Evacuating 200 head of livestock during brush fire season?

(Sorry--bushfires I think, not brush fires....)

Let's say you raise lamb in New South Wales and you have 200 head. It's just you, for the most part, not a big operation.

You have pens and pasture and your property borders open, unpopulated land. There's brush fires bushfires every year.

If a fire is burning out of control toward your property (and livestock), do you open the gates so they can run free? pen them? put them in a metal-roofed/sided barn? Take them to an evacuation center?

The closest I know from southern California is horse management. Horse owners will load their animals into trailers and take them to evacuation centers. But that's different, most horse folks don't have more than five or six animals.

I found one 2019 article about cattle stock in Australia, basically they were released to fend naturally, and it was heartbreaking to see what happened to those animals and families.

So what would be the normal thing for a sheep rancher stockman/pastoralist to do with his 200 head and a fire coming at him?

Sorry frank, bushfires, yes? I think that one's on my radar for the actual snippet. I hadn't been aware that 'ranchers' was wrong, (thanks!) but did come across 'firies' for firemen. ?

Have been tempted to use words like 'walkabout' but out of fear of getting usage wrong am erring on the side of caution where possible. Am basing some of the details on news reports from last year--wombats seen during the daytime and things like this--but have not drilled down into finer details yet, for example, into the geographical distribution of wombats. (For all i know they live nowhere near NSW.)

First things first. How the heck does someone in the lamb industry manage his 200 head of sheep during fire season (as in the 2019 variety.)

p.s. re: 'rancher': It looks like his land might be called a 'sheep station' and he is either the owner (sole operator), or a stockman or a pastoralist (but that might relate only to certain lands.). ?

veinglory said:

A lot of the time you just hope for the best. If you have land that is less likely to burn you move them there. This is likely to be lambing areas close to the home, especially if the family is sheltering in place. There is likely to be a fire break around the home with cleared land and they could mow any dry grass. Afterwards you go out with a gun and kill burned animals. No you won't be letting them go. Sheep on unfamiliar land are dumb and would impede roadways where people might be trying to evacuate. The public land probably has protected species on it. (My background includes emergency planning for animnals).

I am thinking of production animals and 200 is a lot less than that so they might have other options. A production farm will have maybe 2-3 thousand. If they have a small herd they might have more facilities. If they have almost yearly (I don't think any area always gets effected by the bushfire season) they will have some kind of effective plan and know areas that don't burn.

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Thank you. This is helpful.

Based on the fires last year, it seems my character has some number of days to watch as the blaze comes closer (and hope things turn around). I have him sending (carting, trucking) fifty lambs to slaughter as a way to reduce his herd, but he still has 150 in the end. If this plan of action raises any flags, I'm curious about that too.

Love it.

Sadly, these animals must die. Although I suppose I could have Patsy try, and then kill her, too.

/evil patty

veinglory said:

I have to say 200 animals is really small. Keep in mind that even the best sort of wool sheep is going to make you about $100 income a year, less for meat. And there is no general purpose sheep in production so it is wool or meat.

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It started at 500 but my gut instincts said that would seem like a lot for one guy living on his own. Maybe I'll bump it back up. A google books result said one person can manage up to 1000, but that seemed really high. I'll look at the income end of things.

The consensus is more sheep, so that's easy since it was the original plan. I might go with 700. Artisanal wool sounds most lucrative, and a 'second job' is not an issue. A neighbor is also not an issue. It's a good thought.

We have clearance guidelines in southern California (60 feet clearance around any 'open space' , cleared by June 1st of each year.) Firebreaks are already part of the thinking--I think there's enough common sense and common history there that this part was sort of intuitive--my guy uses a bobcat or a back hoe to augment the existing break (although for all I know Australians don't have 'back hoes' per se).

I'm leaning toward having some portion of this character's herd missing as veinglory suggested, and he gets on his horse to look for them, after protecting most of the herd through his action plan, ultimately finding the lost little sheep and/but getting surrounded by the flames and he goes down with the horse and the sheep.

It's a vignette, about 800 words.

??? Keep it coming.

Yes, there is. I'm incorporating actual climate events into this particular novel. Alphonse has the ability to relive Earth history and in this novel, that ability focuses on climate events. (He lived Earth's geological record in Aerovoyant.)

At the moment, Alphonse relives Fukoshima, the Australian bushfires, the extinction of the bramble cay melomys (first mammal to go extinct from climate change), ummm... Hurricane Katrina ... uhhh ....an emerging infectious disease (I think I chose the 2019 central American Dengue outbreak, which was historic in scale, believe it or not) ... there are eight such events altogether, I think, though that number is subject to change. Ocean acidification, desertification, changes in migration, etc. (Murder hornets! What?)

The idea is to continue, throughout the trilogy, to illustrate the scale of the climate/environmental destruction problem. Global. Interconnected. (and the rate of fossil fuel consumption--and CO2 emission--is staggering.)

Each snippet is a short one- to two-page vignette of Alphonse, living through the event. I want him living through climate-driven wildfire and the Australian ones seem like a good framework. Those struck me as more graphic than our SoCal wildfires (which we live through annually, the smoke and flames and evacuation plans and so on), in part because of the tragedy impacting the koalas and wombats. They were horrifying.

Each of these 'flashbacks' is footnoted to actual information online. (The freedom of self publishing.)

I don't want the flashbacks to be US--centric, as he lives on another world and in another time, and climate change is global.

I'll try to address the verisimilitude in an ongoing way and in a dedicated way down the road--I agree with you.

Thank you for all the fantastic feedback! Love it. Love the support, as well.

(Ummm.. he does have dogs, although going back through the thread I see I neglected mention, oops.)

Obviously I've given a thumbnail here, but the real question in the OP has been answered--most directly by the Unimportant's PDF on NSW guidelines, and Veinglory's feedback too, but everyone else's is so greatly appreciated as well.

You guys are amazing. Thank you. I've always been impressed with the kindness of Australia.