Tule elk are being misused by both sides in the battle over ranching in the Point Reyes National Seashore. Pro-ranchers say the elk must go, while anti-ranchers say the ranches must go. But elk must stay because they fall under the jurisdiction of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which knows that the park’s elk carry a communicable disease. Ranches, if they clean up their operations, will also stay, given congressional intent.
The Point Reyes National Seashore and Golden Gate National Recreation Area Citizens Advisory Commission, on which I served, heard many conflicts, most of which ended on middle ground. My middle-ground prediction here is that the elk fence will come down. But the middle ground on the elk dispute has been obscured by overheated rhetoric from both supporters and opponents of agriculture.
Pro-ranchers claim that elk eat so much grass that, during a drought, dairies could lose their organic certification, which requires that at least 30 percent of a cow’s diet be grass. But organic certifiers waived the rule during the drought across the state, not just in areas with elk. So the lack of grass was primarily due to drought, not to elk.
Pro-ranchers note that elk eat supplemental feed and break fences and pipes. Yet the impacted ranchers have refused to fence elk out of supplemental feeding areas or accept the park’s offers to reimburse for broken equipment.
Pro-ranchers have disguised their desire to eliminate elk with calls for new fencing. The current elk fence is effective because the reserve’s steep cliffs create a full enclosure, but the fence that ranchers propose would not enjoy the same geography and would be linear, not enclosing. It would be hugely expensive, environmentally damaging and ineffective: elk would simply walk around the ends of it.
Anti-ranchers are no less careless with their claims. When they staged photo ops of volunteers carrying jugs of water to fenced-in elk supposedly dying of thirst last year, the following day I went to the site and videoed a nearby babbling brook surrounded by elk tracks and scat. According to state wildlife experts, elk populations, like those of other wild creatures on Point Reyes, decrease during drought principally due to lack of forage, not water.
Anti-ranchers note that the seashore is the only national park that hosts tule elk, but tule elk are also protected at the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge, which is intended only for wildlife and severely limits visitation. If the seashore’s only priority was elk, the park should get rid of its parking lots and visitors.
Another anti-ranch photo op featured volunteers stretching their arms through the fence that was supposedly keeping the elk from moving to water. But young males of many species like to roam, and elk get in and out of the reserve through the fence. So the fence is increasingly irrelevant and is not keeping elk herds from water. Tule elk cows and calves are homebodies that prefer the safety of the habitat they know, even in a drought.
Some anti-ranchers claim that tule elk are endangered. They are not. Their population is booming in California due to the absence of their natural predator: wolves. The reintroduction of wolves is not an option at Point Reyes, nor is hunting. Birth control is ineffective. So the park is hazing elk away from the affected ranches, with lethal removal as a last option.
Ungulate populations nationwide are managed by culling and hunting. That is the burden that humans have taken on by eliminating top predators. Even if the park itself did not cull, if its elk population were to spread beyond park borders, the elk would be hunted.
Conflicts between elk and ranching are significant in California. The state issues hunting permits to ranchers who resell the permits to hunters, but the paperwork is complicated and the resales only partially offset elk impact costs. And, unlike other states with conflicts between wildlife and ranching, California does not have a compensation program to address crop damages.
What would happen if the park removed the elk fence? Very little at first. Over time, an elk cow would walk off to start a new herd that would create more conflicts.
So for ranching and elk to co-exist, the park needs more elk management. For example, the park charges ranchers for 100 percent of the ranch’s forage, some of which is consumed by elk. Allocating a portion for wildlife might reduce ranchers’ perception that they are raising wildlife for the public’s enjoyment without compensation.
Point Reyes is a mix of wilderness areas, visitor-serving areas and cultural and historic areas, with Indigenous Miwok heritage underlying all. It is a difficult job to maintain a strong middle between these always-competing values—a middle that has been obscured by rhetoric about elk from both sides of the ranching controversy.
Gordon Bennett was a Marin representative on the former Golden Gate National Recreation Area-Point Reyes National Seashore Citizens Advisory Commission from 2000 to 2002, when it was disbanded. He lives in Inverness Park.