The Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday finalized a wild horse management plan that has been a decade in the making and given rise to vigorous debate every step of the way. Almost immediately, advocates for wild horses filed suit against it.
Under the plan, allowable populations across four herd management areas overseen by the Rock Springs and Rawlins field offices, all in Wyoming’s checkerboard of public and private lands, will be reduced from between 1,481 and 2,065 wild horses to between 464 and 836 wild horses.
Tuesday’s version closely resembles the draft version that the agency initially proposed in January 2020.
The changes reduce management levels in two herd management areas — Salt Wells Creek and Great Divide Basin — from a combined range of between 666 and 965 to zero. A portion of a third, Adobe Town, will also be managed for zero wild horses. And the remainder of Adobe Town and the White Mountain areas will drop from between 815 and 1,100 to between 464 and 836.
People are also reading…
Less than a year and a half has passed since the agency conducted a major wild horse gather in those herd management areas and permanently removed 3,540 of the estimated 5,105 wild horses living there. If the plan remains in effect, a second gather could follow as soon as this fall.
It’s a long-awaited win for ranchers in the region: According to the BLM, the changes to appropriate management levels were driven largely by a 2013 legal agreement with the Rock Springs Grazing Association, which sued in an effort to limit competition between wild horses and livestock on private lands within the checkerboard.
(The Wyoming Stock Growers Association, which was also involved in negotiating the 2013 deal and has generally supported the agency’s plan, was not available for comment before this story went to press.)
Wild horse advocacy groups, meanwhile, have already sued over the agency’s decision.
“It’s not unexpected, because they’ve been aiming in this direction for over a decade, but it is highly significant and detrimental to wild horses,” said Suzanne Roy, executive director of the American Wild Horse Campaign.
The group, too, participated in the 2013 case — on the opposite side. Since then, it has sued several times, successfully, to protect wild horses from efforts to curtail their range on Wyoming public lands.
It, along with the other parties involved in the lawsuit, also made its position on the plan known during every opportunity for public comment over the last few years, but saw very little movement from the federal government in response.
Following the release of the final proposal last May, Roy told the Star-Tribune that legal action was on the table unless the agency rethought its approach.
It didn’t.
“We believe that this decision to implement the Rock Springs Grazing Association’s demands, and basically, with the sweep of a pen, take away 2 million acres of habitat for wild horses in Wyoming — we believe that violates federal law,” Roy said Wednesday.
Now, she said, “we’re going to see this fight through.”
The agency, for its part, believes it “followed all applicable laws, regulations, and policies and considered all relevant sources of information and public input” as it finalized the updated plan.
It’ll be up to the courts to decide whether it did.
