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(51,080 posts) Wed Sep 7, 2022, 05:37 PM Sep 2022

Fighting Fire with Flerd

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Gina Mei
@ginamei
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This profile of a shepherdess fighting California's ever-expanding fire season with a flerd of goats and sheep is an absolute wonder. It's funny, and tender, and hopeful on a topic that is so rarely any of those things. Also, FIREFIGHTING GOATS AND SHEEP!

Shepherdess Cole Bush wearing a light wide brim hat, bandanna, green tank top, and jeans, looking over her flerd.
conversationalist.org
Fighting Fire with Flerd
Meet Cole Bush, the shepherdess battling fire season with goats and sheep.
10:40 AM · Sep 7, 2022

https://conversationalist.org/2022/08/31/fighting-fire-with-flerd-cole-bush-goats/

One morning last summer, Cole Bush was high up on a ridge in North Los Angeles County, shepherding her “flerd”—a mixed flock of sheep and herd of goat—from one paddock to another. Normally, this maneuver was routine; but something was wrong. When she turned around, in the distance far below, she spotted a hundred of her goats and sheep: They had slipped off into a high school parking lot and were eating the median. People were already gathering around them. Bush and her team ran down the steep hillside as quickly as they could and found a football coach surveying the scene. She began to explain what was going on: Her animals, now munching away on tufts of grass, weren’t just a prank gone awry. They were there to protect them from fire.

This answer likely surprised him, but Bush—who goes by BCB—explained that the animals were on the clock. Based out of Ojai Valley, in Ventura County, California, Bush’s business, Shepherdess Land and Livestock Co., is a for-hire grazing outfit that focuses on fire prevention and vegetation management. The work they do is tantamount to creating protective force fields; shepherding the flerd to eat brush, weeds, invasive plants—would-be fuel—so that fires won’t move as quickly or get as hot. The grazing is not to eradicate fires, but to ensure they’ll be smaller, more manageable, and to create defensible space.

Of course, the animals have no idea they’re rushing against time to prevent the destruction of property, livelihoods and a potential great extinction. They’re just animals doing animal things; curious, hungry, and content to roam. They have good days and bad depending on the elements; on a hot day they might move more slowly. If there are interesting landscaped yards—or football fields—nearby, they might wander over to get a taste.

Still, they’re highly effective. As they roam, their hooves aerate the soil, making it healthier. They digest plants and turn them into food for the soil when they shit. “Their bodies know so much,” says Bush. From the womb, their gut biomes are prepared as their mothers introduce them to the local weeds and brush. From birth, they begin learning what they need and how to exist with the land; and when they stray, their shepherdess guides them home.

*snip*