The BLM announced last week that eleven allotments in the Book Cliffs area had been relinquished and are now available for grazing.
They’re not in the vacant allotment finder.
The Utah rangeland management page has maps and application forms.
An open house will be held on April 29 at the Vernal Field Office for interested parties.
The allotment master report gives management status, acreage and AUMs, but not active AUMs.
The active AUMs can be estimated from data in this spreadsheet.
Most of the acreage is in the Improve category, suggesting that your stewards of the public lands were not taking their responsibilities seriously.
The allotments offer an estimated 18,075 active AUMs on 286,284 public acres, with a capacity of 1,506 wild horses.
The stocking rate would be 5.3 wild horses per thousand public acres, five times higher than the target rate across all HMAs.
Your faithful public servants employ a double standard for resource management, one for wild horses and another for livestock.
Here we are using the standard for livestock, which is usually higher, sometimes much higher.
The ranching community will likely keep the offering under wraps because they subscribe to a philosophy of no net loss of AUMs—especially to pests!
The advocates won’t pursue it because they’re pesticide salesmen, not conservationists.
That leaves organizations like American Prairie and The Wild Horse Refuge.
The location map shows the arrangement.
Green River and Birchell are on the west side of the Uintah & Ouray Reservation but the allotments on the east side might make a good wild horse preserve.
It’s not clear if one base property can secure grazing preference on multiple allotments.
The bureaucrats would likely throw as many roadblocks in your way as they can because they, like the advocates, want the ranchers to win.
Remember, if a proposed refuge doesn’t include public lands and doesn’t displace livestock therefrom, it’s not worthy of your support.
► Get the truth about wild horses and the wild horse advocates at westernhorsewatchers.com.
Western Horse Watchers Association 