BAILEY — Among Colorado Parks and Wildlife law enforcement officers, Samson is just one of the dudes, but boy does he have a sniffer.
On a recent afternoon in Park County, he’s charging down the edge of a grassy field, pulling Ian Petkash behind him, when he stops, whips his head to the left and starts lunging toward what appears to be nothing.
The wind is blowing in his face and he starts moving like a serpent. A few yards down the field he stops again and changes behavior. He walks a couple of feet in one direction, stops and walks the same distance back the other way. When he zeros in on something in the grass, Petkash, CPW’s K-9 unit supervisor, kneels beside him. The second Samson finds the small green dental floss pick a volunteer stuck in the ground trying to outsmart him, Petkash throws him a ball.
It’s a reward for Samson finding the floss, a new test from his handler.
“He’s never been paid on that scent,” said Petkash.
Samson is the star of CPW’s K-9 program, which became an official part of the agency last year after a 10-year trial. He’s a 75-pound, muscle-bound Belgian Malinois from a breeder in Colorado Springs and paid for through a $12,000 grant from ex-Steeler Ben Roethlisberger.
And he’s a key part of CPW beefing up its ability to find kids who wander away from campsites, to uncover freezer bags of illegally caught fish, to bust poachers and, at a time when Colorado’s black bear population is bursting, to scare off bears that wander too close to humans, saving them from having to be euthanized.
All Samson wants in return? Some treats. Some snuggles from Petkash. And for pretty much everyone except his handler to leave him alone. “He’s all business,” Petkash says. And he gets the job done.
Boulder (Bailey, Breckenridge, etc.), we have a bear problem
CPW estimates Colorado’s bear population at between 17,000 and 20,000. Black bears are the only bears we’ve got, although their coats can be light blonde or red. When a guy named Ed Wiesman allegedly killed Colorado’s last grizzly by “stabbing it with an arrow” in 1980, black bears became the state’s largest carnivore, with the average adult male weighing around 275 pounds (about 125 more than the average male mountain lion and 175 pounds more than a large male wolf).
CPW says the largest populations of black bears live in areas with Gambel oak, aspen, chokecherry and serviceberry. The bears have a range of between 10 and 250 square miles.
A recent survey showed the agency received 5,299 bear reports in 2025, up from 4,996 reports a year earlier. The new total ranks as the highest number of reports since 2019 and exceeds the seven-year average of bear-related conflicts and agency-reported sightings.
Bears are omnivorous opportunists, and with so many people living in or near their habitat, they are increasingly stumbling into situations humans create: car doors unlocked with goldfish crackers scattered all over the backseat; a fast food bag with a few licks-worth of honey Dijon dipping sauce tossed in the recycling; a bird feeder full of suet left hanging outside an unlocked screen door overnight.
“When bears get into trouble, it usually isn’t their fault,” Petkash said during a talk at the library in Bailey.
But a bear that finds trouble too often can end up a bear CPW has to kill.
(Laura Kali, Colorado Parks & Wildlife)
Nearly half of bear-related reports in the survey last year involved property damage to sheds, garages, homes or fences. Trash wasn’t the only lure: the report listed accessible bird seed and livestock.
CPW euthanized 78 bears in 2025.
On May 27, Gov. Jared Polis signed new legislation introduced by Democratic Reps. Katie Stewart and Meghan Lukens along with Democratic Sen. Janice Marchman that cracks down on people who feed bears in Colorado.
House Bill 1342 lowers the burden of proof from “intentionally” to “knowingly” luring bears with misplaced or mismanaged food or trash.
And penalties for offenders with three or more violations will climb to $5,000 from $2,000.
But bears are gonna be bears and when they get into trouble it’s Petkash, Samson and other members of CPW’s growing K-9 team that come to the rescue.
Haze a bear, don’t break an ankle
Not long ago, a bear broke into a house people had left attractants around.
The bear threatened the people, so CPW set a trap, and Petkash said they were going to have to euthanize the bear.
“But other bears were working the area and were getting too comfortable around that house,” he added. “I think at one time there were 14 different bears coming around, and I got two calls on two subsequent days to haze the non-target animals.”
Petkash and Samson were called in to help ward them off, saving them from a similar fate as the euthanized bear — and potentially stopping any further clashes with humans or their property.
The video of Petkash, Samson and a couple other CPW officers getting the job done is pretty amazing. They’d trapped the bear in a crate but kept it close where it had gotten in trouble. The idea is not to relocate bears but to teach them it’s no longer worth going back to the site of some yummies because it’s going to hurt.
Petkash is tethered to Samson by a 15-foot leash and another officer starts slamming on the side of the crate.
Seconds pass. He keeps pounding and Samson is straining on the leash. The bear leaps out of the crate with Samson and Petkash hot in pursuit. The second officer shoots it.
“It’s a rubber buckshot, same as a paintball, so you’re basically spanking the bear,” Petkash said. “But when I run downrange I always yell ‘Muzzles up!’ because I don’t want to get hit.”
Handlers run with the dogs on leash because the dogs are “high drive” and can bite the bears, given the chance, he said.
CPW used dogs to successfully haze around 30 bears in the last year, a number they expect to grow now that the K-9 unit is fully operational after years of trials.
It took years for the agency to figure out how best to use dogs.
The first handler in the pilot program that started in 2015 worked with Sci, a Dutch shepherd who was trained to do traditional police apprehension work. He retired in 2024 and is “getting fat and sassy,” said Petkash.
A chocolate lab, Cash, donated to CPW by a Colorado kennel, can smell black-footed ferrets and Boreal toads, so he helps with wildlife surveys — plus poaching cases and educational outreach. He’s still in service.
And Cash and Samson are now joined by Sage, “a high-drive little knucklehead,” whose energy rivals any Malinois, Petkash said.
Donations funded the pilot program until 2025, when parks officials included the unit in its budget. Now funding comes from a mix of state legislative appropriations, private grants and public donations.
And these K-9 cops might have the cushiest jobs in the state.
A cushy job for a crime-fighting dog
They’re well-fed, well-hydrated, well-loved — and off the job, treated like any other pup.
On the job, their health and well-being is paramount.
Samson rides around in a CPW-emblazoned truck with the air conditioner running at all times. The truck will trigger an alarm if it gets too hot inside, send an alert to Petkash’s phone, automatically roll Samson’s window down and turn on a fan to keep him cool.
While the treatment can seem lavish, the assignments can be dangerous.
Petkash remembers a poaching case near Guanella Pass involving the killings of big game.
Despite responding to reports of eight shots fired at a location, multiple CPW officers couldn’t find any bullet casings.
“That led them to believe the suspects picked up the brass,” Petkash said in an interview on CPW’s Colorado Outdoors podcast. But they wanted to let Samson try to find evidence.
Once Petkash and Samson were on scene, Samson alerted but Petkash saw nothing.
That’s because the cartridge the dog smelled was buried deep in the grass — much like the floss pick he found in Park County.