A few years back the Stanislaus National Forest recently rediscovered another weapon to reduce wildland fire danger: goats. "They're like vacuum cleaners with tails," Forest Service spokesman Pat Kaunert had said. Brush and small trees in the Tuolumne River drainage near the community of Confidence burned years ago and has since been overrun by brush that threatens to burn again. Hundreds of nearby homes also made for a nightmare situation . Wildfires love steep terrain and so do goats. So the idea was to let them munch their way through hundreds of acres to help build fire breaks. But it would take some work. The goats had to be herded, watered, fenced as they went and protected from predators. Some goat ranchers got $230 an acre for the use of their goats and the Stanislaus got useable fire breaks and clearance of flashy ladder fuels. The area became safe from fire, unfortunately....other areas were not.
The Stanislaus National Forest was keen to the idea of using goats as fire prevention tools in 2002, the same time that the Angeles National Forest deemed that the goats were too dangerous to the ecosystem and to the population of bighorn sheep that had already faded from our landscape. Do goats help fire prevention efforts or not? To answer that question, we have to go back in time ninety years.
In 1917, the Angeles Forest first used goats for the purpose of fire control. Proven to be a sound project at first, the forest's balance was maintained by taking away fire dangerous flashy ground fuels and insuring a stable watershed at the same time. (goats left root systems intact) But there were other reasons for the goats, namely the byproducts of meat, goat's milk and manure. All which would bring extra money into the pockets of the Forest Service. So, in a way the project worked...but in a way it also became a disaster.
Interesting enough, goat manure might have been the turning point that stopped the project of the goat firefighting tool. The round substance was hard to gather, even if you used a shovel. During rainy seasons, the substance got runny and slick, causing many injuries to the employees who worked the goats to graze them and gather the byproducts of milk and manure. When the round substance was dry it was a different story. A ranger would write, "Due to the rapid desiccation of the small, round pellets and their lack of cohesion when dry, when combined with the effect of the hill-creep, they were easily dislodged and under the pull of gravity were in constant movement toward the valley floor. Due to their shape and the steepness of the topography, some of the pellets attained considerable velocity in their movements." Apparently, forest workers began slip slidding down the mountain because of the manure.
Because the firebreaks were located in areas of steep and rugged topography, and accessible only by foot travel, means of harvesting the milk and manure proved to be a difficult task as well.
At first, the goats were milked and the milk transported to the nearest road by mule pack train. Unfortunately, the milk, on arrival to a waiting pack train, had attained "undesirable characteristics" during the process. The churn-like action of pack animals, plus the high temperatures sustained by the containers in transit, introduced the process of bacterial action, which caused the milk to become curdy and collect an odor that wasn't at all desirable to man nor beast. Not to mention cut down the possibility of any profit motive.
The Forest Service in the San Gabriel Wilderness then came up with an ideal used by Los Angeles area diaries...they initiated handling the milk by pipelines. The reports read, "Due to the pipes heating up during the heat of the day, it was manifestly impossible to get the teats of the goats into the pipes because of the sensitivity of this particular organ to outside stimuli". In other words, the hot pipes didn't exactly entice the goats to go along with the program. Soon, the relationship between goat and forest worker became strenuous, which would explain the sudden increase of supply in goat meat.
Anselmo Lewis, the Baldy Ranger on the Angeles Forest wrote of the incident fifty years ago, "The animals were possessed with a degree of perversity which can only be equaled by a frustrated Russian delegate to the U. N. Herding was most difficult, with the animals constantly scattering through the brush adjacent to the firebreaks. One herder reported that it would be simpler to herd a swarm of bees across the desert than to keep the goats on the firebreaks."
Hot pipes and aggravating manure subsequently made the Forest Service reevaluate they association with smelly goats. No doubt that Ranger Lewis' impressive memo forbidding continual use of the creatures in the future worked. Even up to 2007.
Just another moment in local history, excerpt from T. Graham's History of Big Pines.
