Grazing Goats: Friends or Foes?

A small herd of seven goats grazed contentedly last week on a hillside behind Fire Station 23 in Los Liones Gateway Park. They were in between jobs, according to their owner, Palisadian Linda Schilcher, who’s using them as a brush-clearing business serving hillside property owners in Pacific Palisades, Brentwood and Malibu. Schilcher said she fenced in the animals on a tiny plot of land because she was desperate for a place to put them. There they feasted on the surrounding vegetation for three days before park volunteers discovered last Thursday that the goats had stripped three oak trees. “The poor oak trees have been completely denuded,” said Palisadian Maria Bane, who was weeding and watering with fellow volunteers Norma Spak and Carol Leacock when she met Schilcher, who told her the goats were nearby. “I said to myself, ‘I hope she put them in an area that’s only grass. Once we got there, we screamed. [The area where the goats were located] enclosed three oaks that we had planted and I, personally, had watered for six years.” Bane said that they contacted the State Park officials immediately. Later that day, Schilcher was issued a citation for illegal grazing on public land and ordered to remove the goats, which she did with the help of Palisadian Monica Gilsanz, an 11-year-old helper. “I didn’t know that the volunteers were beautifying that area; I thought it was a marginal area,” said Schilcher, a Pennsylvania native who lives in Marquez Knolls. She was featured in the Los Angeles Times last August when some of her neighbors complained that the goats, who were sleeping in a trailer in front of her house, were becoming a permanent fixture in the neighborhood. Schilcher argued that the trailer was temporary until she could find suitable open space for the animals. “Generally, they move from contract to contract,” Schilcher told the Palisadian-Post. She said that her herd, now a business called Great Grazing Goats, has had steady contracts since April, clearing brush on hillsides along Earlham, Friends, Lombard and in Mandeville Canyon. So when Schilcher once again found herself in a bind with no open space on which to park them, she said she went to Will Rogers State Historic Park and asked if she could have her goats clear some park land in exchange for a temporary plot. The answer was no. Schilcher said she was told that the park “had a mechanical contract for the areas that needed to be cleared” and that “they knew which plants were under protection.” She added, “I still didn’t admit to [the supervising ranger] that I had put the goats on state parkland already.” Schilcher knows she was in the wrong at Los Liones and understands why she was cited. “It’s an infraction, not a misdemeanor,” she said of the citation. “I suspect it will be quite a serious amount of money.” According to Bane, Schilcher told her that she had permission from the fire department to have her goats there. “I said, ‘The fire department doesn’t own any property there, it’s parkland.'” A spokesman at Fire Station 23 confirmed that they have no authority over that land. Ironically, the day Schilcher moved her goats from Los Liones, the herbivores landed another contract. Currently, they are grazing on private land in Mandeville Canyon. “I’ll bring them out for the Fourth of July parade,” said Schilcher, noting that they will ride in her brush-covered trailer so that they’ll have plenty to eat while on the route. She also plans to double her herd this week by buying eight to 10 more goats from the Pierce College farm. “I’d like to save as many as I can [from slaughter],” she said. Most of her current weed-eaters, which she either adopted from the East Valley Animal Shelter or bought from the Chino Livestock Market, are does, with the exception of two wethers (neutered males). Breeding bucks omit a powerful smell. Schilcher is pursuing a Potrero Canyon contract, in which she envisions “three visits of four weeks each by about 20 goats’in February, June, and September’to clear dangerous brush in the first year.” The goats would rest and sleep overnight onsite. “The value of goat grazing is that they don’t uproot or kill trees unless you leave them in one area too long,” argued Schilcher, who trained with a goat-milk farmer in Pennsylvania before coming to California. She added that goats are quiet and leave no gasoline or oil spills, as compared to motorized mechanical methods. “We thought the goats were great,” said Palisades resident Deborah Phillips, who hired Schilcher’s goats to clear 200-300 ft. of her Potrero Canyon property, just off Friends St., in late April. “They do a really good job and they fertilize the land.” Schilcher currently charges five cents per sq. ft. (Her telephone is 573-0124). Phillips’s husband, Dr. Jerry Bloore, had heard about Great Grazing Goats from one of his dental patients, and needed to clear “land that we don’t use but that the fire department expects us to keep clear for fire hazards,” according to Phillips. So, they decided to use this form of brush clearance because “it seemed much more ecological” than the mechanical method. Phillips added that Schilcher was “nice, sweet and conscientious,” and when the goats got out a couple of times, she responded immediately and secured the fencing. Schilcher provides homeowners with a local emergency number to call, plus she only works in the local area so that she can respond to such problems. “We’ve just got to be sure that the fences are secure; that’s the real art of it and work for me,” said Schilcher, whose goats were subsequently hired to clear several other plots of private land in the Friends St. neighborhood. However, the volunteers of Los Liones would argue that goats also pose a danger to desirable vegetation. Said Maria Bane: “The grass [in Los Liones] was hardly touched. [The goats] ate the oak trees and willows.” She will continue watering the oaks in hopes of reviving them.