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Rumors that the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) voted to slaughter some 44,000 healthy wild horses living in off-range holding facilities have gained traction online this month, stoking outrage on social media among admirers of the animals. The rumors aren't entirely true.

The vote, as Snopes.com noted on Tuesday, was made by an advisory board that offers recommendations to the BLM, not the BLM itself, meaning it does not amount to a decision to carry out the euthanasia. Ginger Kathrens, a board member and advocate for the humane treatment of animals who was the sole dissenting vote against the recommendation, told the rumor research site that it was unclear what the next step in the process would be. And the BLM has not said whether it would accept the recommendation.

The vote resurfaces a decades-old conflict over the fate of wild horses that sometimes pits the concerns of animal-welfare advocates against federal officials and scientists who warn of the effects that precipitous growth in the horses' numbers can have on the health of ecosystems – and potentially on the horses themselves.

The ballooning populations of wild hoofed animals include burros as well.

As of March 1, 2016, the current estimated on-range wild horse and burro population is 67,027, a 15 percent increase over the 2015 estimate of 58,150, according to the BLM. The US land management agency says that horse and burro herds tend to double every four years. 

In Arizona alone, BLM rangeland management specialist John Hall estimates that 600 to 700 burros roam in a million-acre region called Cibola-Trigo Herd Management area, according to the Associated Press.

"Nationwide, it's easier to adopt out burros than wild horses," said John MacDonald, manager of the BLM's Yuma field office told the AP. "No. 1, I think is they're cuter. Two, you can put them in your backyard where you can't do that with a horse. Around here people can use them for packing or hiking."

The management of the herds is complicated by the facts that wild horses – the feral descendants of domestic stock that either escaped or were turned loose on Western ranges – have long served as symbols of frontier freedom in the United States, a romantic perception that has irked ranchers for nearly as long, º£½Ç´óÉñ noted in 2005:

At its current level, the wild horse population is 40,000 more than what the BML calls an "appropriate management level." The management agency is tasked with finding the best way to keep the population in check but is caught in the difficulties of navigating between the challenges of administering birth control to large, intelligent, and powerful animals and litigation from animal rights advocacy groups.

In 2014, The Monitor reported that President Obama had signed into law a bill that effectively banned the slaughter of horses for human consumption in the US by providing no funding for meat inspectors at packing plants.

In a press release last week, the Humane Society denounced the advisory board's recommendation and blamed the BLM for longstanding mismanagement of wild horse populations.

"By focusing massive efforts on removing horses and burros from the range, without treating those horses remaining on the range with any form of fertility control to limit population growth, holding facilities throughout the United States have become overburdened," it wrote.

The BLM has acknowledged the necessity to improve its population control methods, but sterilization plans have run into snags. In Colorado, the agency backed off of a plan in September in response to litigation from Front Range Equine Rescue, a nonprofit that advocates for wild horses, that it said would put staff at unnecessary risk while implementing the sterilizations, according to the Denver Post.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.