Laguna Beach Stuck on Horns of Dilemma

They eat everything in their path, these goats employed by the city of Laguna Beach. And for them the path is always the same--a 200- to 300-foot-wide swath around town.

Dutifully they munch, day and night, directed by two Peruvian goatherds over hilltops, around homes, through canyons and along steep slopes. Oblivious to the importance of their work, or that its integrity is being debated, hundreds of bleating goats shave grass, shear weeds and crunch branches.

They are gorging the goats, officials say, to starve the flames.

When they are finished, the city’s perimeter looks precisely the way fire prevention officials want it: mowed to the nub like raw scratches on a pristine landscape.

It is that ring of cleared vegetation--done more cheaply by goat than it could be by by people--that will help defend Laguna Beach from the blazes that residents have come to fear since a 1993 firestorm consumed 14,000 acres and 440 homes.

The first in the state to use firefighting goats full time, Laguna is seeing its idea tried on other sunbaked hills, from Oakland to the coastal highlands of Malibu and the foothills of the Angeles National Forest. With at least 2,000 goats now working as brush-clearing crews across California, a recent run on the animals led Berkeley to briefly try sheep and cattle.

But environmentalists in Laguna Beach and elsewhere have warned that the indiscriminate eaters would devour precious native plants and threaten diversity. Now, about seven years after the goats were permanently put on Laguna’s 1,400 acres of hillsides, local environmentalists say the fragile “fuel modification zone” has become a weedy “goat arterial.”

“They swallow seeds from one canyon and deposit them in their droppings in the next one,” said Elisabeth Brown, a Laguna Beach biologist. “They’re eating stuff over here and [leaving] it over there. Everything’s getting moved around. . . . It’s not good. And it looks like hell to boot.”

Laguna Beach fire prevention officer Mike Phillips views the goats’ signature landscape differently.

“It’s stark, I’ll admit that,” he said. “But from a fire protection standpoint, it’s a beautiful sight.”

After the 1993 firestorm that whipped through Laguna, causing more than $500 million in property damage, jittery city officials moved to keep about 600 goats they had been using intermittently on the hillsides since 1991. The Angoran, Spanish and Boer goats eat around the clock, and clear more than 1,000 acres a year.

It made sense to use them full-time then, said City Manager Kenneth C. Frank, and at an annual price of $198,000, it makes sense now. Human crews would cost from $875,000 to $1.2 million

Besides, said Frank, who lost his home to the 1993 fire, the goats “make people feel safe. We’ve worked very hard to protect sensitive environmental areas from their grazing. If anybody is complaining, they just don’t understand the history or what we’ve done.”

So the goats are allowed to browse, in areas approved by state and federal wildlife experts. By now, their route is the designated fire perimeter, from Laguna Canyon Road past homes in the Top of the World neighborhood and on to Hobo Canyon at the edge of South Laguna. They work with impressive speed; if they can get their beards on it, and it lies within the portable electronic fences set up by city fire prevention officials, it will be gobbled up.

“They do not care what it is,” said Agotilio Moreno, a goatherd who cherishes his million-dollar ocean views. “They eat. It is their job, and they are so happy.”

Brown and other environmentalists are certainly not.

South Laguna, for example, is being exposed to a stew of weeds and grasses it has never seen before, said Allan Schoenherr, an ecology instructor at Fullerton College. The goats’ presence may also be influencing the movement of wildlife through the area, he said.

“Basically, we’re trading one kind of problem for another,” said Schoenherr, who lives in Laguna Beach. “We think we’re doing something for the greater good, but really, what we’re doing is changing things without knowing how it’s going to change things. We may never know what all of the long-term consequences are.”

Some Laguna program advocates, however, say sprouts from the seeds transplanted in goat droppings are devoured by the goats on the next pass through, usually within 10 months. In Los Angeles County, fire officials keep their 600 to 800 goats confined in an area for a day or so after they finish grazing to minimize unwanted transplanting.

“We’re trying to be sensitive to [environmentalists’] concerns about that,” said Assistant Los Angeles County Fire Chief Herb Spitzer. “But this is biological vegetation management. It’s natural. There’s going to be some movement, no matter what.”

Spitzer said his department began using goats a year ago in high-risk areas, including a 120-acre fuel break in the Santa Monica Mountains along the Ventura County line and 150 acres around the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest.

Like Laguna, Los Angeles County fire officials got money for the program from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Over the years, Spitzer said, they’ve tried everything--cattle, sheep, hand crews, machines, chemicals and controlled burns--to reduce brush. Goats, he said, “seem to be the way to go.”

Phillips said criticism of the goats is not widespread in Laguna. Instead, he says, residents corner him in the supermarket, asking when the goats will be in their neighborhood. Comforted by the sight of Laguna’s furry fire-fighters, they bring their children to watch the herd. Some have goat-watching parties on backyard decks.

Others want goats brought into areas Phillips is trying to protect, such as a four-block stretch behind Arch Beach Heights homes, where endangered coastal sage scrub and big-leafed crown beard flourish. Only when he refuses such requests, Phillips says, is he met with hostility.

“I usually get yelled at when someone thinks the goats aren’t eating fast enough, or when they want the goats in their neighborhood. . . , I just don’t sense a real swell of opposition.”

Indeed Brown and other critics are all but resigned to the goats’ presence. Nor are they sure how to change what has been done. Removing them now could pose worse problems, Brown says, after so many years of intensive grazing.

Another option some biologists want to try is costly and time-consuming--and not completely proven. It requires hand-clearing of brush, then compacting it into a mulch that is then spread like carpet between heartier, more fire-resistant shrubs. The idea is that the mulch and minimal ground disturbance combine to prevent weed growth for several years.

“When [clearing] is done by humans, there is more discretion on what is cut down,” said Eric Jessen, chief of Orange County Harbors, Beaches and Parks. “Goats will eat anything in their path, but human workers are given lessons from biologists.”

But even if they could afford such a “biomass” program, city officials say, it wouldn’t protect very steep slopes that are virtually inaccessible to man and machine. About 10 years ago, when hand crews trimmed some areas, it took helicopters to lift out the cuttings, they said.

“I couldn’t begin to guess how much it would cost to spread an organic carpet on the hills of Laguna Beach,” Phillips said. “Plus, we don’t even know how effective it would be.”

To be sure, no one knows how much fire protection the goats ultimately will offer, because their fire break has yet to be tested. In some Northern California areas, however, similar goat programs have reduced potential firestorms to “piddly campfires,” officials said.

“We have an area here called Panoramic Hill, between Berkeley and Oakland, and it’s a nasty, steep hill with one way in and one way out,” said David Orth, an assistant fire chief in Berkeley. “It burns almost every year. But the goats mean we deal with 1- or 2-foot flames instead of 20 or 30.”

High above the fuss in Laguna is a lonely goatherd who has steered his hungry charges around the city long enough to know the way by heart, in the dark.

Moreno, who grew up herding goats in Peru, has a calm, unalloyed understanding of his work: “special” plant areas marked by fences or flags are off-limits to his four-legged crew.

“If the people are worried . . . they should not be,” says Moreno, 36. “The goats, they are right here with me. No place else.”

He considers his flock. More than 100 kids have been born in the past year, and a few are playfully butting heads, a sight that has become a family attraction in Laguna. He waves his arm toward the herd, as if he can quiet critics with a simple declaration.

“They are just eating, see?” he says. “That’s all.”