United States attorneys responded last week to the final motion filed by animal rights lawyers in the ongoing lawsuit over tule elk die-offs at Tomales Point. Officials have declined to comment on elk issues since the suit was brought by the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Clinic last June—months before the Point Reyes National Seashore finalized its general management plan amendment—but the latest brief offered a glimpse at the park’s legal strategy. Lawyers argued that the elk activists were wrong to focus on the seashore’s general management plan to address their concerns about malnourishment in the fenced herd. There is no connection, they wrote, between a revised G.M.P. and the actions the plaintiffs are seeking: removal of the fence and provision of supplemental food. “[The plaintiffs’] persistent focus on elk management issues (and the fence) reveal that their true grievances relate directly and exclusively to the 1998 Elk Plan, and not the G.M.P.,” attorneys wrote. The elk plan, they argued, is already being addressed. Last month, seashore superintendent Craig Kenkel announced plans to revise the 1998 plan in response to recent droughts that have caused stark fluctuations in the herd. The government’s brief cited the announcement as an argument for a summary judgment in its favor. The Harvard clinic had asked the court in its last brief to speed up the Tomales Point planning update. But the park’s lawyers wrote that the process, which must go through extensive environmental review, could take at least three years, and called the clinic’s requested one-year timeline “arbitrary.” Park attorneys wrote that management plan updates are discretionary and that a plan “cannot need revision purely for revision’s sake.” Members of the public have no right to take part in discretionary planning, they wrote. They cited the Supreme Court’s 2004 opinion in Norton v. Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, in which the court ruled against an environmental group that sued the Bureau of Land Management over off-road vehicles in wilderness areas. The opinion determined that discretionary, “day-to-day agency management” issues could not be decided by courts under the Administrative Procedure Act, which the Harvard clinic had invoked. In August, the federal court denied an injunction that sought relief for the elk in the form of supplementary food and water. Federal judge Haywood Gilliam, Jr. will hear the case, one of two lawsuits now facing the seashore, in the Northern District of California’s Oakland courtroom on Feb. 24.