At Point Reyes, Elk Have Become the Canaries in the Cattle Industry's Dying Coal Mine [View all]

Suing the federal government was not on my bucket list. Yet here I am, lead plaintiff in Gescheidt v. Haaland, a lawsuit filed last year in U.S. District Court, Northern Division of California, by attorneys with the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program.

With three co-plaintiffs, I assert that more than 150 tule elk died in Point Reyes National Seashore’s “tule elk reserve” from 2019 to 2020 — as a direct result of National Park Service mismanagement. We believe more than one-third of an entire tule elk herd was killed intentionally.

Park Service officials not only ignored its mandate to protect this rare, wild, native California species inside a national park unit, but caused the deaths by confining the elk behind fences, on land lacking adequate food and water. The Park Service has become a de facto zookeeper refusing to adequately feed and water its captive animals. It did this before labeling the resulting deaths “natural.”

Since filing the lawsuit, the Park Service revealed scores more elk have died; over half the reserve’s tule elk died (mostly likely of starvation and thirst) in just two years, from 2019 to 2021.

But I’m not in court just to sue the Park Service for killing Tule elk, though that’s reason enough. I want the public to get the big picture, the reason elk are confined in the first place: for the cattle industry. Park funds are subsidizing the ongoing environmental degradation of public land — by privately owned cows.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/02/24/at-point-reyes-elk-have-become-the-canaries-in-the-cattle-industrys-dying-coal-mine/