How an Army of Goats Could Help Prevent California Wildfires (vice.com) 125
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: California has unleashed an army of goats to munch away at overgrown brush and grass throughout the state in hopes of reducing the risk of wildfires this summer. State agencies have deployed the animals to roam, eat, and wipe out highly flammable vegetation. Recently, in an area near Lake Oroville in Northern California, between 350 and 400 goats cleared nearly five acres of land. And on Sunday, 1,500 goats are scheduled to begin clearing 34 more acres in the area -- by eating everything from invasive species to poison oak to thistle. The animals have also been contracted out to different cities around the state concerned about wildfires, including Anaheim, Oakland, and Los Angeles.
The initiative is part of the state's "Fuel Load Management Plan," started in 2012, which is aimed at reducing large patches of overgrowth throughout the state -- a major source of fuel to wildfire spread. Originally, the state used boots-on-the-ground crews of people armed with chainsaws and wood chippers to clear brush. But California has decided that in some areas, it's goats, not humans, that can help the most. "They eat everything," Kryssy Mache, an environmental scientist at the California Department of Water Resources, told VICE News. And they can also reach up to five feet in the air to nibble tree branches. "It's just another cool concept that we're using. It's not just humans going out and making the difference -- we can also use goats." But the goats are usually just Phase One. In the fall, human crews will come in and trim up area that goats cleared to ensure it remains less vulnerable to fire, according to the DWR.
The initiative is part of the state's "Fuel Load Management Plan," started in 2012, which is aimed at reducing large patches of overgrowth throughout the state -- a major source of fuel to wildfire spread. Originally, the state used boots-on-the-ground crews of people armed with chainsaws and wood chippers to clear brush. But California has decided that in some areas, it's goats, not humans, that can help the most. "They eat everything," Kryssy Mache, an environmental scientist at the California Department of Water Resources, told VICE News. And they can also reach up to five feet in the air to nibble tree branches. "It's just another cool concept that we're using. It's not just humans going out and making the difference -- we can also use goats." But the goats are usually just Phase One. In the fall, human crews will come in and trim up area that goats cleared to ensure it remains less vulnerable to fire, according to the DWR.
Goats are great, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Goats are a great way to clear because they will clear things like poison oak, which is especially nasty when burned, and they turn it into... goat, the world's most popular meat, specifically because they're hardy and can eat almost anything.
However, you would need an absolute arseload of goats to make any significant dent in California's fuel load.
The only realistic way to solve it is to stop building flammable homes, and start setting more fires like the natives used to do. They maintained this land for over 10,000 years, they might know what they were doing.
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They maintained this land for over 10,000 years, they might know what they were doing.
But were there 330 million of them? Things might be a little bit different now...
Re:Goats are great, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
At various times and places they *did* overpopulate the area. This generally resulted in a collapse of the cities in that area. You can blame this on weather cycles, with several bad decades in succession, but that was only important because the area was populated beyond it's carrying capacity in bad times.
FWIW, we've overpopulated the carrying capacity of the area. Currently of just about every area on earth. Carrying capacity isn't fixed, as it depends on things like technologies used for food storage and irrigation, but we seem to be well beyond the permanent carrying capacity at current levels of technologies (including social engineering).
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Carrying capacity isn't fixed, as it depends on things like technologies used for food storage and irrigation, but we seem to be well beyond the permanent carrying capacity at current levels of technologies (including social engineering).
We're way, way below the potential carrying capacity, but not with the greed-based economic systems we're using now.
Re:Goats are great, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Goats are great, but... (Score:2)
horses to ride (they were brought by the Spanish)
More or less correct. There were horses on the American continent. But the h. sapiens that came across from Asia ate them all. It wasn't until the natives actually saw the Spanish riding them that they got the idea.
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No. The state of NorAm native culture as found by the English and Dutch was that of the 5th or 6th generation of descendants of survivors of a bioapocalypse that destroyed between 70 and 90 percent of their population. This is because they had no immunity to the smallpox introduced to the tribes further south by contact with the Spanish and it spread thoughout the North American populations and killed off most of them.
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Wandering/ nomadic described the life of some of the Plains Indians, and maybe in the far North (I'm not sure). But it did not describe the pre-Colombian way of life of most of the tribes, who had stationary villages, and in some cases even cities.
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Sorry, I meant specifically out here in California, but I didn't specify. That's my fault.
Re:Goats are great, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
You want some reality, look what the Iroquois Nations did to the Hurons ... There was even some ritualistic canabalism.
The Iroquois used canabalism as policy, using terrorism to deter attacks on them: If your tribe attacked theirs, they would eat some of the attackers.
The policy is still remembered: My wife is of Iroquois descent, and some of my friends are descended from other tribes that had had contact with them. With two of those friends, when I first introduced my wife, they initially backed off and asked if she intended to eat them. She said she would not. After that they got on just fine. (The Iroquois were also famous for keeping their promises.)
Interestingly, the Iroquois Confederacy and its organization was a substantial factor in the Founders design of the U.S. government. Prior to contact with the Americas, the Greek and Roman republics were well known in Europe, but used as an example of why, allegedly, republics would fail and monarchies were necessary for successful governance. But in America the Iroquois Confederacy provided an example of a powerful and stable federation of republics that operated across greater language, cultural, and religious differences and communication delays than European kingdoms and empires.
One quote that has come down to us is from Benjamin Franklin, who in 1751 wrote to his printer colleague James Parker that âoeIt would be a strange thing if Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.â If you look at the organizations of the US government and the Six Nations you can see how much of the Iroquois Confederacy's design was rebranded with more European naming and built into the design.
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Interestingly, the Iroquois Confederacy and its organization was a substantial factor in the Founders design of the U.S. government.
That certainly seems to be a popular speculation, athough to my understanding the "substantial" part is being hotly debated with no definitive answer in sight. So you seem to be selling that spexulation as a fact.
Re: Goats are great, but... (Score:1)
However, they were here for ten thousand years of relative peace
Is that like the kind in Arkansas?
What you typed might be true and likely isn't but we'll never know for sure - which you'd know if you had the faintest idea how "science" works.
Re:Goats are great, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Relative peace? Bullshit. They were a bunch of tribes that fought each other over resources and land, same as today. That was apparent even when we got here in the 1600s. No different in what we now call Latin American.
Heck, had the native tribes actually been on the same page, Columbus would of never secured any kind of a foothold nor would anyone else coming. Instead, some native groups worked with Columbus to gang up on their enemies, not realizing what Columbus would ultimately usher in.
But yeah, mostly peaceful. Sure.
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Relative peace? Bullshit. They were a bunch of tribes that fought each other over resources and land, same as today. That was apparent even when we got here in the 1600s. No different in what we now call Latin American.
Correct. Tribes. People living next to each other. Last I checked, the Navajo and Susquehannock never fought each other.
Heck, had the native tribes actually been on the same page, Columbus would of never secured any kind of a foothold nor would anyone else coming. Instead, some native groups worked with Columbus to gang up on their enemies, not realizing what Columbus would ultimately usher in.
But yeah, mostly peaceful. Sure.
Columbus never landed on what is now the United States. He never knew this country existed. As for the native tribes, the ones he did come in contact with, they apparently were fairly civilized because they didn't attack these new people and treated them as guests.
Whereas Columbus bragged about needing only fifty men to enslave them all (good Christian values and all). Further, the Span
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"those tribes were mostly peaceful (South America included despite their history)" History? What history? None of the native languages was written, except for some Mayan languages and Aztec (Nahuatl) of Central America, and what records remain from the Mayans and the Aztecs do not indicate peaceful coexistence.
I'm not familiar with most parts of South America, but the earliest records we have of the Shuar (SE Ecuador) and their neighbors in what is now Ecuador and Peru do not sound peaceful. And the Inc
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The thing is until white people colonized and subjugated the people living in the Americas, there was no such thing as an "Indian". It is that experience of subjugation that the descendants of all those peoples have in common.
You wouldn't lump a Scotsman and a Pashtun tribesman together and generalize about them as "Eurasians". It makes just as little sense to lump together pre-Columbian Mohawks with Hopi.
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Peace for whom? You don't seriously entertain that "peaceful natives" crap, do you?
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Relative peace = for thousands of years, the American natives did not attack Europeans.
Peace = the American natives did not attack each others.
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"relative peace"
Buddy...put down the Zinn and read about real history. The native populations in North America were just as brutal as native populations in Europe or Asia. The myth of the Noble Savage is just a myth. They were just savage to each other.
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"they were here for ten thousand years of relative peace" There is no way to know that; they left no written records, except for the Mayans and Aztecs, who left records of conquest. One reason Cortes and his relatively small army was able to conquer the Aztecs was that the groups subject to the Aztecs hated them for their bloody ways. As for the other Indigenous groups of North America, I suspect "peacefulness" and respect for the environment are mostly ideas we attribute to them from a safe time distanc
Re:Goats are great, but... (Score:4, Funny)
Goats...see? https://modernfarmer.com/wp-co... [modernfarmer.com]
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Nope nope no nope nope nope nope.
You must be new here if you don't yet have an immunity to that photo.
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I'm not going anywhere near any image links on this story.
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The only realistic way to solve it is to stop building flammable homes, and start setting more fires like the natives used to do. They maintained this land for over 10,000 years, they might know what they were doing.
They might, but then things are different [youtu.be] than they were 10,000 years ago as well. Extraordinary circumstances demand extraordinary solutions.
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They might, but then things are different than they were 10,000 years ago as well. Extraordinary circumstances demand extraordinary solutions.
Okay, but goats aren't that solution, they don't scale well. What do you suggest is?
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Better than going around STARTING fires during a drought.
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Better than going around STARTING fires during a drought.
California is in a perpetual state of drought cycles, and is likely in for a long continuous period of drought. The best time to have gone back to setting these fires is decades ago. But waiting isn't going to make it better now, either. It's only going to result in larger unplanned fires, because we've been preventing too many of them for too long.
Re: Goats are great, but... (Score:1)
We will have to wait for the climate to warm up some more. The rainfall will increase and California will change to a humid subtropical climate. This cool, dry weather is a disastrous anomoly.
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Goats can easily scale. Just put few of them together and you magically get more goats. I'd love to see California overrun with goats. Much better than the wild horses which overrun Nevada and cause much damage.
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Goats do scale well. Mountain goats are the best alpinists, they can scale sheer cliffs
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Way to show your ass. The majority of time in California that the natives were settled there would have been what we consider conditions of extreme drought. The 18-1900s were extremely wet for California, geologically speaking.
https://www.mercurynews.com/20... [mercurynews.com]
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The fires in California, that are reported in the national media, start in their forests and move to the house.
Goats appear to be a slow return to Forest Management. California's State Government stopped actual Forest Management. This neglect of the Californian forests and the unintended consequence (though not unforeseen consequences) are the causes.
Houses and the communities in California are not the problem.
Quite
Re:Goats are great, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
California's State Government stopped actual Forest Management.
[...]
Houses and the communities in California are not the problem.
Quite blaming us!
Wrong. Both are the problem.
The natives didn't just set fires. They also didn't build structures they expected to persist for long periods in places which needed to burn. Not building flammable long-period homes in forests is part of forest management.
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California's State Government stopped actual Forest Management. [...] Houses and the communities in California are not the problem. Quite blaming us!
Wrong. Both are the problem.
The natives didn't just set fires. They also didn't build structures they expected to persist for long periods in places which needed to burn. Not building flammable long-period homes in forests is part of forest management.
Not building houses where it doesn't rain helps with "water issues" too. But this is California ... enjoy your "great weather".
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They also didn't build structures they expected to persist for long periods in places which needed to burn. Not building flammable long-period homes in forests is part of forest management.
Also, the natives didn't expect other people to rebuild those structures for them, whether through lawsuits or insurance.
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"Quit blaming us!"
Why, *you* (assuming you have built out in the sticks somewhere) are the problem.
Only asshats build 10s of kilometers from a firestation, and then complain that when a natural - fucking annual ! - event like a brush fire burns their house to the ground. Don't want your house to burn, build it out of adobe, with a tile roof, and in a clearing away from any undergrowth - you know, like people did 100 years ago.
I grew up in a California that was mostly that, and idiots didn't build in the
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California's State Government stopped actual Forest Management.
58% of forests in California are managed by the federal government. State-controlled forests amount to 3% [ca.gov].
Houses and the communities in California are not the problem.
Quite blaming us!
This is like saying bears are the problem when new communities are built in or near forests.
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Natives weren't that good. You will find many places they had to abandon because they "drained the well dry" and poisoned the land
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There are such places, but they are in the minority, and most of them were hard places to live in the first place.
Regardless, we're talking about California right now, and successful forest management. The entire western seaboard from around Point Sur well up into Canada used to be redwood forest, from the coast to the range.
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We are locusts.. in fact, if the goats don't work out..
Proper resource management will require a whole new thought process, away from maximum profit for one thing. Nobody wants to do a thing because, capital expenditures.. I just read where California has a 75 billion dollar surplus (or is it 38 bil [ca.gov]?), and instead of repairing infrastructure and practicing proper forest/water management, despite the drought and the fires, they want to give everybody a tax refund. It's pretty easy to see why they have a prob
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Data Point: Average rent was down 30% from the p
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However, you would need an absolute arseload of goats to make any significant dent in California's fuel load.
So what you’re saying is the goats really curry flavor with the environment, making billions of true American gyros in the process?
Sold!
Please, sir, may I have another?
A metric arseload of goats. (Score:2)
However, you would need an absolute arseload of goats to make any significant dent in California's fuel load.
No kidding (so to speak).
They're talking 70 to 80 goats per acre for one project, 44 for another. The projects aren't just a one-day operation but last for a while. (I recall commuting by one project near Milipitas where they were using what I'd guesstimate at about 40 goats to clear a mile or so of the grass on one side of the freeway. They did a great job but it took a couple weeks.) So call it
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Given how delicious goat meat is, and how many US citizens own guns, is that really a problem? I mean, if you declared "open season around the year" on goats, how long would it take to decimate their population again?
Hasn't worked for wild boar in CA, which have gone from a limit of one a year to one a day to as many as you want, just since I moved here. Also this is California, where much of the area is off-limits to hunting and the animal leftists are trying to make shooting anything illegal.
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I don't know how true it is (and I'm too lazy to spend what remains of my Sunday afternoon tracking the truth down), but I have heard that the deer problem out east was not a problem until the movie Bambie made it uncool to be a deer hunter. Now they seem to be everywhere, and cars do little to cull them.
Re: A metric arseload of goats. (Score:2)
As someone who once worked in forest management, I can tell you a big part is the problem IS the hunters.
They typically don't want to go more then a mile off road, and they EXPECT many deer to come to them and to never go home empty handed.
They were always describing the PA deer population as "dangerously depleted" (LOL) and lobbying for MOAR DEERS. Every forest understory in that state has a nice clean vegetation line at 3' as it is. Yeesh.
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Millions of goats means millions of baby goats which are one of the most adorably cute animals on the planet. ... we can have furry clubs for people wearing baby goat costumes.
I'm looking forward to the flood of baby goat antics on youtube.
IDEA! Californai could monetize those baby goat videos to pay for the project. And spin-off merchandise and animated cartoons.
And and
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Baby goats are great. I can joke I have kids! ;)
Re: Goats are great, but... (Score:4, Funny)
Don't you mean goatal warming?
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Don't worry. Top scientists are hard at work towards gene splicing human DNA into a new breed of goats [christianity.com]. This will minimize the amount of methane they produce and make them easier to herd around.
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Less methane than cows.
Does McDonalds even sell goatburgers?
California could become the world's leading exporter of goat cheeses.
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I'm all for any solution that involves goats. My question is what are the chances of the goats doing more harm than good. Any chance of them becoming a invasive species that we have to hunt from helicopters?
California happy cows (Score:1)
Look... It's Goats...see? (Score:3, Funny)
Goats...see?
https://modernfarmer.com/wp-co... [modernfarmer.com]
Just goats...see? Eating grass?
Re: Look... It's Goats...see? (Score:3)
Goats don't eat everything ... (Score:2)
... but they will clear a forest of green undergrowth and generally most leafy things, but not grass unless they are trained to or have nothing else to eat. They are browsers not grazers.
Although they will eat bark and some woody twigs and branches, they won't clear an area of dead scrub. You need people (preferably forest raking Finns) or a fire.
Re: Goats don't eat everything ... (Score:2)
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Yep, and you can mix in some llamas to kick the shit out of predators, so you don't even need dogs, nor constant human supervision.
The problem with goats is that if you let them get out of hand they eat everything. But these days we can just put a tracker on every goat.
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Or a donkey.
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One thing they do eat, however, is young trees. Range a bunch of goats through a forest for awhile and after awhile you don't have a forest. This is supposed to be what happened to the Biblical "Cedars of Lebanon".
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Yes, exactly. Any young trees or saplings. Plus they like pine and spruce bark and shoots, especially the young green tips in the spring.
They won't eat up the dead bushes unless they are starving.
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Actually, you don't want a lot of new tree saplings. You want a nice mature forest with widely separated mature trees and as little undergrowth as possible. The problem with most California forests is that they are too thick and dense with too many trees crowded together. Some efforts have been made to remediate this by going through and cutting down thick stands of trees and undergrowth leaving larger well spaced trees but this is very expensive to apply on a large scale.
Cows are good for some of this. (Score:2)
[goats] will clear a forest of green undergrowth and generally most leafy things, but not grass unless they are trained to or have nothing else to eat. They are browsers not grazers.
For areas where it's mostly grass and weeds, cattle are good. (PG&E seems to be using them to keep the tall grass and weeds down at the substation near the west end of Auto Mall Parkway in Fremont CA, for instance.) Cleared fields where grass and weeds are coming in are one candidate area. Low-water rangeland is another.
W
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Horses like thistle as well but usually only late in the season. Field full of nice pasture grasses with a couple of thistle patches and the herd is all in the middle of the thistles and munching away.
I do believe that the dire complaints about domestic stock farts are, um, over blown.
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I do believe that the dire complaints about domestic stock farts are, um, over blown.
Hear hear!
I've never figured out why those worried about cow farts think that the other critters that eat the plants fart any less - especially since many of them have substantially less efficient digestive tracts.
For instance: It may take a lot of rabbits to fart as much as one cow (or let the pellets outgas between the first and second pass through the rabbit). But it also takes a lot of rabbits to eat as much as a cow.
Start more fires (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, heard it right.
Before "the white man cometh", the natives used to start small controlled fires to get rid of the excess fuel in the Yosemite area:
https://atmos.earth/yosemite-i... [atmos.earth]
With all their wisdom, and "trying to preserve the nature, and reduce greenhouse gases", we have banned the practice. In fact it is said that even collecting dead bushes for camp fires is a punishable offense. You have to bring your tinder with you.
But, forest fires are a required part of the ecosystem. In fact we write articles about how "redwood seeds need fire to grow":
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/natur... [pbs.org]
Even then, we go and stop every fire that will get rid off the excess dead wood. And all of a sudden all those combined fuel start ablaze and even the entire state coming together cannot stop it.
Do not fight the nature. You can never win.
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I don't know, I mean, as long as it's not in my backyard, *chuckles* those firestorm tornadoes look pretty bad ass. The fact that they really occur in nature and not just when it fits the movie plot is just astonishing.
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Yeah, but people live there now. If you start more fires you'll burn down their houses.
There are slightly more houses in CA now than there were 500 years ago.
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No worries. We'll just unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the goats. And we've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
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...and when winter comes, the gorillas will simply freeze to death.
(I came here looking for this and was not disappointed. And yes it will be a bit hard for gorillas to freeze in California, so shut up.)
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You misinterpreted a bunch of things. (Score:3)
1) No, this is a rather well respected, common science based approach.
2) The goats are NOT wild. They are a herd that is rounded up and taken to different places. They are eventually killed and eaten. We can do that because they are not let loose. So they do not eat random man made things. Also, that is mostly a myth, they far prefer plants unless they are starved. They are not stupid.
3) The main problem there was AUSTRALIA, not the rabbits. Also we are not freeing the goats, we are rounding them u
"Men who..." (Score:2)
Goats eating undergrowth. (Score:3)
To those worried about them becoming invasive: They're not just "set free". They're tethered to an old tire and moved daily.
But with supervision (Score:2)
You have to take the goats away before they also eat the trees.
This is the wrong solution (Score:2)
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-wait I've seen this movie!
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fun little creatures (Score:2)
Years ago, when living on a farm, we had goats.
Fun little creatures which will eat anything,
yes anything,
but mostly what they would prefer to eat.
They escaped from their enclosure,
up the paddock,
down the other side of the paddock,
across the road,
into the dairy farm,
into the nice lush pasture,
through the fence,
into the neighbours prize rose garden.
Weren't we the favourite neighbours.
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We visited a rescue farm yesterday, and they had half a dozen goats. They had to wire the door knobs on their sheds so the goats couldn't open them.
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Problem is the extent of the fires the natives set is incompatible with our throwaway, nature can suckit mode of operation. The natives of California often built short-lived structures which they could set on fire without remorse, and they commonly moved to different parts of the regions they lived in during different seasons. So if you lived within walking distance of the coast you'd set the fires as you headed out. We want to live in the middle of the forests in houses we expect to persist for many years,
Re: Bring back controlled burns (Score:2)
In particular, we ought to outlaw flammable roofs. Metal roofs have very similar TCO.
No shake roofs would go a long way to preventing house fires. But you are going up against that hippie rustic aesthetic. Which is what drove a lot of people to live in the woods in the first place. I'm afraid it's an insurmountable problem. California will just have to burn.
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Some places have tornadoes. Others have hurricane. Many have snowstorms. A few have volcanoes while many have earthquakes.
In California, we got our fires and the occasional earthquake. You pick your poison. I personally wouldn't want to live where you get snowstorms. That just seems pretty terrible to me.
Also, tornadoes seem horrible also and they seem to hit every year to the same states. Volcanoes seem great until they aren't.
Earthquakes are almost entirely a joke unless you get hit really hard or have sh
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In California, we got our fires and the occasional earthquake. You pick your poison. I personally wouldn't want to live where you get snowstorms. That just seems pretty terrible to me.
Terrible? Are you kidding? We love our snowstorms out here as long as there isn't an ice storm preceding it. Kids get out of school. Everybody builds snowmen and goes sledding. The lucky few fire up their snow machines. When I was a teen, my buddies and I would throw a shovel in the trunk and head out to see the winter wonderland. We look forward to them when it hasn't happened for a while.
I can't imagine anyone in California standing around with marshmallows on a stick hoping for a decent wildfir
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Yeah, fucking GP likes surprise disasters you can't do anything about, it seems.
No warning on earthquakes. Fires can spring up quick and travel fast.
Snowstorms?
We know about that shit 2 weeks out. We know where and when a week out. Two days before and as the storm track and atmospheric conditions get closer we can start to predict snow amounts pretty accurately in most cases.
If you can't stock up on food, get the blankets out, hit the physical therapist to get your back in shape, and dust off the shovels an
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Skiing. You forgot skiing. Every time it snows a lot here (near DC), I get to get out my XC skis. Not often enough, though.
Think snow.
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Yes. (Score:2)
I like the idea. However, we need to be sure to actually control it by splitting forests into sectors. I think in about 15 years we could restore the forest (so that it's not a tinderbox) with scheduled burns which would allow for the wildlife to vacate from designated burn sectors and still have somewhere to go. If we were really smart then we would sell tickets so that pyromaniacs could get their fix which could help fund the whole thing.
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I'm not doubting the efficacy and importance of controlled burns, but no one knows what the indigenous tribes of California did, and certainly not what they did for thousands of years--because none of those tribes had a written language.
Derpity derp (Score:2)
Contracts are sacrosanct - unless they benefit workers. Then they can be tossed aside like toilet paper.