POINT REYES NATIONAL SEASHORE, Calif. (Jan. 9th, 2025) — In Defense of Animals and local activists are celebrating a historic lawsuit settlement agreement to phase out all dairies and most beef ranches at Point Reyes National Seashore following years of broken promises, finally ending 150 years of destructive animal agribusiness and the killing of iconic Tule elk on the Point Reyes peninsula. This monumental decision to begin restoring and prioritizing wild animals and natural habitats follows years of campaigning and marks a huge victory for environmentalists and animal advocates. 

In signing the deal, ranchers agree to vacate within 15 months and will receive private payments, estimated, collectively to be $40 million for all the ranch operators. The agreement follows years of advocacy by environmental and animal protection organizations, including In Defense of Animals, which staged multiple demonstrations and emergency elk water deliveries over the last four-and-one-half years to win media attention and public support.

“By ending the brutal exploitation of over 6,000 cows for beef and dairy, this agreement will finally free the park’s magnificent Tule elk,” said Jack Gescheidt, Tule elk consultant for In Defense of Animals. “It will also massively reduce land degradation, waterway contamination, and greenhouse gas emissions in the park, and allow greater freedom and protections of all wild animals living on land, and in its streams, bays, estuaries, and lagoons. The restoration of Point Reyes begins with this historic deal signed by four dairies and seven of the nine beef operations in the park.”

Over the past nine years, multiple lawsuits about ranching and involving the National Park Service’s management of ranching and wild elk have challenged the legality and publicized the devastating ecological impacts of the beef and dairy ranching businesses. This entire time they have been actively polluting Point Reyes’ land, air, and waterways feeding into the Pacific Ocean. 

Ranch operators sharing the reported $40 million sum raised by The Nature Conservancy, will phase out their polluting businesses within 15 months. Degraded pastures will be re-zoned by the National Park Service into a “Scenic Landscape zone” and then finally begin to recover from decades of the destructive, extractive cattle industry’s impact.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government paid ranch owners the equivalent of $350 million taxpayer dollars, to sell, lease back, and then finally vacate their lands. In return, they agreed to move out within 25 years, by 1987. But as that deadline approached, ranchers instead flexed their considerable political muscle, reneged on the deal, kept the money, and repeatedly got lease extensions to continue their cruel, exploitative, and polluting businesses up to the present day. 

Back then, ranch operators not only refused to leave, they doubled down on their decades-old public relations campaign, attempting to rewrite history, including promoting three false narratives: that they helped create the national park, that they were supposed to operate at Point Reyes forever, and that they are environmentally responsible, hard-working “stewards of the land” — but all of these claims are false. “Sewers on the land” is closer to the truth; the ranches have always been the park’s leading source of pollution of its land, air, streams and the Pacific Ocean, into which they all drain.

After a decades-long, hard-fought campaign, over 16,000 acres of ranchland fenced off to the public inside the Point Reyes national park unit will be reclaimed, representing around 85 %percent of leased lands. The park’s founders originally intended the entire Point Reyes peninsula to become a sanctuary for wildlife and a place of unspoiled beauty where future generations of wild animals can flourish. And where future generations of humans can enjoy watching wild animals while knowing they are protected.

“This is an incredible victory for wildlife, ecosystems, and everyone who has fought tirelessly, for years, to free Point Reyes from the grip of destructive ranching operations,” said Marilyn Kroplick M.D., President of In Defense of Animals. “At long last the confined and harassed Tule elk, as well as the park’s deer, coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, and foxes, can thrive without the artificial barriers, wire fences, and pollution integral to these modern, industrial cattle ranches that went largely unnoticed by the public. This decision is a testament to the power of grassroots advocacy and the enduring commitment to protect our public lands, and a stunning example of how even local, organic meat and dairy drive wildlife destruction and pollution.”

For decades, millions of pounds of manure, millions of gallons of urine, and tens of thousands of pounds of methane from these ranching operations have caused extensive and continual ecological damage. Approximately 6,000 mother-baby cattle pairs trample native vegetation, contaminate streams and lagoons with manure and urine, and emit huge quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas that traps 20-80 times more heat than carbon dioxide. After this settlement is completed, around 200 cow pairs will remain.

But the removal of the majority of the park's ranching operations will allow Point Reyes’ coastal vegetation and its waterways to recover and support a flourishing, more diverse array of native plants and wild animals, including black-tailed deer, coyotes, hares, raccoons, foxes, skunks, badgers, and the park’s iconic Tule elk who have suffered and died by the hundreds in recent years as a result of being fenced inside the ironically named “Tule Elk Reserve” at the remote Tomales Point. The approximately 700 Tule elk in the three elk herds will finally be allowed to roam and interact more naturally, freer of fences which exist only to benefit the for-profit private ranches.

In addition to being starved of resources, some Tule elk in the park also have contracted diseases from the for-profit cow businesses, including Johne’s, the wasting cattle disease, which is common among confined dairy cows, including in the smaller, organic operations touted at Point Reyes. 

“This agreement represents a new beginning for Point Reyes,” said Jack Gescheidt of The TreeSpirit Project and a consultant for In Defense of Animals. “The departure of cattle ranching from the park means cleaner waterways, healthier land and vegetation, and a brighter future for the Tule elk and all the park’s wildlife. This is a victory we have fought long and hard to achieve, and it demonstrates the necessity and effectiveness of dedicated advocacy, activist demonstrations and the power of the press and public opinion.”

Under the agreement, the National Park Service will oversee the phased removal of the cows and ranching infrastructure, including hundreds of miles of barbed-wire fences. It will also resolve three different lawsuits, including this one with three environmental organization plaintiffs which inked the agreement: the Western Watersheds Project, Center for Biological Diversity, and the Resource Renewal Institute.

An earlier lawsuit, Gescheidt v. Haaland, was filed in June of 2021 by the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Clinic and more directly addresses the National Park Service (NPS) mismanagement of the Tomales Point Tule Elk Reserve. The suit brought by the Western Watersheds Project, the Resource Renewal Institute, and the Center for Biological Diversity has been in mediation for over two years, holding the NPS responsible for the ecological damage done by the ranching operations.

“This victory belongs to everyone who stood up for the Tule elk and the ecosystems of Point Reyes,” said Kroplick. “The end of ranching operations marks the dawn of a new era for the park, where all three of the park’s Tule elk herds, and all its wildlife, can roam more freely, and the land can begin to heal. We applaud this momentous decision and look forward to seeing Point Reyes finally restored to its full, natural glory.”

The agreement caps years of sustained advocacy by In Defense of Animals and other organizations to hold the National Park Service accountable for prioritizing wildlife over private ranching business interests. 

In Defense of Animals will continue to monitor the implementation of this new agreement for Point Reyes National Seashore to make sure the ranchers adhere to the terms of the settlement in the fifteen months ahead, and repeat their past behavior of accepting millions of dollars and then refusing to leave. The organization will also continue to fight for Tule elk access to approximately 10,000 acres of adjoining Golden Gate National Recreation Area public land where seven beef ranches remain, an even beyond national park borders, into Marin County land, which the new agreement prevents. The agreement also carves out a loophole which allows the killing of Tule elk if they interfere significantly with remaining ranchers. Activist Gescheidt said about all this, “In Defense of Animals may trust, but they will verify.”

In Defense of Animals will also continue to advocate for private cows be removed from all public lands so that they too can be restored for wildlife conservation and to mitigate the climate crisis, caused in large part by raising cows for human consumption which is the supply feeding consumer demand for beef and dairy products.

All people who love animals can directly contribute to this cause—which includes reducing global warming, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, and massive land and water pollution—by simply refusing to eat meat and dairy products. Doing so protects wildlife and directly reduces the suffering of the millions of cows held in cruel confinement and slaughtered at a young age, in these exploitative, for-profit ranches that treat sentient animals as objects and property for financial gain, regardless of the size of the business — including the small organic ranches at Point Reyes.

### MORE INFORMATION ###

NPS press release Jan. 8

Settlement agreement

Tule Elk Town Hall #4 informational video - Dec. 19, 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS2mgWuj0R4

Tule elk campaign: www.idausa.org/elk

CONTACTS

Jack Gescheidt, TreeSpiritProject founder, jack@treespiritproject.com | (415) 488-4200
Fleur Dawes, Communications Director, In Defense of Animals, media@idausa.org 415-879-6879

In Defense of Animals is an international animal protection organization based in California with over 250,000 supporters and a history of fighting for animals, people, and the environment through education and campaigns, as well as hands-on rescue facilities in California, India, South Korea, and rural Mississippi since 1983. www.idausa.org/elk

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