ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Smokey the Goat?

Laguna Beach’s use of goats this spring to clear a swath of chaparral may seem far-fetched. But not if, at some point during the coming long, dry summer, a fire’s advance is effectively stalled because of some smartly targeted goat grazing.

Having goats on the fire prevention team is a humorous notion, but clearing fire breaks is serious business. So in an unusual effort, the City Council recently agreed to a $125,000 pilot program that now has 500 goats munching along three breaks, with the goal of cutting back 152 acres of overgrown chaparral over the next three months. The goal is to protect fuel breaks that guard the northern half of the city, and to extend them around to the southern half.

While goats were used successfully by the state Department of Parks and Recreation to clear brush in the Santa Monica Mountains some years back, Laguna Beach is said to be the only city in Southern Calfornia that has tried using goats for fire control.

The difficulty getting inmate labor and the high cost of hiring private crews make goats an economical choice for a fiscally squeezed city. And unlike humans, goats aren’t susceptible to poison oak.

Even if labor crews were brought in, there is always the problem of disposing of cuttings, which would have to be brought by helicopter to a landfill, another costly and cumbersome venture. For obvious reasons, the disposal problem takes care of itself.

It may seem odd at first to propose dispatching a battalion of brush-eating goats. But this idea from off the beaten path really does make sense.