U.S. District Court Grants Advocates Right to Intervene in State of Wyoming Anti-Mustang Lawsuit
On Monday, January 5, 2015, the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming granted a motion by The Cloud Foundation, noted photographer Carol Walker of Wild Horse Freedom Federation and other aevocates to intervene in a State of Wyoming lawsuit against the U.S Bureau of Land Management (BLM) over wild horse management. The States lawsuit seeks the removal of hundreds of wild horses from public lands in Wyoming, a state in which fewer than 2,500 wild horses remain.
“Our clients wanted to intervene in the case to defend wild horses from the pro-ranching special interests and their allies in state government. Our clients’ goal is to prevent the federal government from acceding to their claims that the horses must be removed from the public lands to protect the private livestock that are allowed to graze on the same lands,” said Caitlin Zittkowski, of Meyer,Glitzenstein and Crystal, the Washington-DC based law firm that is representing the groups and individuals intervening in the case.
Last year, the DOI BLM (Federal Gov) settled a similar legal attack by pro-ranching interests in Wyoming, agreeing to decimate nearly half of the state’s remaining wild horse population. The advocates maintain that the governor’s decision to expend public resources on a lawsuit against the BLM is ironic for a state with so few wild horses remaining, and one that promotes wild horses in tourism videos that tout Wyoming as a state that remains untamed, wild and free.
In Wyoming, wild horse numbers are dwarfed by the number of livestock grazing on public lands at taxpayer expense. Fewer than 2,500 wild horses remain on just 3.2 million acres of public rangeland, while hundreds of thousands of livestock graze 18 million acres of public land in the state. Put another way, wild horses are present in Wyoming on just 2 percent of the BLM land grazed by livestock.
http://wildhorsefreedomfederation.org/
Active Litigation in Wy. State court- http://www.thecloudfoundation.org/news/legal-battles/403-wyoming-lawsuit
