Wyoming Checkerboard 2016: Legal Battle for Wild Horses

October 4, 2016

AWHC Contributor

The American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Campaign), along with Return to Freedom, The Cloud Foundation, and photographers Carol Walker and Kimerlee Curyl, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Wyoming on October 3, 2016. This legal action challenges the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) decision to conduct another wild horse roundup in the Wyoming Checkerboard area. The wild horse advocates are represented by Bill Eubanks of the public interest environmental law firm Meyer Glitzenstein & Eubanks LLP.

The lawsuit is the latest chapter in an ongoing legal battle against the BLM's plan to eradicate wild horses from a two-million-acre area of public and private land at the request of the Rock Springs Grazing Association (RSGA). The RSGA owns or leases the private land blocks in the Checkerboard and views wild horses as competition for taxpayer-subsidized livestock grazing on the public lands in the area.

On September 19, 2016, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on the plaintiffs’ appeal of a lawsuit challenging the 2014 BLM Checkerboard roundup, during which 1,260 wild horses were rounded up by helicopters and removed from the range. At issue in both cases is the legality of the BLM’s reliance on a request from private landowners to remove wild horses from private lands as an excuse to eradicate them from the public lands in the area as well.