The Trump Administration’s warp-speed restructuring of the federal government, mass integration of government data and vast tracking of immigrants would likely not be possible without a key technological partner: Palantir. The software company provides the digital architecture powering what former employees describe as an authoritarian agenda. Yet the company’s staggering commercial sector growth — up by 121 percent over the past 12 months — has attracted far less scrutiny. America’s largest meat company, Tyson Foods, became an early commercial adopter of the software in 2020, establishing a blueprint for how large food corporations can leverage Palantir’s surveillance technology.

Palantir advertises its partnership with Tyson as a flagship example of how its software is “transforming food and beverage businesses for the AI era.” Tyson uses Palantir’s Foundry platform, which has been described by a former employee as a “super-charged filing cabinet” for its unique capacity to digest endless amounts of data. It’s easy to see how this data-mining technology could be incredibly useful in managing complex food supply chains with many variables — and indeed, Palantir claims that it saved Tyson $200 million over the course of two years.

Yet Tyson’s deployment of Palantir also showcases the limits of the technology in protecting a vulnerable workforce. The company used Palantir to forecast Covid-19 infections among its meatpacking workers, according to Scott Spradley, Tyson’s former Chief of Technology. This data was then used to prepare for supply chain disruptions as workers fell predictably sick, while Tyson extensively lobbied against mandated worker protections.

Tyson Foods did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Palantir’s Expansion into the Food Industry

The U.S. food industry’s workforce is particularly vulnerable to surveillance technologies. An estimated 2.1 million immigrants work across the entire U.S. food supply chain, from farmworkers to food processing workers to grocery store workers — a workforce that has long been subject to heightened surveillance to further immigrant control and raids, which have significantly expanded under the Trump Administration. And this heightened risk of deportation  makes food chain workers — fearful of speaking  out because of their immigration status — more vulnerable to corporate abuse.

While there is no indication that Palantir is currently being used by food companies to monitor employees, food corporations have been investing in other AI technologies to this end and Palantir has facilitated the internal surveillance of employees in other industries.

For instance, Tyson and JBS, the world’s two largest meat companies, have invested in smart watches used to monitor workers’ movements. In a press release, a JBS spokesperson describes this technology as a “wearables and analytics platform” that will “provide us insight into how each employee responds to ergonomic and process changes by digitizing individual worker motion.” This raw data is fed to an AI algorithm, which converts it to metrics displayed on a dashboard for supervisors to monitor.

Palantir is not part of these smart watch projects, and it has repeatedly stated that it does not harvest any raw data. Instead, Palantir is able to quickly integrate existing data already stored by the company without making any changes to the underlying datasets. Yet as Tyson’s venture capitalist arm invests in smart watches and other forms of AI, it’s easy to see how the mass integration of data across varying data fields could lead to privacy concerns. Experts have warned about the compounding risks to privacy “that arise when huge datasets are merged and analyzed, which is the premise behind Palantir’s business model.”

Tyson first contracted with Palantir in 2020, as meatpacking plants emerged as the epicenter of the pandemic, to predict infections among its poultry plant workers down to nearly an exact figure. “In a very short amount of time we started working on figuring out how bad the spread is going to be, which plants are going to be affected, how quick are they going to be affected,” said Tyson’s Scott Spradley in a keynote speech at a Palantir-sponsored conference.

“I remember telling our CEO, “Hey, this plant in seven weeks is going to have 880 people infected and we’re going to shut that plant down,” said Spradley. “So that day hit. 883 people were infected because we were driving prediction with Palantir.”

Though Tyson had the technology to forecast infections, the company didn’t use this data to heighten protections among workers in advance of projected outbreaks at its meatpacking plants, at least none that were made public. Instead, this software was largely used to protect Tyson, ensuring that infections among workers didn’t disrupt the company’s intricate supply chain. By forecasting worker infections, Tyson could plan in advance for irregular inventories from plant closures and labor shortages, as Spradley explained: “This plant’s going to go down, so we need to start shifting product to this place.”

In Spradley’s speech, the only protective measure for workers mentioned was Tyson’s vaccine mandate, which relied on Palantir to verify vaccination records.

It was later revealed, in a 2022 House investigative report, that Tyson and other meat producers lobbied the first Trump Administration to shield the industry from liability for worker deaths and illnesses and exempt the industry from the stay-at-home mandate. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis determined that Tyson and other major meatpacking companies failed to take adequate coronavirus precautions, “despite awareness of the high risks of coronavirus spread in their plants.” Tyson possessed especially detailed awareness of the risk that Covid-19 posed to its workers, raising ethical questions about the responsibility that companies have to act on the data availed by Palantir.

Tyson is part of a growing wave of major food corporations — including General Mills, Wendy’s, Beyond Meat and Aramark — to embed Palantir in their operations. The U.N. World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian food aid program, is another adopter of Palantir. As the software giant appears poised for further growth in the food sector, supported by energy-intensive data centers being rapidly built across the country, it’s worth asking, sooner rather than later: what are the risks of a food system that runs on Palantir?

Palantir’s Ethical and Human Rights Concerns

Like many emerging forms of AI-driven technology, Palantir is malleable and responsive, designed to reflect the motives of its users, whether that is generating more profits or improving efficiencies or protecting its workers. Named after the ‘seeing stones’ in Lord of the Rings, Palantir can give companies and governments an unusual level of insight, but this doesn’t guarantee this information will be harnessed for good.

And in the wrong hands, like the seeing stones, the integration of vast pools of data has the risk of being weaponized for unethical or even illegal ends.

These risks are something that Palantir’s employees acknowledge, to an extent, even before being officially hired. In the final step of the hiring process, prospective employees typically undergo what is known as the “founder interview,” meeting with one of the company’s four founders, according to a former Palantir employee, who asked for anonymity due to a lifelong non-disparagement agreement he signed with the company.

In this final interview stage, “they would ask you a disarming question to catch you off guard, then try to read your soul to see if you were going to put the mission at risk or not,” the former employee told Sentient over Signal. “An example of a question a lot of people got (mine was similar to this) was: ‘How would you feel if software you wrote resulted in people dying due to a bug?’ Follow up: ‘What if this wasn’t a bug, but the software’s actual purpose?”’

“They made no excuses that Palantir’s software was powerful and would be used to ‘get the bad guys’  and ‘protect Western democracy,’ whatever that meant,” adds the former employee.

By now, it has become clear that these questions were not just far-flung hypotheticals. Palantir’s contracts with military and law enforcement agencies have demonstrated that the company is a willing partner to institutions that, whether by design or accident, kill people. Its 2024 contract with the Israeli military has especially provoked outrage, prompting accusations of enabling Israel to commit a genocide. Palantir also recently inked a $10 billion contract with the U.S. Army, building a “comprehensive framework” for the military’s data. And Palantir is behind a new $30 million mass surveillance system, deployed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to track and deport unauthorized immigrants.

There are mechanisms built into Palantir’s design to limit the company’s clients from accessing sensitive data, according to the former employee. For example, there are safety controls to prevent employees in intelligence agencies from accessing information that they don’t have clearance to see, with an option to flag someone who does have the permission to view this data in order to share it. There are also audit logs, owned by Palantir’s clients, that can monitor what information individual employees access in the system.

“The problem is all the safeguards in the world don’t mean anything if nobody uses this feature,” adds the former employee, who never anticipated this system would be abused when he was initially hired. “You still have to trust that your government will follow their own laws, another modern-day situation that back then seemed unimaginable.”

And these built-in measures have repeatedly proven insufficient. In July, Palantir was questioned by members of Congress about likely violating multiple federal laws by merging across federal agencies to create a searchable “database” of Americans, raising concerns about how this software is enabling the mass surveillance of both unauthorized immigrants and U.S. residents. The U.S. government relies on Palantir’s Foundry platform to compile this potentially illegal database — the same platform that Tyson deploys.

As it stands now, it’s not clear how most food companies are utilizing Palantir beyond the often vague, public-facing statements. But as Palantir further expands into the commercial sector, so do concerns about using the software to compile sensitive data.

While it may be common for defense technology to be wrapped in opacity, arguably for the sake of protecting national security, Palantir maintains a similar level of secrecy even in non-military contexts, Ilia Siatitsa, a program director and senior legal official at London-based nonprofit Privacy International, tells Sentient. She sees this as a problem.

“We have to just rely on promises from a company, but how is that good enough? How is that sufficient? Companies have never lied before? That’s what I find, from a public policy perspective, problematic,” says Siatitsa.

“Once [Palantir] moves the same product to the food industry, for instance, or the health sector, or all these other public sectors, then I think the citizens have a right to know a bit more about what exactly the product is doing, how it’s used and what exactly they aggregate and for what purpose,” says Siatitsa.

Siatitsa points to Palantir’s partnership with the U.N. World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian organization. When this partnership was announced in 2019, Privacy International and other nonprofits wrote an open letter to David Beasley, the executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, warning that “the partnership has the potential to seriously undermine the rights of 90 million people the WFP serves.”

“Nothing has been transparently shared about the procurement process that WFP set up to engage Palantir,” states that 2019 letter. “Given the gravity of these concerns, building in transparent checks and balances — such as third-party audits, open procurement and contract or agreement transparency — seems essential.” But this letter didn’t result in any greater levels of disclosure. Even today, “we have no information how this collaboration is going,” says Siatitsa.

As for Tyson, it remains unclear how the company is currently utilizing Palantir. In his 2022 remarks, Scott Spradley appeared to be brimming with excitement about all the ways Palantir can be further integrated into Tyson’s operations. “And we’re just continuing to find more and more, once you get all your data into Palantir, into Foundry, your kind of use case exploitation is unlimited,” said Spradley. “There’s nothing that you really can’t…we haven’t found a zero sum game there yet.” Of course, there are legal limits to how companies and governments can deploy Palantir, but that is increasingly appearing irrelevant.

The caravan of executions started with a U.S. Army veteran in March.

It continued in May with a former Army Ranger who served in the Gulf War, then an Air Force veteran in July, a former National Guard member in August, and a Navy veteran in October.

On Thursday, a former Marine, and next week, yet another Army veteran are scheduled to die in what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has called the “most veteran-friendly state in the nation.”

He’s the one who signed all seven of their death warrants. The governor wielding the executioner’s pen is a Navy veteran himself.

“They are coming so hard and so fast that it’s hard to keep track,” said William Kissinger, a Vietnam veteran who spent over four decades behind bars in Louisiana and now advocates on behalf of veterans on death row. “It’s heartbreaking.”

It’s also historic. Florida is on pace to more than double its record of eight executions in a year since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty nearly a half century ago. The number of military veterans on the list is startling.

While veterans represent an estimated 12% of Florida’s 256 death row inmates, they account for nearly 40% of the 18 death warrants that the governor has signed this year.

MORE COVERAGE: A List of the Veterans Florida Executed in 2025

DeSantis, a former JAG officer who served as a legal adviser to SEAL Team One in Iraq, has ignored the pleas of some veteran advocates and refused to address the disproportionate ratio of former service members he is sending to the Florida State Prison’s execution chamber.

“I don’t think he [DeSantis] is targeting vets specifically,” said Art Cody, a retired Navy captain and director of the Center for Veteran Criminal Advocacy. “He is just not taking [their military backgrounds] into consideration.”

But should he?

Should Military Service Matter?

While death penalty opponents and tough-on-crime hard-liners clash over the moral arguments and political motivations of DeSantis’ historic urgency, another debate is suddenly raging: Should an inmate’s military service matter when a judge, jury, or governor decides who deserves the ultimate punishment for society’s most heinous crimes?

The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on that question 16 years ago in a case out of—none other than—Florida. The justices overturned the death sentence of Gregory Porter, a decorated Korean War veteran convicted of killing his former girlfriend and her boyfriend, because his attorney had presented no evidence about the combat that left him “a traumatized, changed man.”

“Our Nation has a long tra­di­tion of accord­ing lenien­cy to vet­er­ans in recog­ni­tion of their ser­vice, espe­cial­ly for those who fought on the front lines,” the court stated in a 2009 opinion. “Moreover, the relevance of Porter’s extensive combat experience is not only that he served honorably under extreme hardship and gruesome conditions, but also that the jury might find mitigating the intense stress and mental and emotional toll that combat took on Porter.”

What makes the recent surge in veteran executions stand out, veterans advocates say, is how they contrast with the historic declines in death sentences nationally and the rising understanding of the traumatic impact of military service.

A new report released this week by the Death Penalty Information Center tallied more than 800 veterans sentenced to death in the U.S. since 1972.

About one-fifth of those veterans served in a major conflict, with the largest group—106 veterans—from the Vietnam War. About 40% of those Vietnam veterans had a known diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and many had been exposed to Agent Orange, the report found.

Jeffrey Hutchinson, the Gulf War veteran executed in Florida this May, traveled what the report called the ​“bat­tle­field-to-prison” pipeline. The former Army Ranger’s appeals for mercy included his diagnoses for PTSD, trau­mat­ic brain injury, and neu­ro­tox­in expo­sure.

“In many cases in Florida, the juries that sentenced these veterans to death never understood how seriously they were harmed by their experience in the military and what effect those injuries had on their ability to conform their behavior to the law,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit research center that focuses on how the death penalty is implemented. “Gov. DeSantis is in a position to recognize that and do something about it. But he, instead, has been scheduling them for execution and letting them be executed at his sole discretion.”

Yet, victims’ advocates argue that Hutchinson’s horrific crimes speak for themselves: He was convicted for the murder of his girlfriend and her three children, after busting down the front door of their north Florida home on Sept. 11, 1998, and finding them in the master bedroom. He shot mom Renee Flaherty and her kids, seven-year-old Amanda and four-year-old Logan, all in the head. Then he turned the gun on nine-year-old Geoffrey.

“The terror suffered in that moment is incomprehensible to this court,” the trial judge said.

More than 26 years later, Florida carried out Hutchinson’s execution.

Justice for Victims’ Families

Until this month, DeSantis said little about why he has so dramatically accelerated the pace of executions in the Sunshine State. Before this year, Florida had executed nine people—including two veterans—since the Republican became governor in 2019. Six of those were in 2023, critics note, as DeSantis launched an unsuccessful campaign for the White House.

The governor said during an appearance in Jacksonville earlier this month that he’s trying to do his part for victims’ families who deserve to see justice served.

“We have lengthy reviews and appeals that I think should be shorter,” DeSantis said, according to WUSF. “I still have a responsibility to look at these cases and to be sure that the person’s guilty. And if I honestly thought somebody wasn’t, I would not pull the trigger on it.”

But the governor has failed to address why so many of those inmates this year are veterans.

“By the time I’m writing about one, he has already signed another death warrant,” said Kissinger, a former airman first class and Vietnam War veteran who has led appeals to the governor on behalf of Florida’s veterans on death row. Three years after returning from the war, Kissinger killed a man during a drug robbery  and was locked up in Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he eventually became an inmate counselor on death row.

Kissinger was among 161 veterans who signed a letter calling on DeSantis to stop signing death warrants for veterans, including former National Guard member Kayle Bates, convicted for the 1982 murder of an office manager in Lynn Haven near Panama City.

A week before Bates’ execution in August, many of those petitioners gathered in Tallahassee, urging DeSantis to reconsider, arguing that executing veterans affected by war and denied mental health care was “not justice.”

They called the executions a “final abandonment.”

When asked for last words, Bates, who had been deployed during the deadly 1980 Miami race riots, said nothing. He had maintained his innocence for more than 43 years.

He was the fourth veteran executed in Florida this year. But his lethal injection became a tipping point for scores of veterans and death penalty opponents who say serious questions remained about his case.

When The War Horse reached out to DeSantis’ office with questions about Bates and whether the governor takes into account an inmate’s military service, a spokesperson replied with the same two sentences shared with other media: “Kayle Bates was executed after receiving the death penalty for murder, sexual battery, kidnapping, and robbery. His sentence had nothing to do with his status as a veteran.”

The Case of Kayle Bates

In 1982, Bates was an active member of the National Guard when he was charged in the brutal murder of Janet Renee White. Prosecutors say he abducted White from her office, stole her diamond ring, attempted to rape her, and stabbed her to death.

The trial of Bates, who was Black, opened with a prayer from the victim’s minister, who asked for the judge and the all-white jury to have “wisdom.” With no mention of Bates’ military background, he was sentenced to death within an hour of deliberations.

But the Florida Supreme Court threw out his original death penalty and ordered the trial court to reconsider his sentence. This time, attorney Tom Dunn, an Army veteran, represented Bates with one aim: to persuade the jury that Bates was not the “worst of the worst,” and that life in prison, not death, was appropriate.

Dunn presented Bates’ military service and lack of criminal history, and put forth 18 character witnesses, including fellow National Guard members.

They testified about how Bates’ deployment to the Miami riots, two years before his arrest, had affected him. Bates was among thousands of National Guard members sent into Miami after an all-white jury acquitted four white police officers in the beating of Arthur McDuffie, a Black Marine Corps veteran, left in a coma after a traffic stop in December 1979. For three days, Black neighborhoods in and around Miami burned. Vehicles were set on fire, people were dragged and beaten, and businesses were looted. At least 18 people were killed and hundreds injured.

One fellow Guard member described how Bates was afraid and nervous during patrols, according to court records, and another testified about the gruesome violence, especially against Black residents. No one came out of that experience unaffected, the Guard member testified.

Bates’ wife described him as distant and plagued by nightmares, and she said he often woke up screaming and not recognizing where he was. A forensic neuropsychologist testified that the trauma Bates endured could have influenced his later behavior.

But Bates’ attorney Dunn also focused on another argument: As an alternative to a death sentence, he said, the jury should be able to recommend life in prison without the possibility of parole, a new option under Florida law. At Bates’ original trial, the only alternative to death was 25 years to life. By 1995, Bates had already served nearly 13 years on death row, so Dunn worried jurors would feel forced to impose the death penalty so Bates couldn’t be eligible for parole in another 12 years.

When the jury asked the court after nearly three hours of deliberation if it could sentence Bates to life in prison without parole, the judge said no.

Ultimately, the jury voted nine to three to sentence Bates to death again. In a U.S. federal court, the lack of a unanimous decision would lead to a hung jury and no death sentence. That is not the case in Florida.

A dissenting Florida Supreme Court judge later criticized the ruling, calling the court’s refusal to accept Bates’ waiver “unnecessarily harsh” and inconsistent with past rulings.

A 42-Year Path to Execution

In 2024, almost three decades after his resentencing and a year before his execution, Bates’ legal team uncovered information suggesting a potentially fundamental problem with his original conviction: The jury may have included a relative of the victim. They asked the Florida Supreme Court to allow them to interview the juror.

If true, such a discovery could have led to a retrial. Florida law, like that of most other states as well as the federal system, explicitly bars jurors related to a victim by blood or marriage. The court, however, rejected the request as being too late, records show.

So on July 18, 2025, almost 42 years after Bates’ conviction, Gov. DeSantis signed a letter addressed to the warden of the Florida State Prison in Raiford about 140 miles away.

The death warrant was brief, outlining Bates’ court rulings, and concluded with a note saying that the governor’s office did not find executive clemency “appropriate” for him. It did not provide any further explanation for the decision.

Janet White’s husband, Randy, had been waiting for this resolution for four decades. He said he attended every hearing and every trial to “let Renee know that justice has finally been served for her,” he told USA Today. He attended the execution, but not out of revenge, he said. He had actually made peace and forgiven Bates years ago as a way to move forward.

“You’ve got to find a shorter route than 43 years,” he told the USA Today. “There’s got to be a better system that will see all these appeals through quicker.”

Honoring Those Who Served

On D-Day, just over two months before Bates was executed, DeSantis signed three separate bills “strengthening Florida’s support systems for veterans and their families,” according to a news release.

One was toward long-term care access for veterans and their spouses; another aimed to expand the state’s suicide prevention program specifically for veterans; and the last one proposed a crackdown on those trying to exploit veterans seeking their benefits.

“On D-Day and every day, Florida honors those who served our country in uniform,” the governor said in his announcement. “Florida remains the most veteran-friendly state in the nation.”

It is also one of the seven states in the U.S. where a dedicated clemency board listens to pleas to commute sentences and is required to make recommendations to the governor. But unlike in the other states, Florida’s four-member board is headed by the governor himself. The state has not granted clemency to a death row prisoner since 1983.

That appears to also be the case in the two executions scheduled for this month—both of whom are veterans: Bryan Jennings, a Marine Corps veteran, has been on death row for more than four decades for the rape and murder of a six-year-old girl in 1979; Richard Randolph, an  Army veteran, was convicted of the 1988 rape and murder of his former manager.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Jennings’ final legal appeal, clearing the way for Thursday’s execution.

“Florida’s practice transforms clemency from a constitutional safeguard into a secret administrative ritual,” Jennings’ lawyers wrote.

For Kissinger, who has become a vocal advocate for criminal justice reform in Florida, the quest to be heard has become an endless battle. As the dizzying pace of executions keeps growing, he has repeatedly requested a meeting with the governor to discuss veterans on death row.

He knows it’s a long shot.

“I keep waiting on emails,” he said. “I keep waiting on some sort of acknowledgement.”

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This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

The post Florida’s Governor Is a Veteran. So Are Seven Inmates He’ll Send to the Execution Chamber This Year</br> <span class=’secondary-title’>Veterans represent nearly 40% of the record number of death warrants Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed in 2025. Should their military service matter?</span> appeared first on The War Horse.

Since 2022, four Wyoming hospitals have closed labor and delivery wards, leaving 16 birthing hospitals for a state spanning 97,000 square miles. Medical workforce shortages, onerous on-call doctor schedules and mounting affordability challenges have only exacerbated the state’s growing maternity care gaps. 

The problem is not unique to Wyoming, but the state lags behind others in embracing and implementing solutions, according to a new Wyoming Women’s Action Network white paper. 

Wyoming, for example, is the only state not to participate in the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, an initiative to support best practices that make births safer and improve maternal health outcomes. 

“There are tools that are available to us that really haven’t been a focus of discussion, and could maybe start to make a significant difference,” said Jen Simon of the Wyoming Women’s Action Network. Like so many complicated issues, Simon said, “there’s no silver bullet. It’s going to take [multiple] efforts to really address it. And so, let’s start to identify what low-hanging fruit might be.”

That was one goal of the white paper, titled “The Equality State’s Growing Crisis: What maternity deserts mean for Wyoming and how we can turn the tide for moms and babies.” 

By collecting baseline data and policy directions, Simon said, the hope is to underscore an array of steps — even small ones — that can lead to more robust maternity care. 

“We do in fact have options,” she said. 

Along with joining the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Care, “low-hanging-fruit” strategies range from distributing low-cost alert bracelets to new mothers to convening an annual summit for sharing best practices. 

Rising challenges, falling births 

A dearth of maternal health care has made pregnancy and childbirth increasingly tricky in widening swaths of Wyoming, a 2023 WyoFile investigation found. 

This is evident in Fremont County, where moms are opting to temporarily relocate to places like Denver and even the East Coast to deliver babies. It is evident in Rawlins, where families have to travel Interstate 80, a notorious stretch of highway that closes frequently in the winter, to deliver in Laramie. And it is evident in Teton County, where overflow patients from elsewhere in the state are straining OB-GYN providers. 

Lawmakers made maternity care a top issue of study for the 2024 legislative off-season and began to identify a complicated mix of challenges for providing such care in rural places, though they didn’t pass any policies. 

Meanwhile, births continue to fall in many Wyoming hospitals, and a fifth facility, Platte County Hospital in Wheatland, temporarily shut down its delivery services in October.
For the Legislature’s Joint Labor, Health and Social Services Committee, maternity care was the No. 1 priority again during the 2025 off-season, or interim. 

Committee members discussed the issue in depth in October and acknowledged the problem’s scope is daunting. Proposed measures, such as one they advanced to authorize freestanding birth centers to get Medicaid coverage for midwife births, are merely “band-aids” that could perhaps keep maternity care limping along in its current state, lawmakers said. 

That leads to Simon’s point that Wyoming doesn’t have to focus on large-scale state-level reforms for solutions. 

“It’s such a significant challenge to move things through the legislature in every state, not just this state,” she said. The intent of the white paper is “to really be thinking about what would be accessible for hospitals and providers, and what are some best practices that are really simple and straightforward.”

Training, sharing, legislating

The paper’s more accessible recommendations include instituting an annual, statewide maternal health summit — an effort already underway. There are also training approaches, such as the Obstetric Patient Safety Program, commonly known as OPS, which is designed to help medical providers prepare for obstetrical emergencies. 

Postpartum birth alert bracelets, meanwhile, represent a simple and inexpensive tool that alerts health care providers to patients who have delivered within the previous six weeks. That can help ensure recognition and response to complications such as hemorrhage, hypertensive crises or infection — leading contributors to postpartum maternal mortality.

There are also local-level models, such as a community-wide prenatal access program developed in Teton County, as well as inclusion in national expertise pools. 

“Participation in [Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health] would give Wyoming access to resources, technical assistance, and collaborative partners to better collect and report data, implement strategies to address identified issues, and ultimately improve maternal outcomes,” the white paper reads. 

It also identifies more-involved strategies aimed at improving local capacity, affordability and workforce recruitment. These include initiatives like expanding physician access to remote support from maternal-fetal medicine specialists, administering matching-funds loan-repayment programs for health care professionals or boosting reimbursement for providing maternity services to Medicaid patients.

The Labor Committee in October voted down draft legislation that would provide for increased Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement for OB services and critical access hospitals.

Even though government can play a vital role in improving maternity care, Simon said, she hopes to convey that other meaningful avenues exist. 

“Here’s some things that can be done, that hospitals can decide, that communities can decide, that individuals can decide,” she said. 

Advances 

The paper also highlights some positive steps and strategies that are rolling out in the maternal health realm. 

This year, for example, Megan Baker of St. John’s Health in Jackson became the first Wyoming Section Chair for the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses, which connects her with resources for training and improved obstetric outcomes for Wyoming moms.

Baker, the manager of women’s services at St. John’s, has spearheaded initiatives to bolster the hospital’s maternal health offerings. St. John’s recently became Wyoming’s first hospital to gain a “maternal level of care” designation. She also helped obtain a statewide grant for OB safety courses and acquire alert bracelets for her facility. 

Wyoming medical professionals and hospitals will need to work together to combine resources to create a stronger network, Baker said. She is also a proponent of small-cost, big-impact programs like the alert bracelets. 

“I think we have to look at things differently,” she said. “Share resources, share people and figure out how others are doing it.”

If Wyoming’s trend continues, experts worry that mothers will put off or forgo prenatal care, travel long distances in difficult weather or give birth in emergency rooms with nurses who aren’t trained in labor and delivery, which could have dangerous or even deadly results. 

The erosion in care also poses existential threats to communities, as adequate health care is crucial to attracting young families to rural towns, state leaders say. 

“Being able to have a baby, safely, in Wyoming is a harbinger of our state’s present and future prospects,” Wyoming Women’s Action Network Board Member and Teton County Commissioner Natalia Macker said in a release. “The health of our moms, babies, and families is a clear indication of how healthy our hospitals, communities, and economy will be.”

The post Wyoming lags on solutions while maternal care crisis grows, report finds appeared first on WyoFile .

Centra Southside Community Hospital is set to close its labor and delivery unit and OB/GYN services in Farmville on Dec. 19 as part of a consolidation of women’s health care with their Lynchburg facilities.

The closure in Farmville fits a growing national pattern: rural maternity units are disappearing faster than communities can adapt. 

As birth centers shut down, pregnant women in smaller towns are forced to travel farther for care. For residents in Farmville, the nearest full-service labor and delivery unit will now be an hour or more away.

Centra decided to close the unit for a variety of reasons. According to Centra’s statement, declining birth rates and recent reductions in federal healthcare funding played a role. President of Centra Southside Community Hospital Thomas Angelo added in a recent interview with The Farmville Herald, a local news outlet, that staffing the unit was also a challenge.

Centra said staff are reaching out to all affected patients, and there are a few options that remain in the area for prenatal care.

One is Central Virginia Health Services, a federally qualified health center in Farmville, which has midwives who see patients. 

The other is Centra’s Emergency Department — the staff is trained to stabilize and care for patients before transfer. They can deliver babies, too, according to Angelo’s interview with The Herald.

Patients who choose to continue seeing Centra providers will be able to transfer their care to the system’s Lynchburg facilities or another site of their choice, the statement said.

What is happening in Farmville is part of a national trend. In 2025, 27 rural hospitals have shut down or have scheduled the closure of their labor and delivery units according to a report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, a national policy center focusing on promoting affordable, patient-centered health care. In 2024, 21 units were closed.

The reasons for the closures are similar to Centra’s — a national shortage of healthcare providers, declining birth rates, and low reimbursement rates from private insurance and Medicaid that pay hospitals less than what it costs to deliver babies, making maintaining birth units unprofitable, the report said.

State legislators have put forward some initiatives focused on maternal health outcomes, including money in the state budget to support OB-GYN residencies, Virginia Mercury reported.

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If you’ve ever done a double take at your bird feeder, wondering, what on earth is that patchy bird, you’re not alone. It happened to me on a crisp October morning when I spotted a bird that looked like a faded watercolor version of a Purple Finch. I blinked. I checked my bird app. Was this a new species? Some exotic visitor blown off course? Nope, it was just one of my usual backyard guests, caught in the middle of a messy, magnificent transformation. Molting season had arrived.

Meet the Purple Finch—or what’s left of it. The Purple Finch is usually a stunner. Males, in particular, flaunt a vibrant raspberry wash over their head, chest and back, blending into streaky browns and whites below. They’re like the red wine of songbirds—bold, rich and unmistakable. But during molting, that confident color gets interrupted. Feathers fall out. Patterns become jumbled. Bald spots may appear. The once-glorious plumage turns into a confusing patchwork that makes even seasoned birders pause and say, ‘Wait… what bird is that?’

The photo above is a perfect example. This Purple Finch is deep in the throes of a molt. You can still see flashes of its true colors—literally—but the rest of it looks like it went through a bird-sized spin cycle. Pink feathers peek through faded patches. Dark spots sit where fresh feathers are just starting to emerge. The overall effect? A creature in flux, a feathered Frankenstein’s monster piecing itself back together.

Why birds molt

Why do birds molt anyway? Molting is nature’s way of giving birds a wardrobe refresh. Feathers wear out from sun, wind and day-to-day life. They’re not alive like hair or fur; once grown, a feather can’t repair itself. So instead of mending old ones, birds replace them entirely—usually once or twice a year, depending on the species. For Purple Finches, molting typically happens after the breeding season, around late summer into fall. It’s a gradual process, replacing feathers in a specific sequence so they can still fly, forage and escape predators. But the trade-off? Their looks take a temporary nosedive.  Imagine trying to impress someone while wearing only half a suit. Or going to a party with your haircut stuck halfway between shaggy and buzzed. That’s the molting experience.

Bird lovers know this phase is just part of the finch’s story. Molting isn’t a mistake—it’s a natural, vital process. But the way it transforms these birds is pretty mind-blowing. During the height of molt, a male Purple Finch can look like a hybrid: part house finch, part juvenile, part who-knows-what. I’ve seen people mistake them for entirely different species, and honestly, it’s easy to understand why. That broken-up coloration and irregular feather coverage throws off all the typical field markers we rely on. But then—almost like magic—it all comes back together. New feathers grow in. Colors deepen. That unmistakable rose-red plumage returns. And just like that, the bird is whole again, like nothing ever happened.

Nature doesn’t need Photoshop. It builds the drama right into the design. It’s tempting to think of molting birds as less attractive versions of their usual selves. But if you’re a true bird enthusiast, this is one of the coolest times to observe them. You’re witnessing a live transition. A biological reboot. It’s like seeing the caterpillar become the butterfly—except here, it’s finches ditching last season’s feathers for a new, sleeker model. I’ve grown to love this ragged phase. There’s something raw and real about a bird in the middle of change. They’re not picture-perfect, but they’re alive, adapting and in motion. Watching a Purple Finch go from patchy and awkward to polished and brilliant again reminds me how resilient nature is. Let’s be honest—it’s kind of fun to play “guess that bird” when a half-molted finch shows up looking like it belongs in a bird-themed mystery novel.

What to look for

If you’re a backyard birder like me, fall is the perfect time to keep an eye out for molting Purple Finches. Look for:  patchy plumage, irregular color patterns, especially around the head and back. Feather spikes or “pins,” new feathers still encased in their sheath. They look like tiny quills and will eventually unfurl. Awkward behavior; some birds might scratch more or preen excessively as new feathers grow in. That’s normal. And don’t worry—molting isn’t painful for birds. It can be a bit uncomfortable and energy-intensive, but it’s completely natural. If anything, it’s a sign the bird is healthy and going through a normal life stage.

Beauty in the process

There’s something deeply reassuring about the rhythm of molt. It’s a reminder that change doesn’t always look pretty in the middle—but it’s necessary. Even the most radiant creatures need to fall apart a little before they come back stronger. Seeing this ragtag Purple Finch on my feeder, looking like a bird-shaped jigsaw puzzle, reminded me that beauty isn’t always about polish. Sometimes, it’s about process. About watching something wild and wonderful slowly become itself again. So, the next time you spot a weird-looking bird that seems like it’s been through a storm—pause. Take a closer look. It might just be a Purple Finch, reinventing itself one feather at a time.

For fellow birders: snap a photo, take notes, and enjoy the transformation. There’s nothing quite like witnessing nature’s makeover in real time. That messy little bird? It’s not lost. It’s in progress. Just like the rest of us.

As Montanans pause this Veterans Day to honor those who served, it’s worth noting just how many of our neighbors have served in the U.S. Armed Forces. Montana ranks among the top states in the nation for veterans per capita.

According to 2023 data from the Veterans Administration, Montana ranks third per capita, behind only Alaska and Virginia, for the number of veterans who call the state home. According to those stats, roughly 1 in 13 Montanans has served in the military. That’s 88,543 residents overall.

Located across the Bering Strait from Russia, Alaska’s ranking stems from its strategic location and several major military installations. Virginia’s is explainable by its dense network of bases, government and defense employers adjacent to Washington, D.C.

Montana, with its single active Air Force base, Malmstrom in Great Falls, has a less-visible presence in terms of active-duty military personnel, with 3,432 active service men and women stationed in Montana as of June 2025 as opposed to 20,671 in Alaska and 122,254 in Virginia. Recruiting figures also show Montana is middle-of-the-pack in terms of the fraction of residents who sign up for active-duty service.

One theory is that Montana is an attractive destination for veterans as they retire from active military service.

Dr. Elizabeth Barrs, a retired Army officer and the director of the University of Montana’s Defense Critical Language & Culture Program, said in an interview that, while she isn’t aware of any hard data on the subject, anecdotally she hears that the state’s recreational options are a draw.

“I think a lot of service members are drawn to outdoor activities,” she said. “The military is an adrenaline-filled career and I think people are looking to fill that.” 

Barrs also cited housing that has historically been less expensive than other states, veterans’ resources like Fort Harrison and a number of new VA clinics across the state as well as an active Special Forces Association chapter. 

As she commemorates Veterans Day this year, Barrs said she’s thinking about the military as an example of engaged citizenship.

 “I hope that Americans focus on what joins us together. In our military, millions of young people from every walk of life come together to serve one common ideal — the Constitution,” she said. “I wish Americans would look to that as an example.”

The post One theory on why Montana has a disproportionate number of veterans  appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Several small NC towns are experimenting with Utah-based TextMyGov service, which allows texting to and from residents. Reactions are mixed.

Small NC towns trying out direct texting with residents is a story from Carolina Public Press, an award-winning independent newsroom. Our breakthrough journalism shines a light on the critical overlooked and under-reported issues facing North Carolina’s more than 11 million residents. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

I sit at the lunch table knowing my food is getting cold, too busy writing to eat. My two table mates are eager to tell me their stories. They are both veterans, attending an Armed to Farm training for beginning farmers. One went out of her way to welcome me, fetching a chair from a nearby table.

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Mary Martinez Rigo, 64, is older than most of the other attendees. She and her husband rehabilitated a former pine forest in Virginia into pasture for alpacas by literally drilling nutrients into the compacted clay. Her husband’s health is declining and she is at Armed to Farm with an eye to the future.

“I don’t want to give it up, and am looking to age gracefully in place as a farmer and a veteran,” she said. “I am looking to pivot from production to offering workshops.”

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This November event was the 54^th Armed to Farm, a program of the nonprofit National Center for Appropriate Technology. NCAT was founded during the energy crisis of the 1970s to develop energy saving strategies for underserved communities. In 1987, NCAT expanded its mission to include sustainable agriculture.

The week-long training events combine classroom instruction with in-depth farm tours. Experts, some of them veterans themselves, present on beekeeping, marketing, soil health, and agricultural law in the mornings. Afternoon tours provide for a close inspection of thriving small-scale agriculture operations and the chance to ask practitioners specific questions.

Participants begin by discerning goals for their farm. During the week they explore enterprises that could meet those goals. Some are aiming for profitability while others are seeking to be self-sufficient, grow a community garden in order to donate food, or operate a farm that trains other veterans. 

The farm visits at the November event, held in Berea, Kentucky, exposed the group to aquaponics, horticulture, beekeeping, fruit and nut production, goat tending, retail operations, and seed saving. The Berea College Forest hosted a session on horse logging that drew a lot of interest.

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Towanda Farrington got involved in farming through an equine program for veterans. She found that being outdoors and caring for animals helped her PTSD. She plans to operate her Mississippi-based vegetable and herb enterprises the old-fashioned way.

“I want to use a plow horse on my farm,” she said. “I got my horse from the Humane Society and like nurturing him as he nurtures me.”

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Piloted in 2013 and launched in 2015, the Armed to Farm program has welcomed participants from 46 states. It has also proven highly successful; 83% of its thousands of graduates remain involved in farming. Some have gone on to leadership in community food system work.

Participants in this program gain much more than knowledge. Veterans face unique challenges, and being in a group with their former military peers creates an instant community. Participants feel safe to share their military experience in this nurturing environment, and program leaders are intent on accommodating their special needs. 

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Sean Judge was in a pivotal place in June 2019 when he attended his first Armed to Farm. With a PTSD diagnosis and recent surgeries to remove a tumor from his spinal cord, his physical restrictions dictated that he walk slowly and carry nothing over five pounds. Regardless, he felt like a full participant in the event.

“They asked about accommodations on the application and found a way for me to attend,” he said. “They never let go of me, even though they knew it would take a little bit for me to get there.”

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Some attendees don’t know any other veterans interested in agriculture before Armed to Farm. They meet the teaching staff of NCAT, five of whom are veterans, who act as mentors and guides, and emerge connected to a supportive network they can call on in the months and years to come. 

“Veterans having their own program is one of the biggest factors in [Armed to Farm’s] long-term success,” said Mike Lewis, a veteran and NCAT staff member. “I get at least four texts a week from graduates reaching out or asking technical farming questions.” 

Veterans continue to benefit from NCAT resources after their Armed to Farm experience. Each receives a stack of books and pamphlets to take home, and can take advantage of networking and virtual learning opportunities. The advanced Armed to Farm 2.0 events provide a deeper dive into the business aspects of farming and scaling up production. 

NCAT developed and operates Armed to Farm through a cooperative agreement with USDA-Rural Development. Each event relies on organizational partners for expertise and funding. Nonprofit Ranchin’ Vets offers a transportation stipend to participants. The Berea event was in partnership with Kentucky State University under one of their grant programs.

Looking to the future, Armed to Farm leaders hope to expand its reach. They are working on offering more enterprise-specific trainings, and hosting a tribal-focused Armed to Farm event.

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The post ‘Armed to Farm’ Program Prepares Veterans for Success in Agriculture appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

As appropriations for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s funding remains uncertain because of the government shutdown, Native American tribes across the U.S. have been forced to step in with emergency funds to support families who rely on the federal aid.

It’s a demographic that relies heavily on SNAP, which provides food assistance for approximately 42 million Americans. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 23% of American Indian and Alaska Native households used SNAP benefits in 2023 — nearly double the national average.

And tribal advocates and representatives have warned lawmakers of the risk the government shutdown poses to their communities, including the lapses in funding to SNAP, Head Start and WIC, the Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.

“Most tribes are taking care of their tribal members. It’s just that they’re taking on a lot of expense at this point,” Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin said.

In Oklahoma, Cherokee Nation officials announced on Monday they would use $6.5 million to provide direct checks to citizens on the reservation or in nearby counties. Another $1.25 million will fund nonprofit food programs and local food banks to help support the Cherokee Nation, which is the largest tribe in the country.

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma launched a Temporary Food Assistance Program for tribal members nationwide. Eligible members can apply for a one-time $150 food assistance payment via EBT, and holiday food vouchers. 

The Osage Nation expanded its Temporary SNAP Relief Program to cover all enrolled Osage households statewide. Eligible households may apply for a one-time $300 payment per household. 

Other nations, such as the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, are coordinating food banks, resource lists and food-distribution tailgate events in anticipation of benefit disruption.

In other states, the percentage of people affected by SNAP cuts also disproportionately hits tribal nations. Wisconsin, for example, has 11 federally recognized tribes, and the Menominee tribe is its largest with approximately 8,700 members, according to Wisconsin First Nations. Wisconsin Watch reported that in Menominee County, which is 80% populated by the Menominee Tribe, 46% of residents receive SNAP benefits. Officials for the tribe did not respond to an inquiry.

When asked if he’d been speaking with tribal nations in his state about how they are affected by SNAP cuts, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson said, “Well they would be affected like everyone else.”

“I’m opposed to this government shutdown,” Johnson said. “The simple solution is: Vote for the House CR.”

Sen. Mike Rounds told NOTUS he has been in contact with the tribal nations in South Dakota.

“The vast majority of the members on most of my reservations, one of their primary sources of money for food is SNAP,” Rounds said. “Our Democrat colleagues, I think, are starting to understand it. But they are wedging because they want something that we can’t deliver, which is an outcome on their proposal to simply continue on with a failed plan on Obamacare.”

A federal judge ordered President Donald Trump on Thursday to issue full SNAP benefits within a day, a decision that comes after a long back-and-forth over the use of USDA contingency funds. On Friday, the administration filed an appeal to stop that order.

But even ahead of the shutdown, SNAP was already facing cuts. Trump’s reconciliation bill slashed $186 million in SNAP funding through 2034, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The bill, which was signed into law in July, included a $500 million cut in funding to the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program, which allowed states and tribes to procure fresh, locally-sourced food.

“I’ve been speaking to tribal leaders and those that are responsible for food programs within sovereign nations, and there’s concern across the board,” said Sen. Ben Ray Luján.

Luján’s state, New Mexico, has the third-highest percentage of Native Americans in the country. In his previous attempt to pass legislation that would temporarily fund SNAP, Luján included reimbursing the states and tribes that are currently using emergency funding.

When asked if tribes or states would receive these reimbursements, a spokesperson for the USDA blamed Democrats for the shutdown.

“This compromises not only SNAP, but farm programs, food inspection, animal and plant disease protection, rural development, and protecting federal lands,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Senate Democrats are withholding services to the American people in exchange for healthcare for illegals, gender mutilation, and other unknown ‘leverage’ points.”

Historically, tribal reservations are geographically isolated and more likely to be in a food desert.

The only program that remains somewhat untouched by the government shutdown and the reconciliation bill is the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations. FDPIR provides monthly boxes of USDA foods that Natives refer to as “commodities” based on their lower nutritional value. Prior to Nov. 1, when SNAP ran out of federal funding because of the shutdown, some nations suggested their members switch from SNAP to FDPIR because households can not participate in both programs in the same month.

The consensus among lawmakers, however, is to end the shutdown.

Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, the vice chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, told NOTUS on Wednesday the effect on Native American communities is simple to describe: “It’s quite bad, disproportionately bad.”

“People deserve to eat,” he said.

This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and Oklahoma Watch.

The post Native American Tribes Are Struggling in Wake of SNAP Uncertainty appeared first on Oklahoma Watch.

COLORADO SPRINGS

In the 16 years John Michael Williams has lived in a split-level house in a quiet Colorado Springs neighborhood, he has, by his conservative estimate, had 15 deer born in the modest backyard off his glassed-in sunroom. 

The does, looking fat in the spring, will jump the fence, poke around, bed down and give birth to either twins or triplets. After they do, he will close the gate for 10 to 14 days, because he doesn’t want predators sneaking in and snatching the cute, speckled fawns, or the does and fawns getting out too early. And he lets them eat whatever they want. “We really don’t have any plants back there,” he says. “We gave up growing flowers because they love them so much.” 

Several other wild animals have visited his home, including a buck bigger than any he’s seen in the wild, more deer, a red fox whose presence woke him from a nap in his hammock and a bear he found licking the inside of a Starbucks Frappuccino cup he tossed in the trash before the city banned residents from leaving their cans out except for on collection day. 

But something he’s never seen in his neighborhood — and will likely never see — is a wolf. And that’s interesting given how much of the past two years he has dedicated to studying, pondering, discussing and posting about the “magnificent animals” and “ultimate predators” that are “cool to look at” and have incredible senses of vision, smell and hearing. 

In fact, Williams became so taken with wolves and Colorado’s voter-mandated wolf reintroduction program when it kicked off in December 2023 that he created a Facebook page he envisioned as a little like the Drudge Report, before it “kind of went left,” that would educate the public through articles he shared from various media outlets. 

The people who found his page were (and are) divided into thirds, he says. “One-third is, you know, ‘kill them all,’ and the other third is ‘we love wolves, they’re the greatest thing in the world.’ And in between those two, the final third or maybe bigger, are just kind of on the fence.” 

That’s encouraging because he says he doesn’t want Colorado Wolf Tracker to be “an echo chamber” for its members. Rather, his goal is for the page to be a clearinghouse of information about wolves and a place to hold Colorado Parks and Wildlife accountable as they fulfill the voter mandate to restore the animals west of the Continental Divide, and to monitor the narratives they’re creating as they go about it. 

For a while, that’s mostly what Wolf Tracker did — with ample criticism for CPW, Gov. Jared Polis, his administration and his husband, Marlon Reis, an animal-rights activist and outspoken proponent of wolf reintroduction thrown in. 

Williams has his own critics who say he foments extremism by giving hardline wolf haters a place to spread vitriol, and that he’s clearly there to agitate. But he says he “reaches out to people on all sides of the issues to give them an opportunity to give their thoughts” and that his main motivations are keeping the public abreast of wolf news and giving people in rural communities, who he sees as having been subjected to reintroduction, a voice, because he’s “seen what unchecked growth of a wolf population can do in a state,” Wisconsin, and he doesn’t want that in Colorado, where he thinks reintroduction was rushed.  

Wolf Tracker members aren’t generally as welcoming to reintroduction supporters as Williams says he is, though. That’s evident with a quick scan through the comments on most of the posts. 

In January, their rhetoric took what many felt was a dark turn into vigilanteism. And in the 11 months since, as the page has remained a place for Williams to inform, educate and hold CPW accountable, it may also have become more powerful. 

Social media equals “National Enquirer + X + Mother Jones”

Wolf Tracker’s other purpose is to be a landing page for reports of wolf sightings and depredations in Colorado, accompanied by photos and locations. You’ll often see a map with pins showing these locations. At first, it can be alarming. What if someone who supports the ethos of  “shoot, shovel, shut up” zeros in on a wolf and tries to do just that?

Don’t worry. Williams says he never pins “right where someone had found a track and said here it is. You know, latitude, longitude, that sort of thing.” And he shares the pins, he says, “because people that are livestock producers, people that are hunters, recreationists, deserve to know if there are wolves in certain areas. I think that’s something the CPW should be doing. And in the absence of that, I have, at times, posted information with general locations. But never, never the exact spot.” 

What keeps the page humming is the ongoing story of wolf reintroduction — or the saga, depending on your view. And members love a good mistake, like the one they the state made when it let voters decide to bring wolves to Colorado at all, and then again on Dec. 18, 2023, when CPW dropped the first five animals in Radium State Wildlife Area in Grand County.

Information was withheld. Key people were omitted. Members of the media watched wolves step out of their crates and lope into the aspens. But no Grand County commissioners were invited, nor any from Summit County where the second five wolves were released days later. 

More trouble followed as the wolves explored their new territory. Conway Farrell owns a ranch with sheep and cattle between where the Grand County wolves and Summit County wolves were released. And Doug Bruchez, whose ranch borders Farrell’s, said it took no time at all for some of the wolves to find both of their properties. 

When one of the Grand County wolves and one of the Summit County wolves mated, they parked themselves near Farrell’s ranch, where the male wolf, at least, started preying on livestock.

Colorado’s wolf management plan had been approved without a definition of how many sheep or cattle wolves needed to kill before they were considered “chronic depredators” and could be removed. So even though the ranchers had proof the wolves were killing their animals, the agency couldn’t kill them. Then, in April 2024, CPW Director Jeff Davis said the agency wouldn’t shoot the male wolf blamed for the kills because based on data collected from their tracking collars, the female seemed to be denning. Killing her mate, he said, would make the pups’ survival unlikely, an act contrary to the state law directing CPW to establish a viable population. 

They left the pair alone and pups were publicly confirmed in August 2024, when an outdoorsman captured video of three of the pups playing in an aspen grove.  

Wolf advocates celebrated the historic moment for wildlife conservation. But not the citizens of Wolf Tracker. The wolves kept preying on Farrell’s livestock and he had become something of a symbol of all that was wrong with reintroduction.

One of Williams’ heroes is Erin Brockovitch, an environmental and consumer activist who gained fame for her role in a major lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric over groundwater contamination in Hinkley, California. Like the people she represented, Williams says, ranchers and farmers are an underrepresented community that “at least traditionally haven’t had much of a voice. And CPW dumped wolves on them without so much as letting them know.” 

The Grand County wolves stayed near the easily accessible food source they’d found, killing 15 of Farrell’s sheep and adversely impacting at least 35 of his cattle. The state later paid him around $600,000 in compensation for the losses, but when they were happening, lots of people — ranchers and otherwise — were rattled. 

For months prior, the Middle Park Stockgrowers Association had been pressuring CPW to kill multiple wolves known to be preying on cattle in the area. As pressure mounted, and the new pups grew, CPW decided to trap the family group they’d named the Copper Creek Pack and asked for help from Bruchez and Farrell. 

Federal and state trappers posted up in Farrell’s hunting lodge during a time the property would normally have been leased to hunters, Bruchez added. The ranchers were sworn to secrecy, and they kept it. 

But Williams caught wind of the capture operation “from more than one source” and posted about it before it before CPW did, he said. He didn’t know what he’d done until much later, when someone told him he “kind of threw a monkey wrench in the operation by publishing at that time,” he added.

“Oh, well, gosh, that’s not good,” he thought. “I’ve got to be careful, being someone who tends to have a level of respect for our state agencies.” 

CPW announced completion of the operation on Aug. 27, 2024. On Sept. 4, Davis wrote in a private email to several stakeholders interested in restoration, that “despite ‘all of the experts’ and massive headwinds from the extreme end of the ranching community, CPW and our partners will be successful in restoring wolves to Colorado while avoiding and minimizing conflict with the ranching industry.”

Wolf Tracker lit up when Willams posted the letter. He says it was the kind of information members deserve.  

Moderating Wolf Tracker 

After Williams started the page on Dec. 15, 2023, Wolf Tracker “went from one person (me) to 3,000” in two weeks, he said in an email. 

By Sept. 4, 2024, the next time he could get analytics, that number had risen to 7,000. His membership is relatively low (around 13,000), he said, because when he created the page “it was important to keep it private so we didn’t have to deal with scammers, bots, spammers and fake profiles.” He thinks people come to it because they truly care about the issue, about the plight of ranchers and because “there was a real vacuum in the beginning in what was being put out by the CPW.” 

“I mean we knew the wolves were coming, and then we knew it was done covertly. And from an organizational, behavioral public health standpoint … anytime you try to introduce a change into a population or an ecosystem which involves people, information is very important.” 

Williams’ drive to hold truth to power has kept the 68-year-old doctor, writer, Navy vet and hunter busy watchdogging the Polis administration, providing commentary that makes his supporters fawn and opponents shudder, and one time, writing his own “news release” about a CPW operation to kill a chronically depredating wolf because he thought CPW’s wasn’t clear enough. 

“There’s a difference between lack of transparency and secrecy,” he said, citing times he believed CPW legitimately withheld information about the location of wolves for their safety as opposed to times they’ve “actively tried to subvert a message or keep the public in the dark … where it may serve (their) purposes, but it does not serve the purposes of the public.”

He’s a student of Enos Mills, father of Rocky Mountain National Park, who “made some very interesting observations of wolves,” including that they’ll avoid humans and livestock if they’re conditioned to do so (by members being killed). He’s a public health physician licensed in four states who says he’s concerned for Colorado ranchers because wolves are “impacting their livelihoods, stalking their children and attacking their pets.” And he’s a proponent of social media as a mode of information sharing who knows that to keep his audience engaged he has to keep it entertained. “Social media isn’t The New York Times, it isn’t The Colorado Sun. It’s sort of a mix between the National Enquirer and maybe X and throw in a pinch of the New York Post and Mother Jones,” he said.  

But about a year after he created Wolf Tracker, it took a new direction. 

“Running amok and frightening citizens” 

In November 2024, a coalition of 26 ranching, livestock and rural community organizations started pressuring CPW to pause wolf reintroduction. 

A petition they presented to the state wildlife commission contained information about Farrell losing his livestock despite trying everything CPW had told him to do to keep wolves away, including “yelling, screaming, shooting empty cracker shells,” and using Critter Gitter animal repellers, flashing fox lights, livestock protection dogs, carcass management, night patrol and range riders.  

The group said it wanted CPW to hold off on bringing any more wolves to the state until “specific wolf-livestock conflict mitigation strategies (were) fully funded, developed and implemented.”

Williams says he can sense emotional shifts on Wolf Tracker when certain things come to light. And he sensed membership spike after the repeated depredations on Farrell’s livestock. He “has his finger on the pulse” of the group “and the pulse can be fast and the body sweaty and not happy.” (“Or mellow. Breathing a sigh of relief,” he added.) 

When the petition appeared, some expressed cautious hope. But clouding it was a reminder that more wolves were coming to Colorado. “And once again, there was no information,” Williams said, even though prior to CPW bringing 15 wolves in from British Columbia, the agency did tell commissioners in Eagle, Pitkin and Garfield counties that they’d likely arrive in early January.

On Jan. 8, the state wildlife commission denied the ranchers’ petition. That could have fueled the anger starting to flare up on Wolf Tracker. But Williams was also directly responsible. He had been slowly leaking information that someone in Pitkin County had agreed to let wolves be released on their ranch. 

Then one of his “sources” figured out which plane from Colorado-based LightHawk Conservation Flying had flown to British Columbia to get wolves, and Williams shared that information on Wolf Tracker. 

The plane would land at either Aspen/Pitkin County Airport or Eagle County Regional Airport, he wrote. “Another hot tip…keep your eyes open!” 

Sure enough, on Jan. 12, the plane carrying the wolves landed at the Eagle airport, as a couple who knew it was coming awaited its arrival. After watching CPW load the wolves onto three agency trucks, they followed and videoed them driving through Glenwood Canyon. 

On Jan. 14, a second plane carrying wolves that was scheduled to land in Eagle County landed at Denver International Airport, which caused some to speculate that CPW had redirected it because of Wolf Tracker activity. But a CPW spokesperson said Davis moved the landing after learning the Eagle County airport customs desk was scheduled to be closed on the original date and the animals needed to go through customs.  

On the 14th, two men dressed in camo and carrying AR-style rifles followed hints dropped by Williams, and reported by Colorado Politics, to the ranch, claiming they were sightseers out looking for wolves.   

A screenshot of Williams’ tip about the plane had been emailed to Davis and CPW Deputy Director Reid DeWalt on Jan. 8 with a clip from an article in the Toronto-based Globe and Mail that quoted Farrell saying: “Now, we hate every wolf. My advice to everybody is start shooting and poisoning them.” 

A note included with the message said, “By itself, it isn’t much but in a certain situation it could be seen as evidence.” 

But in the end, no laws were broken – at least not on the page or at the airport. So no action was taken against Wolf Tracker members. 

Even so, Julie Marshall, an activist, longtime journalist and former communications officer for Colorado Division of Wildlife, believes Colorado leaders, including CPW and members of the wildlife commission, are “afraid of doing the right thing by standing up to bullies and bad actors.”

“We need fearless leadership to speak up for wolves and good ranchers who want to coexist instead of derail wolf reintroduction,” she said, “but instead we get silence from leadership, which implies it’s fine to run amok with weapons, trespass and frighten citizens. I think the Wolf Tracker group sounds like vigilantes and are dangerous to public safety and especially to wildlife.” 

Williams’ fans praise him, including Jerry Porter, who noted his “hard work of keeping all the misinformation and garbage out of this group!!” Lee Bruchez, Doug’s brother, highlighted the Wolf Tracker community’s “thoughtful support and discussion, particularly (by) John Michael.” 

So, is Wolf Tracker vigilante?   

In the world of vigilanteism, the most effective leaders “appeal to the disempowered. Are often anti-tax, anti-fed, anti-immigrant. And they empower people to feel like heroes by doing things like defending the Constitution,” says Betsy Gaines Quammen, a writer who covers radicalization in the West and vigilante groups like the Free Land Holders and Oath Keepers. 

None of those appear to apply to Williams, but this might: They engage people who are searching for a cause, Gaines Quammen said in an interview.

Wolf Tracker members aren’t necessarily looking for a cause, but in wolves they have one. 

And on the page they might find a group largely united in opposition of not one but two, three or four common enemies. Posts and comments show an overwhelming disdain for liberals, wolves, “wolf lovers,” Polis, Reis and the upper reaches of CPW leadership. 

Proof lies in attacks like this one, posted on the Wolf Tracker page: “I just joined this group thinking it was a wolf lovers page just to keep track of what they (people) were up to. I’m pleasantly surprised to find it just the opposite. Shoot away!” 

It’s also in more extreme ones, like this: “We are living in a State of tyranny…! I will draw this line in the sand. The day one of these pro wolf people assault a rancher over a wolf claim is the day we pick up our arms and make the Cliven Bundy standoff seem like a weekend vacation for these tyrants!”

But as Cory Gaines (no relation to Betsy), a Wolf Tracker member, physics instructor at Northeastern Junior College in Sterling and founder of the Colorado Accountability Project, wrote in an “open email” to The Colorado Sun and state Sen. Dylan Roberts after a Sun story published in February detailing the stakeout and chase from the Eagle County airport, the same vitriol found on Wolf Tracker can be found on Reis’ Facebook page. 

“Colorado Wolf Tracker was not created in a vacuum, has not grown in a vacuum,” he added. And “unmentioned in (The Sun) article are the constructive roles it takes on for many who have concerns over wolf reintroduction. It does indeed take the place of some journalism: The page functions as an information-sharing arm about wolf locations, the rather swampy connections between our governor’s office and CPW, how to advocate, among others.” 

A fair assessment. But even Williams admits the events surrounding the delivery and release of the wolves from British Columbia created “quite a bit of dustup” and he has some regrets over how they unfolded. 

That’s why he removed all mention of the ranch in Pitkin County, the planes carrying the wolves and the events surrounding the release. And he says he tries to filter out comments by a minority of members who think wolves “just need to be wiped out and killed and have a hunting season for them, and, you know, (shoot-shovel-shut up) and the whole thing like that. I think that’s kind of repugnant, and it’s illegal. That kind of content doesn’t get posted. And if it does, I will try to remove it.” 

Some critics of the page would like to see more effort. 

“I used to follow the page more regularly, but my blood pressure really can’t handle it,” said Rob Edward, president of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, who has been involved in wolf restoration for 30 years. “I have a general Facebook profile that I follow it with, because when I was myself there and actually dared to say something in opposition to something John Michael said, I got beat down from every side, including by John Michael.” 

Edwards says he knows the wolf restoration landscape backward and forward, including “most of the very deep arguments on both sides of the equation” as well as “the science against the science.” And he says what Williams is doing with Wolf Tracker “is not in the benefit of finding a way forward of actually separating hard data and facts from fiction, or helping people see the other point of view.” But, he added, “the same applies to ‘pro wolf’ groups where most of the nonsense is rancher and hunter bashing.”

The power of place 

In May, after the British Columbia wolves had been released in Eagle and Pitkin counties, a wolf from the Copper Creek Pack killed four calves belonging to three different ranchers over a two-week period in the Roaring Fork Valley. 

Interest on Wolf Tracker was high, because CPW had re-released the Copper Creek female and four of her five pups near the ranch the men had trespassed on (the male had died on arrival at the animal sanctuary and one pup was left behind. CPW shot it over the summer after it preyed on livestock in Rio Blanco County). By then, CPW had also adopted a definition of chronic depredation, and on May 28, the agency located and shot the depredating wolf. But the rest of the remaining Copper Creek wolves, plus new pups, remained in place, and a couple had zeroed in on calves on two ranches.  

In July, Williams invited a surprise guest onto Wolf Tracker for an informal interview. It was Gary Skiba, a career biologist and CPW commission appointee who publicly resigned when he realized the Senate wouldn’t approve him “in the face of opposition from hunting, outfitting and livestock producer groups.” Unlike Edward, he had a more congenial experience with Williams despite his pro-wolf stance. 

Williams asked Skiba a couple of hot-button questions sure to get a rise out of the Wolf Trackers. They did, but Skiba said Williams “very graciously” thanked him for taking the time to participate, and “admonished one poster who wrote a rather nasty message about me.” His “summary” of Williams, he told The Sun, is that “I don’t think his views on wolves are based solidly on facts in all cases, and we therefore disagree. That said, he was thoughtful and fair-handed towards me.”

Josh Wamboldt, a Western Slope outfitter and frequent contributor, says he believes Williams “strives to keep balance on the page” that serves as “an informational piece” allowing people “to form their own opinion on issues, because you can get both sides of the argument.” 

Wamboldt’s parents were the people staked out at the Eagle County airport, and he said the point of tracking the plane, “was to hopefully get a possible release sight and notify the people in those areas that wolves were just dropped.”

CPW’s lack of transparency has made it so “ranchers can’t even prepare before wolves are dumped at secret locations,” Wamboldt said. “I’ve heard tons of pro-wolf people state that for proper coexistence, it takes a proactive response, not reactive. This entire introduction has been reactive, ranchers don’t get notified until wolves are already knocking on the back door, they can’t get non-lethal measures until they have a depredation, and even then CPW is so short supplied they typically only give you enough to get by.” 

But Mark Harvey, a rancher in Old Snowmass, believes “with a little bit more strategy, a little bit more energy,” Colorado could create a world where wolves, ranchers and livestock could coexist. “It’s been a rough start here in Colorado, but from what I understand, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho went through a similar process at the beginning. Things are much better in those states when it comes to managing livestock.” And solutions are where he thinks Williams should place his focus. 

Howling into the future 

At the moment, the future of Colorado’s wolf reintroduction is up in the air, however, now that 10 reintroduced wolves have died, including a collared female from British Columbia on Oct. 30 in southwestern Colorado, far from where she was released in January.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has also banned CPW from getting more wolves from British Columbia, saying the agency violated rules in its special Endangered Species Act permit regarding international sourcing.

They likewise banned the agency from getting wolves from Alaska, saying the 10(j) rule, that classified Colorado’s wolves as an experimental population and allows management strategies including lethal removal, also stipulates wolves must come from the “delisted Northern Rockies population area” of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, the eastern third of Oregon, the eastern third of Washington and north-central Utah.

And on Nov. 5, the Wildlife Service announced it no longer intends to issue a nationwide recovery plan for gray wolves, which the Center for Biological Diversity says is unlawful, because courts have repeatedly made it clear gray wolves have not recovered in places like the southern Rocky Mountains and West Coast. 

The reaction of Wolf Tracker members to the announcement on Friday of the latest wolf death says more about the page than any interviewer or Williams could. 

It was immediate and predictable.

“Hallelujah.” 

“Great news for a Friday.” 

“Colorado’s pathetic wolf lovers!!” 

“Unfortunately, they are reproducing faster than they’re dying off.” 

By mid-morning, Williams said he’d already deleted some “nasty comments” and took “no joy in reading that some people are happy about the death of this wolf.” But he had some words about the restoration.

“I understand why the introduction efforts must go forward, because of the voters’ approval of Prop. 114,” he wrote in a text. “But I would predict that we will see more wolf deaths and more polarization between all of the stakeholders. I’ve never enjoyed seeing animals caged in zoos, especially bears, big cats and mammals from Africa. The introduction of wolves, whether it be to Yellowstone or Colorado, makes me feel similarly — they have been removed from their natural habitat and dropped into a ‘zoo without walls’ … If there ever was a better time for a pause to reset and get both sides talking to find a better way, I can’t think of one.”