ST. GEORGE — The Bureau of Land Management Cedar City Field Office issued a press release on Tuesday stating the approval of a 10-year plan to achieve appropriate management levels of wild horses in the Sulphur Herd Management Area.
The news release states that this effort is for the purpose of restoring a thriving, natural ecological balance on the area’s public lands, adding that the herd is approximately double appropriate management levels.
The plan calls for gathering and removing wild horses from the range and employing fertility control. In addition, the agency will collect information on herd characteristics and determine herd health as it seeks to restore sustainable rangelands.
The Sulphur Herd Management Area is located in Utah’s western Iron, Beaver and Millard counties, approximately 50 miles west of Minersville, Utah, in the Mountain Home and Indian Peak mountain ranges. The management area contains approximately 265,675 acres, with elevations ranging from 9,790 feet on top of Indian Peak to 6,000 feet in the valley floors.
The gather decision supports the BLM’s continuing efforts to provide public safety, improve the status of threatened and special species, and manage wild horse populations under the Warm Springs Resource Management Plan and the Pinyon Management Framework Plan decisions.
The Sulphur Herd Management Area Plan identifies the boundaries in both land use plans as suitable for wild horses and states the removal objective for both land use plans, including a necessity to “remove excess wild horses from the Sulphur HMA when the population of adult horse, those two years old and older, reaches the upper level of 180 horses,” the news release states.
If wild horses of all ages are included in the calculation, BLM says the appropriate management level for this Sulphur Herd Management Area is 165 to 250 horses. The current estimated population for the management area is 497 horses.
The decision record, finding of no significant impact, environmental assessment and associated documents are available at this website. For additional information, contact BLM Range Management Specialist Chad Hunter at [email protected].