Photo taken on the Salt Wells Herd Management Area by Meg Frederick.
UPDATE: Our federal court case deciding the future of wild horses in Southwest Wyoming has been stayed as a result of the government shutdown.
A scheduled status conference in District Court at which details of the proceedings were expected to be defined had been set for Tuesday. It will be rescheduled once the shutdown ends.
To catch you up:
In July, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Bureau of Land Management broke the law in 2023 when it removed 2 million acres from wild horse use as part of a Resource Management Plan amendment.
The court ruled in favor of Return to Freedom and our our co-plaintiffs, Front Range Equine Rescue, and photographers Meg Frederick and Angelique Rea, as well as other advocates that sued separately.
A District Court judge must now determine whether there is an appropriate remedy or whether the plan amendment should be vacated entirely.
The BLM has pushed back until at least next summer a planned helicopter roundup intended to capture and remove all of the remaining herds — more than 1,920 wild horses — from Salt Wells Creek Herd Management Area and a portion of the adjacent Adobe Town HMA.
The area is known as the Checkerboard because it is made up of unfenced one-square-mile blocks of public and private land set up in the 1800s.
We need your help:
For well over a decade, we have been standing up for the Checkerboard’s herds against both the BLM and powerful local ranchers who want the horses gone forever.
But this battle extends beyond Wyoming: Federally protected wild horses and burros must not be allowed to be removed from our public lands due to private landowner pressure or whole herds will vanish across the West.
Battling a federal agency is difficult and costly. We can’t do it without you.