25 firefighting goats have been moved onto Howth head in Dublin to a bid to tackle future wildfires.
Wildfires raged in Howth for six weeks this summer, damaging up to 30 acres of land.
Spin's Kacey O'Riordan Reports:
In Dublin, on Howth head, 25 firefighting goats are on site where they'll be brought to different areas every day.
That's to eat gorse and in turn slow the spread of future fires.
I met Shepard Melissa Jeuken in the Goats shed.
"They're good browsers, they've large room and capacity."
"So they can eat a lot of forage, hopefully they'll be about to eat their own weight in forage in a day."
"Adults are around 35 to 40 kilos for females, and about 55 kilos for the males."
The wildfires in Howth took six weeks to fully extinguish during the summer.
The cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be as much as 250 thousand euro.
Cutting Up The Landscape
Fingal County Council’s Biodiversity Officer Hans Visser explains what he hopes the goats will achieve.
"The height of the gorse to come down, to kind of make the fires less big."
"So to cut up the landscape into smaller bits."
"If a fire happens, it'll only burn a small bit of the landscape instead of the whole mountainside disappearing."
