On Aug. 5, Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the United States District Court, District of Columbia, ruled that the Bureau of Land Management cannot remove about 100 horses from part of the White River Resource Area (Colo.) because the agency did not determine they are “excess animals” in an overpopulated herd.

In her ruling in the case of Colorado Wild Horse and Burro Coalition vs. Ken Salazar, Secretary, U.S. Department of the Interior, Judge Collyer stated, “It is a federal crime to remove a wild free-roaming horse or burro from public lands, convert a wild free-roaming horse or burro to private use, or kill or harass a wild free-roaming horse or burro. Congress delegated to the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior jurisdiction over all wild free-roaming horses and burros ‘for the purpose of management and protection in accordance with the provisions of this chapter.’ ”

There are approximately 60,000 wild Mustangs in existence, roughly the same number as in the early 1970s. But 33,000 of those 60,000 have been gathered out of the wild and are in BLM holding facilities across the country.

The West Douglas herd affected by the ruling consists of 147 horses within a 120,000-acre area. That number has risen from just nine in the early ‘70s when Congress created federal protections for wild horses.

The BLM has been making plans to remove the herd since 1980 because oil and gas exploration was prompting horses to move into new areas they didn’t traditionally roam. Those plans repeatedly faltered over the past three decades, but the agency was set to begin trapping and roping the animals in late September.

Several organizations that support wild horses—Colorado Wild Horse and Burro Coalition, American Mustang and Burro Association, Cloud Foundation and Front Range Equine Rescue—filed the most recent complaint against the plan in federal court in March.