Photo credit: Meg Frederick
On August 14, we learned that a Wyoming judge today ruled that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) did not violate federal laws when it stripped 2 million acres from wild horse use in southwest Wyoming known as the “Checkerboard”.
We and our attorneys are reviewing district court Judge Kelly Rankin’s 70-page decision which rules against plaintiffs Front Range Equine Rescue, Return to Freedom, and photographers Meg Frederick and Angelique Rea in a lawsuit brought against the BLM.
The Checkerboard is an unfenced area of alternating one-mile-square blocks of public and
private land set up in the 1860s. The BLM amended its Resource Management Plan (RMP) in 2023 to eliminate the wild horses on the Checkerboard, in large part because of an agreement it entered into with a group of local ranchers, the Rock Springs Grazing Association (RSGA).
The BLM’s primary reason for removing land from wild horse use in this area is that it is difficult to create a barrier between public and private lands in that part of Wyoming.
In a separate, but related case ruling, Judge Rankin did deny the RSGA ranchers request to force the BLM to immediately remove all of the Checkerboard’s wild horses or conduct a new management plan amendment process.
We had entered that case along with plaintiffs Return to Freedom, Meg Frederick and Angelique Rea to oppose the ranchers’ demands.
Before finalizing its management plan changes, the BLM removed 3,502 wild horses in a three-
month period in a $1.1 million helicopter roundup which ended in early 2022.
Any day now, the BLM will begin removing 586 more wild horses from the White Mountain Herd
Management Area in the Checkerboard. The BLM’s goal is to reach the low end of their set Appropriate Management Level (AML) of 205-300 wild horses.
In comparison, the BLM gives permits to ranchers annually to graze up to 9,987 cow-calf pairs or 49,935 sheep on allotments that partly overlap the 393,000-acre Herd Management Area (HMA).