Photo taken on the Salt Wells Herd Management Area in Wyoming’s Checkerboard by Meg Frederick.

In a heartbreaking loss for wild herds, a judge today ruled that the Bureau of Land Management did not violate federal laws when it stripped 2 million acres from wild horse use in southwest Wyoming’s Checkerboard.

We are reviewing district court Judge Kelly Rankin’s 70-page decision. It rules against Return to Freedom, Front Range Equine Rescue 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 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.

The BLM’s primary reason for removing land from wild horse use on the Checkerboard: it is difficult to create a barrier between public and private lands in that part of Wyoming.

In a separate ruling, Judge Rankin also denied the 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 entered that case along with Front Range, Frederick and Rea to oppose the ranchers’ demands.

Before finalizing its management plan changes, the BLM removed 3,502 wild horses in a three-month, $1.1 million helicopter roundup ending in early 2022.

As soon as tomorrow, the agency will begin removing 586 more from the White Mountain Herd Management Area in the Checkerboard. The BLM’s goal: reach the low end of an agency-set “Appropriate Management Level” of 205-300 wild horses.

By comparison, the agency permits ranchers 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 annually.

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