Want a fun fact to share over the hors d’oeuvres tray? A license plate has raised more than a million dollars to help ranchers try to cope with reintroduction of wolves in Colorado.
It’s the Born to Be Wild plate, created by The Rocky Mountain Wolf Project.
It’s riding around on nearly 22,000 cars and found in every county in Colorado, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles. And it’s not far behind Colorado’s most popular specialty wildlife plate, the Wildlife Sporting Plate, for hunting and fishing conservation, which has an active vehicle registration of around 36,000.
With over 5 million registered rigs on the road, that might sound like a “meh” statistic. But the plate, which costs drivers an extra $50 a year, has raised just over $1 million since its inception in 2024, and covered a hefty chunk of the wolf program’s costs this year.
Those facts are no snoozers to Courtney Vail, a wildlife biologist, social scientist and chair of the board of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, whose mission is to “help wolves thrive throughout the Rockies.”
“They clarify the negative, really false, perception that only certain counties supported wolf reintroduction,” she said. “I know there’s overwhelming support, and then degrees of support, but that gradient of support is important because it shows the whole state supported wolves. So for the people that are saying only seven or eight counties supported wolves, the plates show it just isn’t true.”
In fact, voting statistics show 11 counties voted “yes” on Proposition 114, the measure that directed CPW to reintroduce wolves, and 53 voted “no.” And contrary to common myth, the “yes” counties were on both sides of the Continental Divide — seven along the Front Range and four on the Western Slope. The counties with the highest percentage of “no” votes were in the northwestern corner of Colorado and five that touch Kansas.
But in every county, there are at least a few people driving around with a black-and-white plate on their car on which a gray wolf walks out of white mountains directly toward the viewer. Stars shine in a black sky over the words “Born to Be Wild.” And they say something about the driver.
“My first opinion is the person who bought it is pro wolf,” Josh Wamboldt, a Pitkin County outfitter, said in response to a query on the subject on Facebook. “Lots of people who get custom plates don’t always read where their money is going. I don’t really care who buys the plate, yes they are supporting ranchers and if you are pro wolf, this is a huge step into helping ranchers.”
Alicia Brossert, a marketing professional who lives in Fort Collins, also gave her two cents: “I’ve spotted a couple in Larimer County! My initial reaction is admiration of their passion and commitment for conservation!”
And “Wolf Man Hand,” a digital creator whose profile says he lives in Wigwam, southeast of Colorado Springs, wrote, “I got them on all 4 vehicles. I had one redneck crazy ‘Deliverance’ type, driving a beat up pickup in Park County, start yelling (bleep) at me and the wife. That’s about all the feedback I’ve gotten so far. I live in El Paso County, but I drive all over.”
Plate sales don’t always align with the ways the counties voted, though, and that may be the most interesting part of this story.
Birthing Born to Be Wild
Vail said it took two attempts and hundreds of thousands of in-kind dollars to make the Born to Be Wild plate a reality. She and crew had to convince Colorado lawmakers, led by several bipartisan representatives, to pass the legislation that would allow Rocky Mountain Wolf Project to create a plate specifically to raise funds for nonlethal means of mitigating conflict with gray wolves.
But there was a catch: The money they raised by selling the plates would have to go directly into CPW’s coffers, instead of where it typically would go, Vail said, “to a nonprofit, and then the nonprofit would distribute those funds through a grant program.”
Rob Edward, president of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, was in the room during the negotiations and he said, “Fine, but you will have to build legislation that very clearly designates this money is for nonlethal conflict mitigation work,” as legislation already existed for compensation for ranchers who lost livestock.
“And no wolf shall ever be killed using this money, period,” he added.
Legislation was approved in May of 2023 and went into effect that August. The first plate appeared in the first week of January 2024.
“The wolf is not something to be feared”
Once funding was in place, it was time to design the plate. Illustrator Gillian Marie created the final design.
Vail said the artist had a lot of concepts coming at her from all sides, because if the plate didn’t look as nice as it does, it wouldn’t sell.
They were trying to reach the broadest audience and appeal to all categories of people, she said, and “Born to Be Wild can be kind of that macho thing, or it can be, you know, a nature lover.”
The wolf walking toward the viewer represents the wolf walking back into its native habitat, Edward said. “It’s walking toward the hunting grounds of its ancestors in Colorado, and it’s not something to be feared. It’s something to be understood, to be revered and worked with. And, you know, it’s going to keep some people up at night sometimes, but even those people are starting to learn that there’s a lot of nuance in what’s going on there.”
“Throwing salt in our wounds”
Google “Born to Be Wild billboard” and AI will tell you “born to be wild” can refer to a 1968 rock anthem by Steppenwolf (naturally) that reached No. 2 on the Hot 100 Billboard, or to the Colorado Born to Be Wild license plate program.
The billboards this story is concerned with are the ones the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project began installing in August along busy roads on the Front Range and Grand Junction that read “Support Ranching AND Wolves.”
The Front Range boards were meant to “target consumer behavior,” Vail said. “You know, you would think that those who voted for wolves would be more likely to buy a plate.”
The one in Grand Junction was placed as a test, after she contacted a few of her producer friends in the region and asked what they thought about the design and campaign.
“They said, ‘Well, we probably wouldn’t want to see those here. It’s kind of rubbing salt in our wounds, so maybe think about not putting them on the Western Slope.’”
A small one went up in Grand Junction “as a kind of courtesy, and to just test that a little bit,” Vail said. Part of it was “sensitizing the public to positive messaging from both the imagery of ranching and the imagery of wolves,” because “you want to cross-fertilize those, right?”
Vail says she thinks she knows why some of her rancher friends said what they did about salt in the wounds.
“There’s some that believe some of the wolf conservation organizations are raising money on the backs of wolves. (But) if the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project is being seen to be raising money, I think there’s a misunderstanding that we’re getting the money.”
The billboards were paid for through a $36,300 grant from CPW and $37,000 of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project’s funds, said Edward.
Pushing wolves and ranching forward
No matter how you feel about wolf reintroduction, proof exists that revenue from the Born to Be Wild license plate is being spent as promised.
Revenue generated by the plate sales covered about $679,000 of the $4 million in operating costs the wolf program logged in fiscal year 2024-25 and so far in fiscal year 2025-26, according to CPW spokesperson Luke Perkins. These included temporary staff to assist with research and community outreach activities, travel expenses to wolf outreach and working group meetings, translocation costs to British Columbia and on-the-ground nonlethal mitigation, including range riders and related supplies, research and field work supplies, fladry and other nonlethal supplies and veterinary supplies.
Nevertheless, “there’s a lot of pressure on the agency and Department of Natural Resources around budgets and how money is being spent around wolves — we know that’s huge,” Vail said. “And we’ve seen the impacts from legislation pulling back funding from the (wolf reintroduction) program,” nodding to legislation that moved about $250,000 in funding earmarked for wolf reintroduction into a fund aimed at driving down health care costs during a special lawmaking term to address the state’s nearly $1 billion defecit in August.
So the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project will keep going, with the billboards, with the plates.
Edward said understanding the effectiveness of the advertising is tricky: “Ultimately, the best metric would be to see an uptick in sales.” They didn’t see that directly after the billboards went up, although they did see an increase in landings on the website wolfplate.org, he added.
“So, I mean, we’ve got the data from being out in front of the media, which shows the millions or tens of millions of impressions that people have seen of the board. But what do we do with that?
“We can’t really measure the increase in general awareness-raising about the plate and the issue. But collaboration, coexistence through collaboration, and protecting ranching and wolves, was kind of the message.”
According to the Department of Motor Vehicles, it seems to be catching on: For the month of October, the Born to Be Wild plate ranked 8th out of 64 Group Special License Plate types sold that month.
From there, the statistics get interesting.
In Weld County, where 93,915 voters said “no” to wolf reintroduction, the fifth-highest number of Born to Be Wild Plates were sold this year from Jan. 1 to Nov. 14: 1,378.
But in Larimer County, where 104,020 people voted for reintroduction, only 1,120 Born to Be Wild plates were sold in the same period.
In Pueblo County, where 48.61% of people voted against wolf reintroduction, 453 bought plates.
While in Pitkin County, where 61.70% of the population voted for it, only 60 made the investment.
And the most plates sold outside of urban centers that overwhelmingly voted “yes” were sold in counties with some of the highest percentages of “no” voters, including Mesa, Garfield, Park and Elbert.