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Five hundred goats saved the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and they charged a thousand dollars an acre, which is the best value the American taxpayer has had in a generation. Simi Valley, California. Every spring the library and the Ventura County Fire Department hire a herd to eat the hillside. In May 2019 the contract went to a firm called 805 Goats, run by Scott Morris and his wife, and the animals went up to clear thirteen acres of chaparral. They were moved round the slope in shifts behind a bit of electric netting and they took it to the dirt. Nothing was left standing that could be persuaded to burn. The Morris children name the herd, which is why the strategic fire defence of a presidential archive was executed by animals called Vincent Van Goat, Goatzart and Selena Goatmez. None of them were briefed. Goats do not require a briefing. Put a goat on a hillside covered in flammable woody scrub and it forms its own view of the situation, usually from the top of something it should not be on top of, chewing, watching you. The arrangement predates that herd. Ventura County Fire has been sending goats up there since 2012, when J.O. Goat Co of Bakersfield delivered 900 of them, and the annual tender is now competitive, which is a sentence about goats. In October the Easy Fire came over the ridge and went at the complex. It split and burned round both sides. Flames got within thirty yards of the buildings. Seven hundred personnel were on it, aircraft were dropping water, and what bought them the time was a belt of ground where five hundred goats had eaten the fire's supper in May. The buildings the fire never reached contained Air Force One and a section of the Berlin Wall. A library spokeswoman said the firefighters told them afterwards that the break made their job easier. Scorched outside. Untouched within. Fire needs fuel. Goats climb what a mower cannot reach and a tractor cannot hold, they carry no spark, they need no diesel, and they leave the ground dunged rather than scraped. The oldest fuel management system on earth, and California pays the market rate because nothing else works up there. Which sits oddly beside the other thing California holds to be true, that ruminant livestock is a climate liability requiring reduction. Same animal. Same gut. Same gas. Hired by the fire department in May, indicted by the air resources board in June, back up the hill the following spring, and never once mentioned it.