Wyoming Public Radio: BLM seeks to remove all wild horses from Rock Springs area

BLM seeks to remove all wild horses from Rock Springs area

Wyoming Public Radio | By Caitlin Tan

Published April 7, 2025 at 4:21 PM MDT

Driving around southwest Wyoming, it’s common to see wild horses. But if a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) plan clears public review and pending litigation?

“There will be so few wild horses left that it will be difficult to see them,” said Suzanne Roy, executive director of American Wild Horse Conservation, a national wild horse advocacy group.

The BLM is planning to remove all of te roughly 3,000 wild horses roaming a 2.1 million acre area around Rock Springs, according to its Environmental Assessment (EA) released March 31. As first reported by WyoFile, the swath of land includes the Great Divide Basin, Salt Wells Creek and a northwest section of Adobe Town. These sections are checkerboard, meaning ownership alternates every square mile between federal and private.

The BLM said its hands are tied because the private landowners no longer want the non-native horses, and it isn’t feasible to fence them out.

“There are no other fences or natural topography that this fence could intersect on the western side for at least 30 miles,” the agency said about the Great Divide Basin section. “A fence would fully bisect the Sublette Mule Deer Migration Corridor and would potentially interfere with big game migration.”

The private landowners are the Rock Springs Grazing Association. They removed their consent for wild horses back in 2010. Ongoing lawsuits have kept the BLM from executing any actions since then, like its plan to remove all wild horses from the area.

Roy’s advocacy group has been part of blocking those efforts. She believes BLM’s removal plan violates the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, which requires the feds to provide for “necessary management, protection and control of wild horses and burros on public lands.”

“The whole plan is devastating from the perspective of protecting wild horses as a historic, cultural and economic asset,” Roy said.

But the BLM maintains in its EA that “it would be impossible to manage wild horses on checkerboard lands without consent of the private landowner.”

Roy pointed to other options, like “land swaps to create areas of contiguous public lands habitat that could sustain the horses.”

The plan is open for public comment until April 30. Depending on how the judge rules on the litigation currently holding up the BLM’s plan will determine the rollout of summer roundups. If OK’d, they’ll start July 15. However, the BLM said it could take several years to gather the roughly 3,000 horses. The agency told WPR roundup plans are based on current staffing levels when asked if federal freezes and cuts could impact the schedule.

Once in the BLM’s hands, the horses will go to federal holding facilities across the country, which are about 80 percent full.

But the BLM told WPR it “would not begin a gather unless sufficient holding space was available.”

Recently, one of the main tools the agency uses to rehome wild horses was halted per court order. It was an adoption incentive program that paid $1,000 after a year of ownership. The judge in that case ruled that it’s “not hard to imagine” that some of these horses were ending up at slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico, something the BLM denies.