Snake River Land & Cattle covers 38,899 total acres, including 5,675 deeded acres and 33,224 BLM acres according to the agent’s listing.
The map puts the deeded acreage inside the Douglas-Sawmill Allotment, a few miles south of the Sand Wash Basin HMA.
The ranch lies within a game management unit so not only will you get pushback from ranchers in trying to flip the preference to horses but from hunters as well.
The allotment master report shows one pasture, so it may operate as a general use area shared by three permittees.
Livestock owned by the other two would remain.
The active AUMs are probably wrong and may be off by a factor of ten.
One of the bullet points in the listing says the ranch receives 743 AUMs, equivalent to 62 wild horses.
The land ratio is good, almost six public acres per deeded acre.
But the allotment overlaps the Douglas Mountain HA according to the ArcGIS viewer, so the ranch meets two out of four requirements for a refuge.
You don’t have to spend millions of dollars on a base property to get wild horses back on these public lands. You just need to rid the bureaucracy of ranchers and ranching sympathizers and overturn the planning process that zeroed out the HMA.
Don’t expect any help from the advocates. They want the ranchers to win.
RELATED: Key Indicators for New Wild Horse Preserves.
Western Horse Watchers Association 