As a DU student, I’m writing to respond to some letters I’ve read in the Clarion about Proposition 127, which asks voters to say Yes and invest in Colorado’s apex predators as a key to climate solutions, rather than as mere objects for trophy hunters to shoot to keep their heads, or for fur trappers to sell their pelts on foreign markets for cash profit alone.

I agree with Annabelle Kiely, who explains well the vast ecological benefits of mountain lions as overseers of healthy ecosystems from the top down. Currently, we have as few as 3,000 lions, and that number is dwindling due to biodiversity loss which is at historic levels due to global warming. It is undeniable that the population cannot be maintained at healthy levels while facing an onslaught from both human-driven habitat loss and thrill-seekers who have chosen big cat murder as their hobby and source of enjoyment.

We have no idea how many bobcats live here. Yet we allow fur trappers to kill in unlimited body counts.

Leading biologists who study mountain lions and bobcats offer evidence that feline predators are the reason we have healthy deer and elk. We owe our diverse wildlife to them. Lions are most adept at selectively removing disease from the environment, including the rapidly increasing epidemic of Chronic Wasting Disease. Even more reason is there have been several cases of deer hunters developing the human form of CWD — Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD) — after consuming venison infected with the prion. They died within a year of diagnosis.

If a person cares about the environment, the habitat sustainability of numerous native species including our own, or even those who hunt deer as a food source, they should strongly support Prop 127. It is the only logical option.

I also read a very different Clarion letter not by a student but a lion hunter, and long-ago retired agency manager, who belittles my peer and tries to explain that killing 500 lions and unlimited bobcats is somehow a good thing for nature. However, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife current sitting Commissioners disagree with him and encourage us to vote YES on Prop 127. Including a commissioner with a PhD in wildlife biology who understands modern science. The lion hunter doesn’t offer anything of value, because we know the true ecological value of lions and bobcats, alive.

This hunter’s harassing and demeaning of DU students has added nothing to this important conversation. Ecologically valuable wildlife should be protected for all of our sakes. Yet we have a hunter who recklessly, irresponsibly celebrates these critical species being shot out of trees as they flee for their lives, baited into cages, choked and beaten to death.

This is not 1850. Our knowledge and understanding of the world around us have grown to where any ignorance is willful. There is deep cognitive dissonance between the need for our survival as a species and ecosystem, and the petty enjoyment of watching a majestic living creature’s life become a pile of fur and blood. The world around us knows how to function, it knows how to regulate itself, it knows how each organism is to interact for the safety and the health of all, human and non-human.

We are at a critical time in history, a tipping point, and to revel in death is to be intrinsically on the wrong side of this issue. Our beautiful Colorado is worth more than treating these creatures as ours to dispose of on a whim. There is only one correct choice. We need to stop repeating our mistakes and leave this archaic lust for suffering behind us.

Lion and bobcat killing has no place in Colorado. Vote YES on Prop 127.

Mike Barlow-Roach is a J.D. Candidate at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and the President of the Animal Legal Defense Fund at DU Law.