wild horses

The BLM initially planned to round up about 3,000 horses starting in mid-July. According to a wild horse advocacy group, it’s delayed until October at the earliest. Meanwhile, a final court decision hangs in limbo.

The fate of thousands of wild horses in the Rock Springs area is still unknown after 15 years of court battles. A judge just pushed the final decision back to a lower court.

More than half of Wyoming’s wild horses will be removed to appease private property owners on the checkerboard landscape. Herds will cease to exist in the Great Divide Basin and Salt Wells Creek areas, and portions of Adobe Town.

Sections of southwest Wyoming’s iconic sprawling sagebrush landscape could soon look different: No wild horses. That’s because the Bureau of Land Management is planning to remove all of the wild horses roaming a 2.1 million acre area near Rock Springs.

A U.S. District judge said it was “not hard to imagine” that some horses and burros went to slaughter in his ruling that led to the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to shut down the adoption program.

A recent University of Wyoming study that linked free-roaming overpopulation to the decline of sage grouse has received pushback for not factoring in livestock. But the lead researcher said it does – indirectly – and that the goal of the research is to help with the complex puzzle of managing multi-use landscapes.

Current estimates suggest more than 70,000 wild horses and burros roam the American West, about half of them in Nevada. That’s more than three times the number land managers say can safely co-exist with other animals on the open range.

Recidivism rates in the U.S. are some of the highest in the world. And in Wyoming, 33 percent of inmates are back in prison within the first year. But studies show that animal therapy can help reduce that by teaching things like responsibility, nonviolence and empathy. Wyoming has a special program – one of only five in the country – that teaches inmates how to tame wild horses.

A federal judge in the Mountain West recently ruled in favor of wild horse advocates who sued federal land managers for failing to stick to their own rules.

The new season of Wyoming Public Radio’s podcast "The Modern West" just dropped its first episode. But the format is pretty different from how we’ve done things in the past. This season, we’re going out in the field with some of the reporters you’ll recognize from "Open Spaces."