025.

If puppies and kittens are no longer available in pet stores and more Coloradans turn to adoption agencies and rescues to adopt dogs and cats, more lives will be saved. If puppy mills can no longer supply Colorado pet stores, the loss of revenue could drive them out of business. If, however, pet buyers turn to unscrupulous breeders accessed through the internet, dogs and cats will be worse off.

Current law requires pet stores to provide the name of the breeder, state, and federal or state license numbers. This requirement ensures at least some oversight and minimal standards for breeders selling to pet stores, but it does not apply to breeders meeting buyers at the Walmart parking lot on the Nebraska border.

To ensure the law will not have unintended consequences, there are a few questions that should be answered at the hearing: If the law passes, will those seeking certain dog or cat breeds turn to unscrupulous breeders accessed over the internet? Are there large-scale breeders that treat their breeding dogs and cats and puppies and kittens humanely, and how will they be impacted by the law? How will pet stores that work with ethical breeders be impacted? If they shut down, will unscrupulous breeders simply get more business?

Is there a more direct way to close down puppy mills using anti-abuse or breeder licensure laws?

Krista Kafer is a Sunday Denver Post columnist.

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Earlier this month, the U.S. Forest Service that it anticipates requiring advanced-purchased permits to hike the famed lakes beginning in 2027. However, there are new rules that adventurers need to be aware of this summer if they plan to enter the Mount Sneffels Wilderness, near Ridgway and Telluride, where the Blue Lakes reside.

Starting on May 31, visitors will be required to pack out human waste and carry bear-resistant food storage containers, which must be approved by the . Additionally, camping is prohibited at the middle and upper Blue Lakes and overnight groups are limited to six people. In its announcement, the Forest Service reiterated that campfires are not allowed anywhere in the wilderness area.

The Blue Lakes are an international destination for hikers and mountaineers seeking to enjoy the Instagram-worthy alpine lakes and scale Mount Sneffels’ 14,150-foot summit. Years of overpopulation, however, have had severe effects on the local environment.

According to a 2023 environmental impact report, the most common issues are improper disposal of human and animal waste; overrun vegetation and threatened wildlife habitats due to the proliferation of dispersed campsites and user-created trails; campers building fires illegally; and frustration among visitors caused by crowding at the trailhead.

That����ap why, several years ago, the Forest Service decided it would limit the number of visitors each year by implementing a permitting system.

“Anyone who has visited Blue Lakes, or even seen photos, understands why we need to protect this area,” said Dana Gardunio, Ouray District ranger, in the recent announcement.

Permits will be required during the peak season, from June 1 through Sept. 30, likely starting next year. In the meantime, the Forest Service has been restoring parts of the area, such as the trailhead, which now has a new bathroom and reconstructed parking lot.

Those looking to hike the Blue Lakes this year should be prepared for heavy crowds. The trail was closed during summer of 2025 due to the aforementioned restoration projects, and there may be people hoping to see the iconic lakes before competing for a permit to do so.

The Forest Service estimates about 35,000 people recreate in the Mount Sneffels Wilderness annually, the vast majority of whom come from June to October. A permit system would slash the number of visitors to about 8,000 people per summer, Gardunio previously told The Denver Post.

In the coming year, the agency will be discussing fees for permits and soliciting feedback from the public.

The study, covering roughly 8.6 million acres in six management units, will run for at least three years with the goal of indiscriminately exterminating “as many (lions) as possible.”

Buying into this ancient predator-prey superstition are the nonprofits Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife and Utah Wild Sheep Foundation. Each has contributed $150,000 to the cull.

Wildlife managers have no idea how many mountain lions roam the state because estimating populations is essentially impossible. Lions are solitary, elusive and range over vast territories they defend. Unlike ungulates that compensate for mortality with fecundity, predators don’t “overpopulate,” and they’re much slower to recover from culling or hunting.

I asked veteran mountain lion researcher Dr. Rick Hopkins, board president of the Cougar Fund, what science supports a claim that killing mountain lions generates more deer. “None,” he replied. “For years, agencies have made such claims, but when pushed to provide evidence, they can’t. Predator control has never worked anywhere.”

Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources estimates the state’s mule deer population at 295,200–73 percent of the “long-term goal.” That goal is based more on desired hunting-license sales than science. Still, considering the natural ebb and flow of deer populations, 73 percent isn’t bad.

Mountain lions have little or nothing to do with the decline of Utah’s mule deer. Predator populations are limited by available prey. What we learned in Biology 101–that predators control prey—is incorrect: Prey controls predators. Utah has experienced prolonged drought, which peaked in 2022. Reduced forage starved female deer so that fewer fawns were born, and those fawns were sickly and therefore less likely to survive winters. When record-breaking snowfall occurred during the winter of 2022-2023, there were massive mule deer die-offs.

Utah’s mountain lion cull follows hard upon a 2023 state law that opened up year-round, mountain lion killing without requiring permits. Both this law and the current cull outrage environmental and animal wellness communities. The Western Wildlife Conservancy and Mountain Lion Foundation have filed a lawsuit (ongoing), asserting that the law violates the state’s Right to Hunt and Fish Act, which requires a “reasonable regulation of hunting.”

The Mountain Lion Foundation dismisses the mountain lion cull study as a “lethal program without rigorous science,” and reports: “Decades of peer-reviewed research across the West show that intensive predator removal rarely delivers sustained or landscape-scale recovery of prey populations. Instead, it often destabilizes predator populations, leading to younger, transient animals, increased conflict and little long-term benefit for deer.”

And this from Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action: “The science shows that healthy lion populations create robust and healthier deer herds, with lions selectively removing deer afflicted with the 100-percent fatal and highly contagious brain-wasting scourge known as Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) caused by malformed, self-replicating proteins called ‘prions.’”

All threats to mule deer pale in comparison with CWD. The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a hunter-support group, calls it “the number one threat to deer hunting.”

In Utah, CWD has been detected in 356 of the few mule deer checked. Symptoms include fearlessness and loss of coordination, behaviors inviting lion predation, and thereby removal of disease vectors.

What����ap more, mountain lions are resistant to CWD. They deactivate prions through digestion, removing them from the environment. That further protects mule deer as well as possibly protecting people. In 2022, two hunters who ate venison from a CWD-ravaged deer herd in Texas died from prion disease. Given the rarity of human prion infections, this seems an unlikely coincidence.

The Idaho Capital Sun quoted Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease at the University of Minnesota, as follows: “We are quite unprepared. If we saw a (CWD) spillover right now, we would be in free fall. There are no contingency plans.”

Dr. Mark Elbroch of Panthera, a nonprofit dedicated to conserving wild felines, told me this: “Heaps of science show the beneficial contributions of mountain lions. Humans are healthier when we live with mountain lions.”

So are mule deer.

Ted Williams, a longtime environmental writer, is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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