California Dispatches Goats to Eat Brush, Prevent Wildfires
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The article paints this as unusual but if the NPS was doing this in NYC that seems unlikely? It was over a decade ago when I was there and I think I was told it was somewhat standard.
> The concept’s not unique to Ventura County, which has been using goats to trim vegetation for about five years.
https://www.newsweek.com/2015/04/24/meet-goats-amazons-new-g...
EDIT: Found it, seems like these are the guys that provided the actual goats: http://www.rentaruminant.com/ they're all over the US.
Sheep will not go out of their way to try new foods but if they are pastured with goats they will observe and learn from the goats, and end up eating a fairly wide variety of plants. They'll never be quite as broad-minded as the goats, but they will eat a wide variety of grasses, shrubs, and leaves. They are not as flexible as the goats and can't reach as high into trees as goats can, nor can they climb hard to reach cliffs and terraces as well as goats can, which is probably why goats are preferred for this but application. But they will definitely eat low-hanging leaves and shrubby plants they can get to.
It's the same with worms. Breed & release into barren soil, and they'll just flee to greener pastures. But cultivate conditions they like, and they will show up all on their own.
Some of the larger parks use sheep to graze down large grassy open areas. The goats are more useful in hilly areas and less picky about what they will eat.
This sort of thing is a problem here in New Zealand. Fragile environments get hit hard by goats, but I’d imagine that wildfires aren’t exactly helpful either.
Without knowing what specific ecosystem you’re talking about, sometimes the seemingly destructive fire is beneficial[0] to an ecosystem.
[0] https://www.fire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/fact_sheets...
It's pretty common to see goats right before entering the Caldecott (heading east).
I wish they'd bring 'em back and take care of the Scotch broom.
They deploy them in parks to eat / manage invasive growth, or just "mow" overgrown areas for private folks who have a lot of land. They're really handy for steep hilly areas that need to be cleaned out.
Before that when I grew up in a rural area if you had a horse(s) you'd just tie them to the fence along the road and they'd trim the ditches quite nicely.
OK, so apologies as this is literally a second-hand shaggy-dog story, but here goes:
I coordinate the maintenance of a privately maintained road in the Sierra foothills. I was chatting with the equipment operator we use while waiting for the new tire to arrive to repair a flat on his grader. Anyway... his sister-in-law does goatherd contracts for CALTRANS to manage roadside vegetation. His wife's family is Basque heritage, so there is multiple generations of sheep and goat herding expertise there.
Usually, she deploys 2 or 3 big sheep dogs along with the goats to deter predation. One time on a contract along I-5 she wasn't able to bring the dogs for the first night, and lost two goats to mountain lions overnight.
The cats are out there... they hide well.
There's a good reason they're as widespread as humans. They're machines.
I was thinking a bit longer term. This effectively free new source of food is going to lead to fatter cats who have more kittens, who in turn survive better because there's more food.
EDIT (because I'm apparently "posting too fast"): Yes, dogs traditionally do this in Europe, the States, and other places. I just thought it was interesting that llamas can also do it, since they aren't carnivores. The details of why they do it are also interesting.
I always thought it was because the gold rush happened literally weeks after the state's incorporation, and fundamentally shaped it in many ways?
When humans interfere with this small-fire process, however, the fuel load increases until there's a massive correcting fire that takes everything standing including the canopy.
In Valley Grassland it was mostly bunch grasses like Purple Needle Grass.
Allan Schoenherr's A natural history of california is a great reference (see p.538-543, if you have the chance).
The Californian islands are another matter. The introduction of large herbivores usually cause all kinds of havoc on small islands, as the plants are usually not adapted to them. That said, the ecology of small islands tends to be very unstable generally.
A confusing use of the word on an international site.
https://phys.org/news/2018-10-goat-brigades-portugal-deadly-...
I learned about it from this Ted Talk. Not sure if it's legit but it seems to make intuitive sense to me https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI
Beavers were being air-dropped, and there are movies of it:
American culture at one point decided that machines were the only way to control the wilderness. Happily, we seem to be unlearning both the machines and the control lessons.
In areas where fires haven't historically been as bad, it hasn't been necessary. A decade-long drought and environmental changes make things done elsewhere (Bay Area, for example) appealing in a new region.
I saw (fenced-in) goats trimming grass in the Berkeley Hills as far back as 2000. I'm sure people were doing it long before then.
> why isn't this done more often
Possibly because it's hard to make sure than none of the goats escape, breed, and wreak havoc on the native species. Eradicating invasive species can be unbelievably expensive and brutal (e.g. helicopters and machine guns), even on small islands. Hopefully they've embedded GPS trackers in all of their goats, but I still suspect that they're taking chances.