Just hours after the National Park Service began dismantling a fence that has confined hundreds of tule elk to the northernmost tip of Point Reyes National Seashore for nearly 50 years, a ranchers association filed a lawsuit seeking to halt the process.
The park service announced its final plan to remove the 2.2-mile boundary on Monday, a decision lauded by environmental activists and condemned by ranchers who contend that the large ungulates damage their infrastructure and compete with livestock for limited forage and water.
“The benefit of removing this enclosure is to allow elk to access additional habitat, increase the species’ population resilience during drought, and promote a more natural population cycle,” park superintendent Anne Altman said in a statement. The decision, finalized after an environmental review that garnered over 35,000 public comments, marked a significant shift in the management of a park that attracts 2.3 million visitors annually—many drawn to the elk’s bi-tonal bugling and dramatic thrashing of antlers during the rut.
By Tuesday, a team of six park service employees was already at work, using backhoes, chainsaws and shovels to methodically take down the fence. “Removing it entirely will take some time,” park spokeswoman Melanie Gunn told the Light.
That same day, the California Cattlemen’s Association, which represents ranchers and beef producers, filed a legal challenge against the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service. The lawsuit seeks an injunction to halt further removal of the fence and restore dismantled sections. It alleges that the park service violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to prepare a full environmental impact statement and neglecting to adequately evaluate the harm to ranching operations or consider alternative solutions.
Erected in 1978, the 8-foot-high woven-wire fence has been a flashpoint in the battle between environmentalists seeking to restore Point Reyes to a more natural state and ranchers who have tended the land for generations. Ranchers have long argued that the presence of free-roaming elk in the pastoral zone—an 18,000-acre area home to four dairies and 17 cattle ranches—will be ruinous for their operations. The park has shared this concern, noting in its 1998 elk management plan that “Removing the fence…could be easily implemented only after ranching activities terminate.”
To ranchers like Kevin Lunny, the decision to take down the fence is an affront to the ongoing settlement of a 2022 lawsuit that will determine the future of agriculture in the park. He sees it as a deliberate circumvention of due process that effectively decides the fate of the ranches and dairies before the mediation runs its course.
“The timing is impossible to ignore,” said Mr. Lunny, a third-generation rancher who lives and works on G Ranch. “Before the lawsuit is even resolved, the park service is capitulating to the anti-ag activists, handing them what they want outside of the legal process and outside mediation. You’d have to be blind not to see this.”
Tule elk were once abundant across California, with numbers exceeding half a million before the Gold Rush. Hunted for their meat, hide and tallow to the brink of extinction, they were reintroduced to Tomales Point by the park service in 1978. Confined to a 2,900-acre reserve bordered by water on three sides, the population was projected to stabilize at around 300.
But elk reproduce quickly, and the park service has said that a boom-and-bust cycle was unavoidable in the enclosure. Without the fence, it estimates the population could balloon past 2,800 animals within 20 years. Because the elk have few natural predators and the park service must contain them within its boundaries, the park’s general management plan notes that population management will be needed.
The Tomales Point plan marks the first update to elk policy since 1998, when concerns arose that the fenced herd might exceed the reserve’s capacity. After rangers counted 465 elk in 1997, they began netting females from helicopters and inoculating them with contraceptive darts. That same year, biologists relocated 45 elk to a Limantour wilderness area; these eventually gave rise to two free-ranging herds. The latest count found at least 315 elk on Tomales Point and nearly 200 in each free-ranging herd.
In recent drought years, confined elk have struggled to find food and water, prompting the park to place water troughs and mineral licks in the enclosure. But die-offs led to animal-rights protests on the point, and in 2021, Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic sued the park service. The suit alleged negligence in the care of the enclosed herd and claimed the fence violated the Wilderness Act, the 1916 Organic Act, and the seashore’s founding legislation.
Mr. Lunny speculated that the park’s haste to unearth the fence’s wooden stakes stems from fears of a policy reversal. “They’re rushing to take that fence down so a new administration can’t stop them,” he said. “Once it’s done, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.”