Horse Owner Bucks at Oak Plan

Call it the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Or, in this case, the OAK Corral.

That describes the showdown looming between a Topanga Canyon horse owner and the state Coastal Commission in a new twist to the Old West fight over open grazing land versus fences.

In an unprecedented move, officials have ordered rancher Patricia Moore to encircle all oak trees on her sprawling hillside pastureland with fences constructed five feet outside the trees’ furthermost branches.

The fences, say state ecologists, will prevent horses from trampling the oaks’ roots and from eating their bark.

But Moore finds the idea offensive. Besides being unnecessary, she says, the tree fences would be unsightly and would deprive her horses of shade--not to mention about 25% of their grazing area.

She is backed by other horse owners in the Santa Monica Mountains who worry that such fences on her property could lead to fences on others and virtually wipe out small horse corrals in shady canyon areas.

There are about 20 oaks scattered around horse corrals at Moore’s Eden Ranch--an eight-acre spread that extends along a ridge near the center of Topanga. Moore keeps five horses there, including a 44-year-old paint named Komaicha that has lived on the ranch all of its life.

Moore says the fencing dispute arose by accident when she set out last year to record a lot-line adjustment between her property and a neighbor’s.

Los Angeles County officials signed off on the adjustment, but Coastal Commission staffers--who have jurisdiction over development within five miles of the ocean--would not. Moore said officials told her a pair of oak trees stood in the way of an easement required for the lot-line change.

Faced with that rejection, Moore dropped the adjustment request. Instead, she says, she simply sold the land to her neighbor with the provision that she could lease back part of it for 99 years so she could continue to let her horses graze there.

But when Coastal Commission planners went to the ranch to check on the lot line, they noticed that Moore lacked a commission permit for a recently installed corral fence. They said she could apply for a permit retroactively.

But when Moore filed that application officials advised her in writing that, as a condition for the permit, horses would have to be kept “five feet or more from the drip lines of all oak trees.”

Officials also demanded that she install special vegetation or gravel “filter strips” outside corral areas for “animal waste containment.”

The oak tree drip-line requirement particularly irked Moore. She said livestock has been grazing beneath Eden Ranch’s oaks for more than a century.

The ranch got its start in 1886 as the Trujillo Homestead--named for a colorful family related to the famous 19th century bandit Joaquin Murrieta. Between 1932 and 1948, the ranch was the site of the Barton School, a combination farm and campus whose students included children of Hollywood celebrities.

During that time, there were as many as 44 dairy cows and 500 chickens, along with draft horses and ponies, at the Topanga site, Moore said.

“A man from Maryland who stopped by here said he was a 1936 graduate of Barton School and there were 30 goats kept under this tree,” Moore said, pointing to an oak she estimated to be about 400 years old. “This tree is healthy. Animals haven’t hurt it.”

Coastal Commission administrators fear that horses jeopardize fragile oaks, however. They say experts warn that oaks’ roots are surprisingly close to the surface, raising fears that the horses’ weight would squash them.

They point to a warning from Doug McCreary, a program manager with the University of California’s Integrated Hardwood Range Management Program, that said “horses are the worst in causing compaction,” particularly during rainy periods.

McCreary, of Browns Valley in Northern California, said he has also seen instances in which horses “totally girdle oak trees by chewing away the bark.” The animals in these cases have not been underfed, McCreary said, “just apparently bored.”

Coastal panel staff planner Lillian Ford, who issued the oak-fencing recommendation for Moore’s ranch, said the proposal is a first.

“We want horses to be removed from oak tree areas,” she said.

That worries horse enthusiasts. They say a widespread Coastal Commission crackdown could eliminate backyard horse corrals in shady coastal canyons.

“It’s so outrageous. Your horse can’t stand under your oak tree? That’s what horses do, stand in shade,” said Karen Moran, a Topanga native whose family owns a 30-year-old donkey.

“There won’t be room for horses, and soon you’ll have a city in Topanga,” she said. “We’re not a city. We’re a mountain community.”

Veteran Topanga real estate agent Eric Nelson said numerous canyon riding rings and corrals are shaded by overhanging oaks. A drip-line fencing requirement could “radically cut down the amount of space” that mountain-area horses now have, he said.

As for Moore, the fence-around-your-oaks edict has prompted her to withdraw her application for a retroactive permit for her corral fence. With no application, there’s no requirement that her oak trees be enclosed, she said.

But Moore said she does not intend to tear down the unauthorized corral.

If the state cites her for not having a corral-fence permit, she said, she will fight that in court. Moore said she might have a better chance of winning that kind of case than a legal challenge of the oak-fencing requirement.

No jury, she predicts, will fault a person for using a fence to keep horses from wandering onto the road and into traffic.