Action Update – Fight for Wyoming Wild Horses Moves Forward

The following update is from the  American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign 

Our fight to hold the Bureau of Land Management accountable for its illegal rounding up of 1,263 wild horses from the Wyoming Checkerboard in the fall of 2014 continues. We recently filed our opening brief with the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. We are challenging the lower court’s decision to allow the BLM to subvert the Wild Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act by using a request from a landowner to remove horses from private lands as an excuse to permanently remove them from over two million acres of public lands as well. If allowed to stand, this ruling could place wild horses and burros across the West at the mercy of a few local property owners who want them gone. The legal issues at stake are so important that a group of distinguished environmental law professors has filed an Amicus brief in support of our position. 

Meanwhile, the BLM is still accepting public comments on an Environmental Assessment (EA) the agency produced to correct previous legal violations related to the Checkerboard roundup. If you have not yet done so, please submit your comments today. Let’s take this opportunity to weigh in against the agency’s audacious trouncing of federal law and in favor of an alternative that would return some of the captured Checkerboard horses to their rightful homes back on the range.