U.S. Court Rules Against Illegal Wild Horse Territory Reduction

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has delivered a landmark decision protecting California's largest wild horse herd. This ruling overturns a U.S. Forest Service (USFS) decision to reduce the Devil's Garden Wild Horse Territory by 23,000 acres.

On August 4th, the court found the USFS's plan to remove land from the Devil’s Garden Wild Horse Territory in the Modoc National Forest to be “arbitrary and capricious.” The agency had claimed the land was mistakenly added in the 1980s and that its removal would have “no significant impact.”

The court stated, “The American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Preservation) and other plaintiffs filed suit alleging that the Service’s revamping of the territorial lines violated numerous federal laws. We agree. A 23,000-acre tract of land and two decades of agency management cannot be swept under the rug as a mere administrative mistake. We accordingly reverse in part and remand for the Service to address rather than to ignore the relevant history.”

William S. Eubanks II, of Meyer, Glitzenstein & Eubanks, who represented the American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Campaign), Return to Freedom, and California citizen Carla Bowers, remarked, “This is a precedent-setting victory making clear that federal land management agencies cannot exclude federally protected wild horses or other key uses of public lands without grappling with the implications of such actions on the environment.”

The appellate court’s decision overturns a district court ruling that allowed the USFS to eliminate critical wild horse territory for private livestock grazing interests.

The DC Circuit further explained, “[T]he relevant environmental concern was the effect of the boundary modification on the wild horse population in the Devil’s Garden area. The Service not only failed to address that concern, it denied its very existence. That head-in-the-sand approach to past agency practice is the antithesis of NEPA’s requirement that an agency’s environmental analysis candidly confront the relevant environmental concerns.”

Devil’s Garden has been designated as wild horse territory managed by the USFS since the 1800s. The USFS's attempt to revise the territory lines began in August 2013, aiming to reduce the wild horse population by 80 percent without studying the impact of livestock grazing, which outnumbers wild horses by eight times. In 2016, the USFS began removing wild horses from the area.

For more details, visit the original article by Horse Canada.