Wild horse advocates are ramping up legal efforts to stop the Bureau of Land Management from removing thousands of wild horses in Wyoming to resolve a yearslong dispute with ranchers.
A coalition led by American Wild Horse Conservation and the Animal Welfare Institute filed a lawsuit Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming asking the court to block BLM from proceeding next month with the planned roundup and removal of roughly 3,300 wild horses over multiple years.
A BLM spokesperson said Thursday the planned roundup, which had been scheduled to begin next month, has been postponed. The spokesperson didn’t give a reason for the delay, which was announced a day after the lawsuit was filed.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday comes less than a week after another advocacy group, Friends of Animals, separately sued BLM to stop it from moving forward with the wild horse roundup. The group accused BLM of ignoring a recent federal appeals court ruling that found the 2023 land-use plan amendment the bureau is using to justify the roundup is illegal.
