Comments due by June 30, 2018

The Bureau of Land Management’s Lander Field Office is accepting public comments on a Scoping Notice for a roundup and removal as well as controversial population control on the North Lander Complex. Roundups are anticipated to start after January 1, 2019, primarily using helicopters.

Located in Fremont County, Wyoming, the Complex includes the Conant Creek, Dishpan Butte, Muskrat Basin, and Rock Creek Mountain Herd Management Areas. Although it encompasses 368,000 acres (575 square miles), the BLM allows just 320-536 wild horses in this area!

The proposed Environmental Assessment (EA) would remove, at minimum, approximately 588 of the 1,124 estimated wild horses who were living in the Complex as of 2017.

Even worse, the EA is considering several controversial and dangerous alternatives for creating “limited-reproducing herds” that include vasectomizing and gelding stallions; adjusting sex ratios; using a combination of gelding, spaying and/or segregating the horses into single-sex herds; and implementing the fertility control drug GonaCon in combination with one of the previously mentioned treatments.

This plan, which once again reflects the BLM’s preferential treatment of privately-owned livestock, will devastate the wild horse population in the North Lander Complex.

Remember – All horses and burros removed from the Complex are in grave danger of being killed if Congress grants the BLM's request to lift the restriction on destroying healthy wild horses and burros or selling them for slaughter. Also, stallions and mares would be subjected to unprecedented and largely untested population control treatments in the form of vasectomies, gelding, spaying, and GonaCon.

Now is the time to weigh in for humane on-the-range management and fair treatment of the wild horses living on our public lands in the North Lander Complex, so please get your scoping comments in by personalizing and submitting the letter below.