The lawsuit over the Point Reyes National Seashore’s management of tule elk failed, showing that anti-ranchers’ effort to conscript elk into their army to wage war on ranching lacks a legal basis. In that effort, anti-ranchers have engaged in an aggressive pattern of disinformation to manufacture a scientific basis for their war. But disinformation is neither law nor science, so next to fail will be the appeal.
All good disinformation campaigns contain a kernel of truth beneath layers of untruths. Here, the kernel of truth is that tule elk lack genetic diversity. That’s because all 5,700 tule elk in California are descendants of three animals saved in 1870. To counteract this genetic bottleneck, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife began a program in 1965 to expand populations and exchange over 1,250 elk between herds to enhance genetic diversity. The program was successful and resulted in a booming population with a higher than 95 percent probability of tule elk persisting for at least another century.
Anti-ranchers dismiss Fish and Wildlife’s successes by deflating elk population numbers while inflating genetic risks and the role played by tule elk in the seashore in the statewide recovery. Yet our elk are infected with the incurable and infectious chronic wasting disease, which prohibits them from being moved outside the park for purposes of genetic exchange.
To sidestep this inconvenient truth, anti-ranchers argue that since cattle infected the elk, once the cattle are removed, the elk will be miraculously cured and can then participate in genetic exchanges to help recovery efforts in California. This claim is totally bogus.
Dale McCullough, a preeminent elk biologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, made clear in a presentation last year to the Marin Resource Conservation District that seashore elk can play no part in statewide recovery efforts because once chronic wasting disease is in a population, individuals will continue to transmit it. None of the many elk populations infected with the disease in the United States has ever cured itself. So even if the park’s ranches go away, the elk will remain a genetic island on the Point Reyes peninsula.
The argument that seashore ranches must be eliminated in order for tule elk to survive and recover lacks any scientific basis. On the topic of elk, anti-ranchers have their facts wrong, their legalities wrong and their science wrong—but there is one thing they have right. Charismatic megafauna like elk make excellent fundraising tools when their inflated plight can be fobbed off on a public naturally sympathetic to at-risk animals. The new appeal—a pointless legal effort to force the park to begin an elk plan that the park has already begun—is simply more disinformation to generate further fundraising.
Unfortunately, this disinformation has overshadowed real animal welfare issues and questions that need to be answered about the elk confined on Tomales Point. Is it inhumane to keep elk fenced in an area so minerally deficient that elk grow deformed antlers? And if the park provided water to elk behind the fence due to climate change—but not to elk outside the fence that are similarly affected by drought—wasn’t this a tacit admission that the fence is an animal welfare problem? The park’s website notes that elk activists covertly supplied water troughs in violation of the Wilderness Act, which prohibits structures in a congressionally designated wilderness area, but the water supply structures the seashore itself installed are a larger-than-minimum eyesore in the wilderness. Lastly, Tomales Point, which is surrounded by water on three sides, would be an excellent and safe place to restore the Native American fire regime, but how could that be done with a fence blocking wildlife escape routes?
With its new commitment to involve the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, I predict that the park will consider removing the elk fence. Such a removal would require more effort to ensure that those seashore ranches that clean up their environmental act can coexist with elk. Ranching and elk coexist throughout California, albeit not always easily. But if coexistence can occur elsewhere, why not here?
These are all questions that need to be addressed by the pending Tomales Point Area Plan, whose webpage states: “public engagement will inform the development of an environmental impact statement anticipated to be initiated in the spring of 2023. Additional opportunities for public comment including public meetings will be offered…” I encourage readers who are truly concerned about tule elk to participate in this planning process.
But don’t waste your time or the seashore’s time with comments urging the termination of ranching on Point Reyes. Limit your comments to actions and impacts within the Tomales Point planning area or impacts outside the area that might be reasonably expected if the fence were to come down. Ranching only occurs outside the planning area, so any comments on ranching are outside the scope of this process. It’s time to focus on Tomales Point and its elk.
Gordon Bennett was a Marin representative on the former Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore Citizens Advisory Commission. He lives in Inverness Park.