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Victory at Point Reyes National Seashore! All Tule Elk Freed. Most Ranchers Will Leave

Victory at Point Reyes National Seashore! All Tule Elk Freed. Most Ranchers Will Leave

We 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. 

Thousands Fewer Cows. Fewer Ranches.  Zero Dairies.

In signing the deal, twelve out of fourteen ranchers at the Seashore agreed to vacate within 15 months and in return (payment) receive private payments estimated, collectively, to be $40 million. The agreement follows years of advocacy by environmental and animal protection organizations, including In Defense of Animals. While the Tule elk were suffering and dying of thirst, we staged numerous 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 some 5,000 cows for beef and dairy, this agreement will finally free the park’s magnificent Tule elk, forever. It will also massively reduce land degradation, waterway contamination, and greenhouse gas emissions in the park, and allow greater freedom and protection of all wild animals living on land, and in park streams, bays, estuaries, and lagoons. The gradual restoration of Point Reyes can begin with this historic deal signed by all six park dairies and seven of its nine “beef” (flesh) cow operations in the park.

Over the past nine years, multiple lawsuits about ranching and 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 over the next 15 months. Degraded pastures will be renamed by the National Park Service into a “Scenic Landscape Zone” and finally begin to recover from decades of land defoliation, soil compaction, and manure pollution by the extractive cattle industry.

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 lobbied for lease extensions to continue their cruel, exploitative, and polluting businesses up to the present day. 

Since then, ranchers have 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% of leased lands. The park’s founders originally intended the entire Point Reyes peninsula to become a sanctuary for wild animals 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 the Seashore’s Tule elk whose three separate herds in different areas of the Seashore will finally all be free to roam, mix, and mate and for the park’s wildlife, ecosystems, and for everyone who has fought tirelessly, for years, to free Point Reyes from the grip of destructive ranching operations. At long last the confined and harassed Tule elk, as well as the park’s deer, coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, foxes and many more animals, can thrive without the artificial barriers, wire fences, and pollution integral to these modern, industrial cattle ranches that went largely unnoticed by the public.

Cattle Industry Damage Reduced

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 5,000 mother-baby cow pairs (how the industry counts cows) 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, under 300 cows will remain.

But the removal of the majority of the park's ranching operations will allow Point Reyes’ coastal vegetation and its waterways to begin recovering 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. 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. 

The approximately 700 Tule elk in the three elk herds will finally be allowed to roam and interact more naturally, freer of fences that exist only to benefit the for-profit private ranches.



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 surrounding ranches. Three different lawsuits will also be resolved, including this one with three environmental organization plaintiffs who have signed the settlement agreement: the Western Watersheds Project, the 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.

Frustrating Concessions & Compromises Too

Unfortunately, the deal comes with some big compromises too. Not all of the private cows at the Seashore will be removed, which they should.  Not all ranching operations will end, and they should. This means all the land, water, and air pollution generated by these “small” organic “family farms” will continue inside a national park that belongs to Americans of all species, not the ranchers.

Disappointingly, additional grazing will be permitted, another gift to ranchers, with more cows brought in seasonally, and variably, from an estimated 600 more “beef cows” to a limit of 1200 cows maximum. This practice is justified as necessary to “manage” grasslands and fire danger — which is ironic because it’s an issue created by cattle ranching in the first place! (More flammable annual grasses, the result of bringing in supplemental hay to feed cows, replace the original, evergreen plants of coastal prairie and coastal scrub which cattle trample and destroy.) 

Watch for the cattle industry’s latest desperate justification for continuing the brutal beef (and dairy) industries as usual: “conservation grazing.”  Which, like “regenerative ranching” is the cattleman’s equivalent of “clean coal.”



So we still have work to do; our activism, public education, and outreach will continue. We will monitor the movements and improved health of the Tule elk herds and continue to keep ranchers to their agreements to no longer bother the magnificent Tule elk, who are finally getting their first real taste of freedom at Point Reyes National Seashore which they so richly deserve.

Our Work Continues!

We 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. We 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, and even beyond national park borders, into Marin County land, which the new agreement prevents. The agreement also carves out a loophole that allows the killing of Tule elk if they interfere significantly with remaining ranchers. 

We will also continue to advocate for animal ranching to 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 animals for human consumption.



All people who respect 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 wild animals 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, “family-owned” organic ranches at Point Reyes.

Learn more about Tule elk and please consider donating to support our work.

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