Public comment on the Eagle Complex Herd Management Area Plan and Gather Plan (DOI-BLM-NV-L030-2026-0007-EA)

Dear Bureau of Land Management (Caliente and Cedar City Field Offices):

I am writing about the Preliminary Environmental Assessment for the Eagle Complex Herd Management Area Plan (HMAP) and Gather Plan, covering the Eagle, Choke Cherry, and Mt. Elinor Herd Management Areas on the Nevada–Utah border. The document is labeled a “Herd Management Area Plan,” but it functions as a plan to remove nearly 2,000 wild horses. After more than a decade of paper plans and templated roundups at Eagle, I am asking BLM to fix the serious problems in this document before any decision is finalized.

1. This is a gather plan with a new title, not a real management plan. A genuine HMAP studies the land — water, forage, fences, fire, and the condition of the range — and sets science-based goals for managing healthy wild horses on it. BLM has never written an actual HMAP for the Eagle Complex. Instead, every few years it issues another gather Environmental Assessment, removes horses, and leaves the underlying land-use problems untouched. This document repeats that pattern: the real “HMAP” is confined to a generic appendix of fill-in-the-blank language, while the body of the analysis is devoted to removal. A federal court in Nevada has already ruled, in Leigh v. Raby, that BLM must prepare a true HMAP and cannot substitute a gather plan for one. A different title on the same gather plan does not make it lawful. I am asking BLM to put the real, site-specific Eagle Complex analysis in the body of the plan — not in a one-page summary that points to an appendix.

2. The outcome was decided before the analysis was written. Both “action” alternatives reach the identical result: removing horses to the low end of an Appropriate Management Level (AML) set decades ago. The Eagle AML was carried forward in the 2008 Ely Resource Management Plan with no disclosure of how the numbers were derived; the Choke Cherry and Mt. Elinor AMLs were set in 1983 from horse counts taken between 1971 and 1982, and have never been revised or their methodology disclosed. BLM cannot lawfully carry forty-year-old numbers into a new ten-year plan without a current, site-specific analysis under its own Handbook, H-4700-1. Every alternative that would actually examine the habitat — adjusting AML, or analyzing livestock use — was dismissed as “outside the scope.” When the only question on the table is how fast to remove horses, no genuine analysis has occurred.

3. Livestock got the benefit of the doubt; horses got the blame — without proof. BLM frames wild horses as the singular cause of rangeland damage, yet its own 2017 Wilson Creek rangeland-health findings attribute conditions to a combination of livestock, wild horses, elk, drought, pinyon-juniper encroachment, halogeton, and fire — not horses alone. The Wilson Creek livestock allotment dominates this Complex, overlapping roughly 47% of the Eagle HMA with 54,070 permitted livestock AUMs, much of it grazed during the growing season when the range is most fragile. BLM is attempting to write a ten-year wild horse plan on top of Wilson Creek grazing decisions that remain under administrative and judicial review and partially stayed. I am asking BLM to disclose the litigation status of those decisions; to disclose suspended and non-use AUMs on every overlapping allotment and whether any are being reactivated under its “grazing flexibility” policy (IM 2025-011); to inventory and analyze every named water source, fence, cattle guard, and exclosure that fragments habitat or blocks horses from water; and to analyze closing areas to livestock under 43 CFR 4710.5 and 4710.6. BLM must also correct its demonstrably wrong claim that changes to livestock grazing cannot be made through a wild horse management decision.

4. BLM cannot promise to protect foals when it admits it has no foaling data. The Eagle Complex has a documented history of severe welfare incidents during helicopter operations — including a mare run by helicopter as she was actively losing her foal, foals separated from their mothers and never recovered, and horses run to a lather in sub-freezing temperatures. The law prohibits helicopter use during foaling season, and BLM recites a foaling window in this document. But that window is an assertion, not a finding: BLM presents no underlying data, no census, no observation record establishing when foaling actually peaks across these specific herds. A foaling-season guideline built on no data is no guideline at all — it is an unenforceable placeholder that cannot satisfy the prohibition on flying during foaling. BLM cannot comply with a protection it has never actually measured. I am asking BLM to determine the real, data-based foaling window for the Eagle Complex from its own herd records, to commit in the decision to a documented foaling window and temperature thresholds, and to establish a public incident-reporting process so the welfare record is transparent.

5. Do the full study, and keep the decisions separate. Removing nearly 2,000 horses across more than 760,000 acres, with cascading effects on water, forage, fire, genetics, and a sensitive species, is a major federal action. The lawful vehicle is a full Environmental Impact Statement, not a shorter Environmental Assessment built on undisclosed, decades-old data. And any gather or removal decision should be a separate decision record from adoption of the HMAP — with its own appeal rights and implementation timing — so the public can meaningfully review each.

A plan that decides the outcome first, freezes the population limits at numbers older than nearly every horse on the range, refuses to examine the livestock use that dominates the Complex, and promises to honor a foaling season it has never actually measured, has not studied anything. It has written up a decision that was already made. The horses at Eagle have paid the price for a decade of paper plans and templated gathers. I am asking BLM to fix these problems and write a real management plan before this document is finalized.

Sincerely,

---