A federal judge isn’t satisfied with how the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) crafted its plan to remove all wild horses from large swaths of southwest Wyoming, according to a court ruling released July 15.
However, it’s unclear what the fate will be for the thousands of horses on roughly 2 million acres around Rock Springs. That final decision is being left to a lower court, per the ruling.
The issue dates back to 2010 when private ranch owners, who are part of the Rock Springs Grazing Association, said they’d had enough with wild horses on their land. They claimed the animals were hitting their bottom line by competing with livestock for grass.
That put the BLM in a tricky spot, primarily because the roughly 2 million acres around Rock Springs is checkerboarded, meaning ownership alternates every square mile between public and private.
After years of court battles, the BLM decided fencing wild horses out of private land wasn’t feasible and that the parties involved weren’t offering any land swaps to consolidate public and private parcels.
So this spring, the agency finalized its plan to remove all the feral horses in the Great Divide Basin and Salt Wells Creek areas, as well as portions of Adobe Town. The roundups were scheduled to start this summer and last a couple years to gather the roughly 3,000 animals.
Meanwhile, wild horse advocacy groups appealed this plan. This is what spurred the appeals court decision released Tuesday morning. The judge said the BLM has the discretion to not manage wild horses on certain parcels of land.
“Like development, wild horse management is a possible use, not one that must be allowed,” the judge wrote regarding the multiple-use laws for BLM land.
But the judge took qualms with the process the agency used to reach the decision to remove all wild horses. The BLM issued the plan through an amendment to its Resource Management Plan (RMP) for the area. The judge summarized the BLM’s thinking: “BLM argues that the ecological balance standard does not apply to RMP decisions.”
This is where the judge pushed back, saying the agency broke federal law under the Administrative Procedures Act.
“When making wild horse management decisions, BLM must consider whether their decisions achieve and maintain thriving natural ecological balance,” the judge wrote. “The decision as to which areas of the public lands should be managed for wild horses is a management decision.”
But how to remedy the error is still unclear. The judge pushed that decision back to the lower courts.
“It does leave the door open, so it’s not a slam dunk win on our part,” said Suzanne Roy, executive director of the American Wild Horse Conservation (AWHC).
AWHC was one of the groups that appealed the BLM’s plan. Roy said she and her team are still sifting through the 26-page decision.
“Our lawyers are still analyzing it and figuring out exactly what it means because it’s complicated,” she said.
Complicated, in that the judge didn’t explicitly say the scheduled gathers can’t continue. They are currently scheduled to begin Aug. 25.
Another wild horse gather began on July 15 in the Rawlins portion of the Adobe Town herd. That gather is separate from the issue at hand. More than 1,600 horses will be rounded up over the next month or so, with the goal of leaving between 259 and 536 on the landscape.
