PETITION CLOSED
PETITION TARGET: Bureau of Land Management (BLM)
UPDATE (6/15/2023): In a horrific decision, the BLM has finalized a plan that will reduce Wyoming’s wild horses by 60 percent while slashing wild horse-designated habitat by nearly 43 percent. We are grieved by this decision and what it means for these iconic animals. We thank everyone who signed our petition, and we will continue to advocate for wild horses. – Lady Freethinker Staff
*
Less than a year after helicopter roundups killed 37 wild horses and sent hundreds more to now disease-ridden holding corrals, wild horses in Wyoming’s Checkerboard Area are facing a new threat — a government decision that would remove more than 1 million acres of protected wild horse habitat, slash the number of wild horses allowed to remain, and completely eliminate two herd management areas.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the federal agency tasked with managing America’s iconic wild horses, has been considering for years how to fulfill a consent decree to reduce wild horse numbers that was handed down by a federal judge in 2013, following a lawsuit from a private grazing entity.
The BLM’s proposal, released this May, would not allow any wild horses in the current Great Divide Basin or Salt Wells Creek herd management areas (HMAs). Herd sizes in the Adobe Town and White Mountain HMAs also would be reduced — leaving only an allowed 464 to 836 wild horses in the area, down from the estimated 1,481 to 2,065 horses that roam free there now.
The decision also impacts 1.1 million acres of designated, protected wild horse habitat – a more than 50 percent loss for Wyoming’s wild horses.
The Checkerboard horses already have suffered enough: 37 died during the most recent roundup, and survivors have been trucked to the Wheatland and Canon City holding corrals, where there are outbreaks of the highly contagious and fatal diseases strangles and equine influenza, respectively.
Rounding up and carting off more horses to already packed facilities, where they could face injury and even death, is not the answer – especially when polls show that 88 percent of Americans don’t support these cruel roundups.
Decimating wild horse habitat also is not the answer.
America’s wild horses don’t deserve to have their free-roaming livelihoods stripped to cater to private grazing interests.
Concerned members of the public and animal advocates can protest this horrific decision until June 6, after which the BLM will consider the comments and then issue a final record of decision.
Sign our petition telling the BLM that you strongly protest the decision to remove wild horses and eliminate herd management areas and that you would support other possibilities – among them, consolidating public and private lands in the Checkerboard area or other alternatives they didn’t consider during the planning process.
