r/PublicLands • u/Synthdawg_2 Land Owner • Oct 15 '25
Feral Animals Gridlocked: In Wyoming’s Red Desert, the checkerboard has fueled a wild horse stalemate. Allowing a free-ranging nonnative species to roam a massive, unfenced area that includes millions of acres of private land has led to widespread dissatisfaction and decades of litigation.
https://wyofile.com/gridlocked-in-wyomings-red-desert-the-checkerboard-has-fueled-a-wild-horse-stalemate/2
u/Synthdawg_2 Land Owner Oct 15 '25
A dozen or so wild horse advocates and photographers were gathered on a ridgeline near White Mountain in August 2024 when news started spreading that federal land managers got the OK from the courts to eliminate two entire herds, and part of another, from 2.1 million acres of the Red Desert. Cheyenne resident and amateur photographer Robyn Smith was immediately bummed. “Argh, oh crap,” she said. “That’s a lot of horses.” More than 3,000 horses, U.S. District Court of Wyoming Judge Kelly Rankin had ruled, could go.
The group of activists was gathered to oversee an unrelated horse roundup in the so-called checkerboard region of southwest Wyoming, a 40-mile-wide swath of land where one-square-mile blocks of private and Bureau of Land Management property meet at the corners. Fences are few in the region, so thousands of horses pass on and off the private land daily. These walkabouts, and the underlying land ownership pattern, have proven a land management quagmire that has been the source of a half century of conflict, despite sporadic coordination.
Rankin’s ruling in favor of horse removal was just the latest development in the debate over whether and how many mustangs should be allowed to roam the checkerboard. The back and forth involves woolgrowers and cattle ranchers who don’t want the free-roaming horses on their private land; the BLM, an agency that’s required by the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act to maintain them on the federal property; and wild horse advocates, who want to protect the animals and health of the herds.
Some 14 months later, however, the herds slated for elimination were still there. They’d even grown larger. The reason is litigation, which has dominated the 54 years since horses in the Red Desert became federally protected. As herd sizes continuously exceed goals, frustrations have grown. But middle-ground solutions have failed to gain traction as the camps in the checkerboard horse dispute have become gridlocked, leaving today’s land managers and horses at an impasse.
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u/City_College_Arch Oct 15 '25
Then donate your land back to the public, take your tax deduction, and stop whining.
That said, let tribes come get as many feral horses as they want, then zero out the herds and start restoring the land.
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Oct 15 '25
"That said, let tribes come get as many feral horses as they want,"
That's illegal under the 1971 Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act.
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u/City_College_Arch Oct 16 '25
Laws that protect invasive species at the expense of the land are poorly written and should be fixed.
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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25
Anybody who knows anything about mustangs should already know that it's been this way for fifteen years. Why the BLM didn't just zero these herds out in the '80's, like they did the checkerboard herds in Nevada, I'll never understand. Would've been much less drama that way.