Thousands of wild horses will continue to roam the sprawling sagebrush sea to the northeast and south of Rock Springs.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is punting its planned roundup of all of the roughly 3,000 horses in the Salt Wells Creek and Great Divide Basin areas, as well as the northwest section of Adobe Town. This comes after a summer of back and forth amid litigation.
The BLM planned to start gathering the animals in July to appease private landowners in the area. But that got delayed until the end of August. Then October. And now, the summer of next year.
The BLM didn’t say specifically why they’re delaying, but there’s ongoing litigation from wild horse advocates.
In 2023, the American Wild Horse Conservation (AWHC) sued the federal agency over its resource management plan for the Rock Springs area. The plan particularly shocked advocates because it called for eliminating the Salt Wells Creek and Great Divide Basin herds.
“This is the first time in the 53-year history of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act that the BLM has eliminated an HMA [herd management area] or eradicated an entire wild horse herd where it concedes that sufficient habitat characteristics (i.e., forage, water, space, and cover) exist on these public lands to ensure a thriving natural ecological balance to sustain continued wild horse use,” according to a 2024 AWHC summary of the case.
The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act is a federal law that requires management of the animals on public lands. But it gives discretion to the BLM to remove wild horses for a variety of reasons, like maintaining an ecological balance and multiple uses of the land.
The BLM insists eliminating these two herds and the northwest portion of Adobe Town, which would be about half of Wyoming's total wild horse population, is the only option. That’s because the area is checkerboarded, meaning it alternates every square mile between federal and private ranch land. The Rock Springs Grazing Association doesn’t want wild horses, which dates back to the Association’s 2011 lawsuit against the BLM. Out of that came a consent decree, where the BLM agreed to remediate the problem.
Over the years, the agency explored different options. That included fencing the horses out of private land and land swaps to consolidate the private and public land. But those options were determined to be unfeasible. That’s why the BLM made the roundup plan that the AWHC sued over.
Despite the lawsuit still pending, the BLM was going to move forward with roundups in July. But a federal judge ruled the BLM was in the wrong – not that the agency couldn’t eliminate the herds, but that it faltered in its process to reach that conclusion.
The judge pushed the decision back to lower courts to determine how the BLM could remedy the situation. It was unclear whether the agency could move forward with roundup plans, but the agency rescheduled for the end of August.
But as that date approached, the BLM pushed back to October. In the meantime, the AWHC filed a separate lawsuit, this time arguing the BLM was breaking the law by moving forward with roundups while the other litigation was still pending.
Several days later, the BLM told AWHC it won’t “attempt to move forward before summer 2026” with the roundups. The AWHC said this will allow time for the case to be heard in court.
If roundups move forward next year, the horses will go to federal holding facilities across the country, which are about 80 percent full. Caring for the horses costs taxpayers. In 2021, the cost for long term and short term holding options was about $77 million.
Earlier this year, one of the main tools the agency uses to rehome wild horses was halted per another court order. It was an adoption incentive program that paid $1,000 after a year of ownership. The judge in that case ruled that it’s “not hard to imagine” that some of these horses were ending up at slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico, something the BLM denies.
