In Defense of Animals Warns Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge That Imminent Round-up of Wild Horses Violates Federal Law

Lakeview, Ore—Today In Defense of Animals (IDA), an international animal protection organization, sent an urgent letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) detailing how the Sheldon-Hart Mountain Wildlife Refuge's plan to start rounding up wild horses violates the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The letter urges that the FWS immediately halt its plan to remove more than 1400 horses from the Refuge in Northwestern Nevada and parts of Eastern Oregon beginning in August of this year.

In the letter, attorneys at Meyer Glitzenstein & Crystal, a Washington D.C. based public interest firm specializing in environmental litigation, outline numerous NEPA violations, including the reliance on thirty-one year-old data to justify the round-up, failing to consider any reasonable alternatives, and rounding up the horses ahead of, not following, the new data that will soon be collected in a planned Comprehensive Conservation Plan which will analyze current environmental conditions on the Refuge.

"The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is thumbing its nose at the law and in doing so cheating the public, whom have a great interest in keeping wild horses wild on our public lands," said Matt Rossell, Northwest Outreach Coordinator for IDA. "Instead of going out onto the refuge and actually looking to see if the wild horses are impacting the environment as the law mandates, the agency simply re-wrote outdated and inadequate information in their push to eliminate a viable wild horse population from its native home."

The Sheldon Wildlife Refuge encompasses more than half a million acres of high desert habitat and was established more than seventy years ago principally for the protection of the area's wildlife, including pronghorn antelope and bighorn sheep. Since the time the Refuge was established, the antelope, sheep and other wildlife have shared this area with herds of wild horses and burros.

The plan to round-up the Sheldon Refuge's horses has been highly controversial with hundreds of comments being submitted by concerned members of the public who feel that wild horses are in inseparable part of the western scene. The round-up has even drawn the attention of members of Congress, including Nick J. Rahall, II, Chairman of the Committee of Natural Resources who submitted a letter calling for the round-up to be halted.

View a copy of the letter to the FWS.
View a copy of Chairman Rahall's letter.