Federal land managers have had a rough time implementing contentious plans to eliminate roughly 3,600 free-roaming horses from 2.1 million acres of southwest Wyoming, where private and public land are interspersed in a checkerboard pattern.
Although U.S. District Judge Kelly Rankin of Wyoming concluded last year that the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) whole-herd removal plan is legal, his decision was appealed and roundups were postponed, and then in July the plan was declared at odds with the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The federal appellate judges out of Denver sent the case back to the Wyoming court to remedy legal deficiencies. The lower court was set to regain jurisdiction soon, according to an involved attorney.
But BLM, in advance of those legal next steps, has already made a plan to move forward.
“[T]he BLM Rock Springs Field Office still plans to proceed with the permanent removal of wild horses in the Salt Wells Creek and Adobe Town Herd Areas, with operations expected to begin on or about Oct. 13, 2025,” Jacqueline Alderman, a spokesperson for the agency’s High Desert District, wrote in an email.
It remains unclear how the agency will address the three-judge panel’s concerns. “The BLM cannot comment on ongoing litigation,” Alderman wrote.
Pro-horse plaintiffs aim to stop the mid-October roundups from happening.
BLM’s decision to proceed with roundups this fall was challenged by Connecticut-based Friends of Animals, one of the groups engaged in a legal fight that’s dragged for years, in the U.S. District Court for Wyoming.
“The default remedy would be to vacate the illegal decision,” said Jennifer Best, Friends of Animals’ wildlife law program director. “There doesn’t seem to be any justification for keeping this illegal resource management plan in place.”
Friends of Animals’ lawsuit, first covered by E&E News, asks the district court to force BLM’s hand.
“We’re seeking to have the removal decision vacated,” Best said. “I would think the proper course of action would be to allow the district court to rule on the appropriate remedy, before going forward with any removals. Unfortunately … they don’t have any plans to stop the removals right now.”
The nonprofit animal advocacy group may seek an additional emergency injunction if the court doesn’t rule before roundups begin, she said.
And there may be yet more lawsuits. Although Friends of Animals acted alone in its latest filing, in earlier stages it’d been part of a coalition of plaintiffs that included the American Wild Horse Campaign, Animal Welfare Institute, Western Watersheds Project, Carol Walker, Kimerlee Curyl and Chad Hanson, among others.
Erik Molvar, who leads Western Watersheds Project, said that he could not speak to the coalition’s legal plans. But he confirmed that the coalition is concerned about the BLM’s signaled actions.
“The circuit court found the plan amendments to be illegal,” Molvar said. “So it stands to reason that the BLM has no business implementing illegal plan amendments before the process is fully resolved before the courts.”
Joanna Grossman, who directs the equine program for the Animal Welfare Institute, said the coalition of plaintiffs is watching to see what BLM does next.
“I’m hoping that the BLM will rethink this course of action,” Grossman said. “Oct. 13 is coming up soon.”
If BLM stays the course, she said, more litigation is possible.
“We are carefully weighing our options and are strongly considering filing a lawsuit,” Grossman said, “but things can change day by day.”
Federal land managers have spent a decade and a half attempting to rid much of southwest Wyoming’s checkerboard region of free-roaming horses. In 2010, the cattle and sheep-centric Rock Springs Grazing Association, which owns and leases about 1.1 million acres of private land in the checkerboard, revoked consent for the equines to exist on its property.
“We can’t fence it, because of the basic nature of the checkerboard,” said Brad Purdy, a BLM-Wyoming senior advisor. “When you weighed it all out, this was the most informed and the best decision, I think, the BLM could have made.”
But the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals faulted BLM for not explaining how removing all horses would maintain a “thriving natural ecological balance”—a requirement of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act.
“The reason they want to remove horses is essentially to minimize conflict with private landowners, even though this covers over a million acres of public land,” said Best, the Friends of Animals attorney. “The bottom line is there’s a mandate to protect horses—and that ‘ecological balance’ should be considered in decisions about horses—and that is repeatedly being ignored.” — Mike Koshmrl, WyoFile
Republished from WyoFile.
