Fire Insurance : Laguna Beach Counting on Goatherd’s Flock to Eat Brush Before Flames Do

Fire season is looming, and the city’s first line of defense is eating as fast as it can.

A herd of goats, led by a Basque goatherd, is chomping its away across the hills, digesting everything in its path: grass, twigs, roots, branches, cans, fence.

The boss sighs.

“They never stop eating,” said Angel Irigoyen, who brought his trade to America 40 years ago from a village in the Spanish Pyrenees. “Tortillas, cookies. They sleep 10 minutes and then they are hungry again.”

Irigoyen and his herd of 700 Angora and Spanish goats make up the soul of Laguna Beach’s novel attempt to contain its fires. The strategy: Let the goats eat the grass, or the flames will.

Nestled high in the hills above the city, Irigoyen and his flock form a pleasant anachronism, evoking the romance of a quieter age. Modernity intrudes only at the edges.

Irigoyen, 65, lives alone in a trailer with views of the Pacific. His goats roam the hills, bells jangling from their necks, hemmed in by a portable fence with an electric charge. Australian sheep dogs, responding to commands in Spanish or Basque, do the legwork.

“I used to get lonely, when I was young, but not any more,” said Irigoyen, his face a desert but for a pair of pale-blue eyes. “I sleep well at night, unless the coyotes come.”

The peace and pastoral pace are not lost on the public officials downhill.

“Sometimes, when I’m sitting in the office, dealing with paperwork and politics and all that, I wish I were up here,” said Laguna Beach Fire Prevention Officer Mike Phillips, standing on a ridge overlooking a majestic sweep of canyon, ocean and hill.

Phillips petted a goat as he spoke. The goat returned his caress by chewing on the antenna of Phillips’ walkie-talkie.

“So that’s why you’re so friendly,” Phillips said to the goat.

Irigoyen and his goats arrived last year. The city used goats for brief periods before, but they decided to base them permanently after the 1993 firestorm consumed 14,000 acres and 440 homes. With the aid of a $400,000 federal grant, the city kicked in $132,000 and awarded the job to EZ Bar ranch in Aliso Viejo.

Enter Irigoyen and his herd. Every day, Irigoyen and two Peruvian assistants lead the goats into the hills and canyons that envelop the city’s higher neighborhoods. The goats are deployed to strategic spots: They cut fire lanes across the tops of hills. They mow the grass that laps the houses that ring the canyons.

“If I can march them like Sherman to the sea, I’ll do it,” he said.

From dawn to dusk, the goats do little more than chew. In a week, a typical goat can eat as much as a 50-pound bale of hay.

From a distance, the areas where they have grazed resemble the yellow patches in a paint-by-numbers landscape. Up close, the grass looks like it has been shaved by a Weed Eater.

“They’re nicer than a bunch of machines,” said Matt Guley, who lives in the Top of the World neighborhood. “The people are glad they are here.”

The goats are not only cleaner and quieter than machines, but they can get to places that are virtually inaccessible to man.

So popular are the goats that neighbors have called the Fire Department to ask that the goats be sent to their neighborhoods. The city’s reply: The goats can only eat so fast.

For Irigoyen, the job is only a little different from the one he has been doing since he was boy growing up in the Spanish village of Elizondo. Since coming to the United States in 1954, Irigoyen has tended goats and sheep in Arizona and New Mexico, as well as California. His wife lives in Flagstaff.

The years have etched in Irigoyen the perfect picture of a goatherd. His face is as worn as an old baseball mitt. He wears jeans, boots, and a green cap that reads: “I am a Sheepherder.” He walks among his goats like a coach among members of his team.

“They are my pets,” he said, swatting one wayward youngster with a switch. “I’ve never lost one. Some people eat them; I don’t. When you cut their throats, they cry. I can’t do that.”

Irigoyen is assisted by two Australian sheep dogs, who, like their owner, are multilingual.

“Vente,” Irigoyen called to Lassie in Spanish, and she trotted over.

“Toriuneta,” he said to Manuel in Basque. And the dog trotted over, ready to serve. Irigoyen points, and the dog nudges a wayward goat back into the herd.

Lately, Irigoyen and his sheep have been working the ridge along Aliso Canyon. Two trailer homes and a portable toilet sit on an escarpment overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Just across the path sits a splendorous mansion.

Irigoyen maintains a small pen for the kids. A fence keeps the coyotes at bay: “I hear them every night. They come all the way up to the pen.”

The goats’ fire prevention prowess has yet to be put to a test locally, but herds have reduced potential firestorms in Northern California to mere nuisances.

“We have had several fires in areas where the goats have passed through,” said Gary Gates, the fire chief in Berkeley. “When they get done with a place, there is just a nub. There is no fuel for the fire to burn.”

Irigoyen said he is confident his team will thwart future fires. And the team, it seems, shares his confidence.

The goats know Irigoyen’s voice so well that when he calls to them with a whistle and rolled tongue, the goats call back--all 700 in unison--with their trademark “BAAAAH!”

Irigoyen just laughs.