Colorado's Bear-Luring Law, Fully Explained

HB26-1342, formally introduced as "Concerning Negligent Behavior That Lures Bears" and signed into law under the amended title "Concerning Knowing Behavior That Lures Bears," amends Colorado Revised Statute § 33-6-131 — the state's existing "luring bears" misdemeanor. It was signed by Gov. Jared Polis on May 27, 2026 and took effect at 12:01 a.m. on August 12, 2026.

A correction worth flagging directly: most coverage of this law, including an earlier version of our own state-law guide, cites August 14, 2026 as the effective date, sourced to Colorado Sun. Checking the enrolled Act and the legislature's own final fiscal note directly, the actual effective date is August 12, 2026 — a Wednesday, which matches Colorado Sun's own body text saying the law "took effect Wednesday." August 14 appears to be the date Colorado Sun's article was published, not the date the law took effect. We've corrected this across our site.

The core mechanism change: the old statute required prosecutors to prove someone left out food or garbage "with the intent of luring a wild bear" — a subjective intent standard that's extremely hard to prove in practice. The new law replaces that with a person who "knowingly places" food or edible waste in the open "in circumstances where there is a reasonable probability of luring a wild bear" to it — an objective, probability-based standard that doesn't require proving what was in someone's head.

The old law also required a mandatory warning on a first offense — only a second-or-subsequent violation was chargeable as a misdemeanor. HB26-1342 removes that requirement entirely: a first offense is now chargeable on its own.

The $200 and $1,000 figures for 1st/2nd offenses are unchanged by this bill and rarely reported alongside the headline $5,000 number — we found them in the legislature's own fiscal note, not in the news coverage.

This is the most underreported part of the whole story. The bill didn't simply drop the standard from "intentional" to "negligent" — that's what its popular short title still implies, and what most coverage repeats. What actually happened is more interesting: the standard moved twice during the legislative process.

In practice, "knowingly" paired with "reasonable probability of luring" means prosecutors don't need to prove you wanted a bear to show up — only that you were aware you were leaving food or garbage accessible, in a situation where a bear realistically could find it. Leaving a certified, bear-resistant container properly latched removes that "reasonable probability" element almost entirely, which is the practical compliance path most homeowners actually have.

This is a criminal misdemeanor, not a civil fine — prosecuted through local District Attorneys' offices, primarily enforced by Colorado Parks & Wildlife (with other law enforcement able to cite as well). It is not an administrative ticket you can just pay and move on from the way a parking fine works.

The honest scale, from the legislature's own fiscal note: from January 2024 through March 2026, CPW issued only 14 warnings under the old law, and zero convictions were recorded in state courts from FY2022-23 through FY2024-25. The fiscal note itself projects roughly 10 citations per year under the new standard — generating an estimated $2,000/year in additional state revenue. This is a real but genuinely small-scale enforcement mechanism, not a mass-ticketing crackdown, whatever the headlines might imply.