After the Bureau of Land Management announced plans to thin the wild horse herd on the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range (Mont.), two charities filed legal action in an attempt to prevent the BLM from removing horses from the range.
The Cloud Foundation and Front Range Equine Rescue filed a lawsuit and a request for an injunction in the Federal Court in Washington, D.C., arguing that the removal of 70 horses will leave this unique and historical herd genetically non-viable and unable to sustain itself into the future. But on Sept. 2, U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan delivered an oral ruling rejecting the application for the order.
The BLM plans to capture all 190 wild horses from the 38,000-acre wild horse range in the Pryor Mountains, which run along the Montana-Wyoming border. The Pryor Mountain herd includes a wild stallion made famous by Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Ginger Kathrens. Kathrens has documented the life of Cloud, a pale palomino stallion, from the day of his birth.
BLM officials intend to release 120 of the horses back into the wild after giving mares a long-term contraceptive injection. The other 70 will be offered for adoption.
The groups challenging the round-up claim the plan could destroy the viability of what some believe to be one of the most genetically pure herds of Spanish colonial horses in the United States. The Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range was created in 1968 and has been culled on three previous occasions—in 1997, 2001 and 2003.
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The BLM’s website explains that the roundup is necessary “to achieve a thriving natural ecological balance on the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range. Several studies over the past few years show that parts of the range are in very poor condition. These range studies were comprehensive and quantified. The higher and lower elevations of the range are suffering resource damage. Use of the middle part of the range is limited due to few water sources. The BLM is prohibited from allowing a deterioration of the range associated with an over-population [of wild horses].”
The Equine Welfare Alliance accused the BLM of circumventing the wishes of Congress that wild horses be protected in the American West. The House has passed the Restore Our American Mustangs Act, and the Senate will review the bill in September.
“Right now there are 12 entire herds being eliminated from 1.4 million acres near Ely, Nev., because these lands are suddenly not appropriate for wild horses,” said Kathrens, who is the volunteer executive director of the Cloud Foundation. “However, no action has been made to reduce cattle grazing in these areas.”
The Pryor Mountain wild horses are descendants of the Lewis and Clark horses that were stolen by the Crow Indians in the early 1800s.
