Laguna Beach Puts Goats Out to Pasture to Prevent Grass Fires

The fire season is looming, and this 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 way across the hills, eating everything in its path: Grass, twigs, roots, branches, cans and fence.

The boss sighs.

“They never stop eating,” says Angel Irugoyen, 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.”

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

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

Irugoyen, 62, lives alone in a trailer with views of the Pacific. His goats roam the hills, bells jangling at their necks, hemmed in by a portable, electrified fence. 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 Irugoyen, 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 is 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, as he stood on a ridge overlooking a majestic sweep of canyon, ocean and hill.

Phillips petted a goat as he spoke. The goat, wearing an ear tag with the number 87, returned his caress by chewing on the antenna of his walkie-talkie.

“So that’s why you’re so friendly,” Phillips told No. 87.

Irugoyen and his goats arrived last year. The city used goats on a temporary basis before, but they decided to base them permanently after the 1993 firestorm. That blaze 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 Irugoyen and his herd. Seven days a week, Irugoyen and two helpers 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,” Irugoyen said.

From dawn to dusk, the goats do little more than chew. 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 not only are cleaner and quieter than machines, but they can reach places that are virtually inaccessible to man.

So popular are the goats that neighbors have called the Laguna Beach Fire Department to request the goats for their neighborhoods. The city’s reply: The goats can only eat so fast.

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

Irugoyen is assisted by two Peruvian helpers and two Australian sheep dogs.

Locally, the goats’ fire prevention prowess has yet to be tested.

In Northern California, they have reduced potential firestorms 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.”

Irugoyen says he is confident his team will thwart future fires. And the team, it seems, shares that confidence in its leader.

The goats know Irugoyen’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 “BAAAAHH.”

Irugoyen just laughs.