Hello and Happy Friday to everyone!

As promised, we will start talking about where we are – what we are doing and some things that you can do to help the Theodore Roosevelt National Park wild horses.

We get asked A LOT:

Why don’t your lawyers just sue the park?

Or

Can’t your lawyers do anything to stop the use of GonaCon?

And

Can’t we ask that Superintendent Richman be fired?

And

The Park is just dragging this out with the hopes that people forget!

While I wish the answers were all that easy, there is more to those stories.

The Park is engaged in a NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) process.  That process requires them to look at the impact that their decision will have on the environment – that includes scientific, historical/cultural and even the economic impact.  It also requires them to have public input (which we just did) and evaluate the comments received. 

We know from what the Park is telling reporters that (1) They plan to have their report on the last set of comments sometime this month and (2) by the end of 2024, they stated they will know IF they will get eliminating approximately 150 of the horses or the ENTIRE herd of currently 200 horses.

We have to wait until they give a final determination before we do anything about their proposed action and even their use of GonaCon.

Why?

IF we demanded that our lawyers take the Park to court, and we had the literal hundreds of thousands of dollars I am sure that would cost, the Park would just tell the judge that whatever the issues presented were, that they were working on those issues in their current management planning process.  The case would be dismissed and we would have wasted a ton of money.  And yes, we have had this actual conversation with our lawyers. 

Can we ask that Superintendent Richman be fired?

What people need to realize is that she was assigned to this Park to do a job.  The management of the horses is part of that job.  All of this was in play long before she arrived at TRNP.  Case in point: This process will be costing over $100,000.  The budget for this had to be approved long before Superintendent Richman came in March of 2022.  Blake McCann was talking about this management plan in 2020.  We know this from the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) documents that were shared with us by American Wild Horse Campaign.  This has been planned for quite some time!

Granted, she isn’t exactly making any friends or working well with the community.  If she was fired, the NPS would just send someone else to replace her and carry out the plans that are coming from ??? – no one knows exactly WHO is pushing this direction.  We do have a few ideas though 😉

The Park is actually NOT just dragging their feet.  Again, they are engaged in a NEPA process and have to see that through.  They have run into a few hiccups!  And we will talk about that in the next few days.  Remember, when all of this originally came out, they expected to be done with all of this pretty quickly. I believe they were talking about 6 months to a year.  We are now going on 2 years into this process.  They have stated they expect this to continue for almost another year.  We do not think that they expected the opposition and public outcry this is getting!  THANK YOU again to all of our CHWHA followers who have answered our Calls to Action!

We will share more thoughts on why this process is taking so long and where the direction may be coming from over the next few days in future blogs.

If you have any questions about this process, please feel free to email us at info@chwha.org or comment on this blog post or our social media pages. 

Thank you for your support and have a GREAT weekend!

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