GOATS AGAINST FIRE
Every summer, wildfires destroy huge areas of forest around the Mediterranean, and the dry hills of Andalusia in southern Spain have suffered as badly as anywhere. Yet in one national park there, something unusual has happened over the past decade: the number of serious fires has fallen sharply. Park officials give much of the credit not to new equipment or extra firefighters, but to a team of hungry animals that spend most of their day eating.(lines 1–5)
Shepherd Elena Ruiz has guided her herd across these hills for twenty years, and people who stop to watch her at work are often puzzled. "They picture a flock of white sheep, because that is what a shepherd always has in picture books," she says with a laugh. "What they find instead is a crowd of brown goats with long horns." Her choice is deliberate. In spring the slopes are covered with thorny* bushes, and sheep simply refuse to touch them, while goats eat them happily. So from March to May the goats work the hills alone. Only in June, once the grass on the lower slopes has dried out, does Ruiz add a flock of sheep.(lines 6–12)
As Ruiz explains, goats have a second advantage over sheep: they can feed much higher up. A goat will stand on its back legs to pull leaves off branches two meters above the ground, while sheep keep their heads down and eat only what grows close to it. Low branches that nobody eats turn into dry fuel, which can carry flames from the ground up into the treetops.(lines 13–16)
"So why not simply use more goats?" Ruiz asks. "Because a herd of goats is small – mine has about eighty animals – and it clears only a few hectares a week. In a park this size, that is not nearly enough. Sheep travel in flocks of several hundred, so they can graze* every open meadow from one end of the park to the other." With both animals at work, summers in the hills have changed. Fires still break out, but far less often, and most of them stay small and never spread beyond a single field – the kind that local crews can put out within an hour.(lines 17–22)
Life on steep, rocky ground is hard on the animals, so Ruiz follows advice from vets at a regional farming college. Every six weeks she trims her goats' hooves* so that they can climb safely without getting hurt, and she leaves blocks of salt on the hillsides to supply the minerals that the bushes lack. Shepherds across the region now do the same, and their goats are noticeably healthier and stronger as a result.(lines 23–27)
The greatest worry for any herd, Ruiz admits, is losing young animals in their first weeks. Newborn kids* are easily killed by the cold nights of early spring, which are common in the hills even after warm, sunny days. A few years ago the college suggested a solution: low stone shelters with straw floors, where mothers and their kids can spend the night out of the wind. Ruiz and several neighbors built shelters like these on their land, and since then far more kids have survived each spring. "Our herds are growing again," she says. "And bigger herds mean more hills cleared before the dry season – good for us, and good for every village near the forest."(lines 28–34)