From Mike Koshmrl
WHITE MOUNTAIN, Wyoming – “That’s a lot of horses,” complained Cheyenne resident Robyn Smith from a ridge in the high desert.
It wasn’t her first angry exclamation. “Argh, oh crap,” was her immediate reaction when she learned that a federal judge had given the Bureau of Land Management the green light to proceed with plans to completely remove two wild horse herds from the southwest Wyoming landscape.
Smith, a retired architect who wears a “Return to Freedom” baseball cap featuring a bucking mustang, proudly calls herself a wild horse advocate. On this crisp Thursday morning in the hill country north of Interstate 80, she was doing one of her favorite things: watching mustangs.
Smith’s interest in the horses – an icon of the West, if not a native one – had evolved organically into activism, starting from a hobby of wildlife photography. “We started photographing more horses,” she said, “and then we started (asking), ‘So what do you mean you want to round them up?'”
Soon, Smith was so involved that she was attending wild horse-related court cases and traveling to roundups — government-run roundups of wild horses that closely resembled what was taking place far away.
While Smith and about a dozen others watched for hours, a helicopter commissioned by the Bureau of Land Management herded one herd of horses, then another, toward a trap. Inside, they were sorted and taken away in trucks.
The animals were part of what the BLM calls the White Mountain Herd, a herd that is severely overpopulated, at least by the number the federal agency considers “appropriate” for this landscape. By the end of the day, 144 animals – 52 stallions, 63 mares and 29 foals – had been removed, meaning crews were almost exactly a quarter of the way to their goal of removing 586 mustangs from range over the next few weeks.
The horses of the White Mountain Herd are so famous that they are allowed to continue to exist. The BLM even offers a scenic drive that goes right through the herd management area. The plan is to keep about 205 to 300 horses in this region, which stretches from Rock Springs northwest to the Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge.
The Adobe Town herd in the Red Desert is also allowed to remain: the BLM plans call for 225 to 450 horses here.
The herds in the neighboring Salt Wells and Great Divide Basin areas are now to be eradicated.
Wild horses compete with sheep, cattle and native wildlife for forage and other resources. That fact is particularly problematic in the eyes of some, and a major driver of horse policy in this “checkerboard” strip of southwest Wyoming, where private and state land alternate in square-mile blocks that meet at the corners. The cattle- and sheep-focused Rock Springs Grazing Association owns and leases about 1.1 million acres of private land in the checkerboard — and has battled with the BLM for decades over wild horses.
Litigation and more litigation
A year ago, the association filed a lawsuit asking a court to force state land managers to remove free-roaming mustangs from their unfenced properties.
After the BLM completed an environmental impact statement calling for the reduction of the two herds and the elimination of two others in spring 2023, a coalition of 11 wild horse conservationists joined forces to file their own lawsuit challenging the decision.
Biden administration-appointed Wyoming District Court Judge Kelly Rankin ruled in favor of the BLM in both lawsuits on Wednesday.
“The Court agrees that … wild horses are being improperly kept on private lands,” the federal judge wrote in his decision on the Rock Springs Grazing Association’s complaint. “While this keeping is ‘improper,’ it does not necessarily require immediate remedial action.”
Rankin again sided with the government in each of the “litany” of claims made by wild horse activists, who argued that the BLM had arbitrarily and capriciously violated the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 and several other federal laws.
“Ultimately, however, the Court concludes that all objections are ineffective because they either confuse the (amendment to the BLM’s resource management plan) with a removal decision, misinterpret the BLM’s obligations, or (because they) conflict with the record,” the judge wrote.
Carol Walker of Lyons, Colorado, was one of the plaintiffs. The day after Rankin’s verdict, she accompanied Smith to the ridge and observed the raid.
“I don’t do this because I enjoy it,” Walker said. “I know the contractors treat the horses better when there’s an audience here.”
Walker joined an appeal filed Friday in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.
“I’m worried that the BLM will try to eradicate these herds as quickly as possible,” she said, “before our appeal even gets here.”
A similar coalition of wild horse activists, environmental groups and individuals, represented by Eubanks and Associates, joined the appeal.
“We expected this case to be decided by a higher court and now return to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, where we have twice successfully defended the wild horses of the Red Desert from this special interest-driven extermination plan,” Suzanne Roy, executive director of American Wild Horse Conservation, said in a statement.
A call to the Rock Springs Grazing Association went unanswered.
Because of the lengthy litigation, which is likely to drag on, it’s unlikely the BLM will remove the entire herds in Salt Wells and Great Divide Basin immediately, said Brad Purdy, the agency’s deputy state director for communications. Although the agency has completed a revision of its wild horse resource management plan — and Rankin confirmed that plan — there is still a requirement to review the action to eliminate a herd under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Raids could continue
BLM-Wyoming began the NEPA study process in June, proposing to remove about 5,000 mustangs from three of the four horse holding areas in the Rock Springs Field Office — including two complete herd eliminations. But with the appeal expected, it’s unlikely the required environmental impact assessment will be completed anytime soon, Purdy said.
That doesn’t mean, however, that federal contractors will stop herding horses in a checkerboard pattern anytime soon.
Nationally, the BLM has set a goal of removing 20,000 wild horses from the landscape by 2024. While numbers have declined from their peak, the current population of about 74,000 horses and wild burros nationwide is still nearly three times the “appropriate” management level — a dynamic that holds true in southwest Wyoming, where there are thousands more horses than the agency and many residents want.
“Could the BLM return these herds to the target population? I think so,” Purdy said. “But I don’t think we can completely eradicate the herd because that is the subject of litigation.” Essentially, intensive roundups could continue throughout the region — and if that happens, the BLM would be in a better position to complete the removal of the entire herd if or when the litigation is resolved.
For horse rights activists, these raids are not particularly funny. Descriptions such as “unspeakable” and “cruel” were common among observers. Barry Smith, who lives in Cheyenne and is Robyn Smith’s husband, did not even want to watch.
“I’m getting too emotional,” he explained from the cab of his SUV, where he waited for the raid to end.
“Some pilots are better than others,” said Barry Smith. “Some are pretty good, and when the horses slow down, they kind of hold back and stay higher. Others overrun them, I think.”
Jay D’Ewart, wild horse and burro specialist with the BLM Rock Springs Field Office, was the man in charge Thursday. As he ate lunch in his pickup truck, he admitted he had something in common with the wild horse activists who kept an eye on his operation.
“I’m just like them, I love horses,” D’Ewart said. “I own them, I use them, I ride them – I just enjoy it.”
He liked seven mustangs that he had previously rounded up so much that he took them home with him. Some of these horses came from herds that were to be exterminated.
D’Ewart had not yet heard of the court’s decision, as he was busy preparing for the week-long raid. But the decision could make him a busy man.
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent, nonprofit news organization focused on the people, places and politics of Wyoming.
