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Tule elk in Marin are dying off, as the park service and activists feud over the reason why.
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Tule elks in a meadow in Point Reyes National Seashore, Marin County, California.NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Tule elk have had a long, hard history of survival in California.
The subspecies of the elk, native to California, once roamed the state in the hundreds of thousands, but uncontrolled hunting and human settlement in the 19th century nearly wiped them out, with numbers dwindling to less that 30 in the 1870s.
That last small herd in Bakersfield was saved by an elk-loving rancher named Henry Miller, and each of the 5,700 tule elk in California today are derived from that herd.