Last evening an attorney with the Bureau of Land Management confirmed with Friends of Animals that there will be no roundup of wild horses from the Wyoming’s Checkerboard area this year! If the agency doesn’t agree to cancel it indefinitely, we have more time to challenge it. 

“This is an important step forward for wild horses and our public lands. Private interests shouldn’t be calling the shots when it comes to wildlife—and no grazing association should have the power to override protections for wild horses,” said Jennifer Best, director of FoA’s Wildlife Law Program.  

Last week, FoA filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Wyoming against the BLM because was moving forward with its plan to eliminate wild horses from more than one million acres of federal public lands known as the Checkerboard despite the Tenth Circuit’s July 15 ruling that the agency’s wild horse Resource Management Plan Amendment is illegal. 

In the Checkerboard, public lands are interspersed with private parcels like those owned by the Rock Springs Grazing Association.

In 2023, BLM issued a Resource Management Plan (RMP) to eliminate wild horses from more than a million acres of public lands and set the ‘appropriate management level’ to zero. In Friends of Animals’ original legal challenge, the Tenth Circuit found that BLM acted arbitrarily in issuing a RMP without considering the requirements of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, including the necessity to manage wild horses in a manner designed to maintain a thriving, natural ecological balance.

BLM claims there are an estimated 1,003 horses in Salt Wells Creek, 875 in Great Divide Basin and 1,693 in Adobe Town. A monstrous 14,448 cattle and 40,231 sheep are allowed to graze where the BLM wants to wipe out wild horses.

The numbers, which the BLM doesn’t even try to hide, don’t lie. They hardly represent the “balance” that the Wild Horse and Burro Act of 1971 demands.

“Not only could this extreme, reckless decision be devastating to thousands of wild horses across southwest Wyoming, it could also set a dangerous precedent that allows BLM to ignore the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, which was intended to protect wild horses on federal public lands,” said Best.

“The tragedy of wild horse roundups exists because the BLM is devoted to turning public lands into feedlots for cows and sheep to appease the meat industry,” said Priscilla Feral president of Friends of Animals. “Friends of Animals finds this morally and ecologically reprehensible, as wild horses are driven off lands to leave the bulk of water, forage and space for doomed domestic animals.”

It is a national disgrace that there are now more wild horses in captivity—59,622—than roaming free. There are only 53,797 wild horses left on federal public lands.

“You can’t have a government agency working for the meat industry. What the BLM and ranchers are doing to wild horses is criminal,” Feral said.