A shout-out to those grass-gnawing goat fire brigades

They are thought to be one of, if not the, very first animals to be domesticated by humans 11,000 years ago.

They came over on the Mayflower as the prized possessions of the earliest European settlers in America.

And this week in Southern California, they are being feted as four-legged heroes whose fabled grass-chewing helped prevent the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum from going up in smoke.

We’re talking goats. And firefighters in LA say they’re indebted to the so-called “goat fire brigades” used earlier this year to clear away the flammable grass and scrub that surrounds the famed library complex on a hilltop in Simi Valley. Fire crews have been fighting the Easy Fire that threatened to envelope the library on Wednesday. Helicopters dropped load after load of water around the complex while 60-mph winds whipped up the flames.

After burning 1,491 acres and coming at one point to within 50 feet of the complex, the Easy Fire remains just five percent contained. But the complex, for now at least, has been spared.

And the goats get much of the credit for getting rid of all that grass that isn’t there this week to further fuel the flames.

Earlier this year, Reuters reported, the hired goats munched their way through the grasslands surrounding the complex, where the fire came perilously close this week to an Air Force One jet and a piece of the Berlin Wall.

“We were told by one of the fire fighters that they believe that fire break made their job easier,” spokeswoman Melissa Giller told Reuters. “The brush only went so far, it didn’t reach the library, because the goats ate it all.”

The goats got kudos, as well, from firefighters battling another wildfire in Southern California, this one near the J. Paul Getty Museum where the animals had earlier cleared much of the scrub surrounding that institution.

The goats’ owner, Scott Morris, told Reuters that the mainly Boer goats have names like Vincent Van Goat and Selena Goatmez and love to eat “noxious weeds and other invasive species that fuel wildfires.” Morris said he zero goat experience before starting the company last November, charging customers around $1,000 for each acre the animals clear.

“At the end of the day, you kind of sit down and say ‘wow, we had an impact,’” Morris told the wire service.