EDITOR’S NOTE: Call to Earth is a NCS editorial sequence dedicated to reporting on the environmental challenges going through our planet, along with the options. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with NCS to drive consciousness and schooling round key sustainability points and to encourage optimistic motion.
This summer season has seen ferocious wildfires tearing throughout southern Europe earlier in the season than usual. More than 240,000 acres of land have already been destroyed throughout Spain, with a current blaze in the south shortly turning into one the nation’s deadliest.
Preventing wildfires has turn out to be a high-tech endeavor of satellites, drones and AI systems. But 80 miles south of Barcelona, an historical answer is quietly roaming throughout the mountain. It’s a herd of donkeys.
Tivissa Donkey Firefighters, a nonprofit in southern Catalonia, rehabilitates mistreated and deserted donkeys and places them to work as “firefighters.” By grazing probably the most flammable grasses in mountains and rural areas, they carve pure firebreaks throughout the dry Mediterranean panorama.
Founder Joan Cedó Sans took in the primary few donkeys in 2020; he now has a herd of 62, transferring throughout the area to clear personal and public lands due to their seemingly limitless appetites. “We’re grateful for the animals that we feel deserve a second opportunity,” he advised NCS, in Catalan.
Remembering the fires that swept close to his land in Catalonia, northeastern Spain, in 2013, he determined to check if the primary donkeys would clear the forest undergrowth round it. “They ate everything,” he stated.
The experiment become a full-time operation, and Cedó, now mayor of the small city of Tivissa, handed the day-to-day operations to Jordi García, a volunteer who joined in 2021. “It’s very gratifying,” Garcia stated in Spanish. “You’re out in nature, and you’ve given these animals a chance.”
One of the primary arrivals was Roberto, a former racing donkey despatched to the slaughterhouse after he stopped successful due to his cumbersome construct. “He is special, and I think he knows it,” Cedó stated. Another donkey, Paloma, arrived with an weight problems drawback from being “fed supermarket cookies and sugar cubes,” Cedó added. “That’s not a diet for an animal like this … It’s a kind of mistreatment as well.”
Cedó believes the venture is mutually useful: the donkeys prevent fires, and the work provides them a “dignified life” — a herd to belong to, medical care from a voluntary vet, and supplementary feed of donated produce from native farms and a close-by theme park.
And their work has by no means been extra essential. In 2025, the European Union recorded its most destructive wildfire season on document, with Spain dropping near a million acres to fires.
Donkeys are grazers and favor the grasses that dry out over the summer season to type “fine fuel” — the plant biomass that ignites most simply and accelerates the fireplace unfold — defined Dr. Jordi Bartolomé Filella, a professor on the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and researcher in herbivore ecology.
For a “very thorough effect, it works well to combine different types of herbivores,” Bartolomé defined, “so that they act on the different layers and species of the undergrowth.”
Goats, which shortly clear woody crops have sparked “goatscaping businesses” in California, which hire herds to graze hillsides that are tough for people to clear.
But Cedó sees one thing particular in his animals: “The work donkeys do, neither goats nor sheep can do,” he stated. “They weigh more, so every time they tread, they tread harder, they eat more.” By trampling the bottom, they break the linked layer of dry foliage a hearth must unfold.
Research has proven that grazing animals may be an effective protection and cheaper than chopping firebreaks with equipment — however like fireplace prevention in normal, isn’t a silver bullet. “It is difficult to guarantee that with livestock grazing there will be no fires,” Bartolomé stated, “but it can make them lower in intensity, and therefore easier to extinguish.”
Tivissa’s donkeys additionally work along with human firefighters. Sometimes, Catalonia’s specialist wildfire unit GRAF runs coaching workout routines chopping firebreaks on the identical mountains. “It’s a win-win,” Cedó stated. “They open the firebreaks, we put the animals there, and we keep it clean.” He added that the paths trodden by donkeys can be utilized “to run hoses if there’s a fire.”
Fire has at all times been a attribute of the Mediterranean, and the grazing of each wild and home animals has lengthy saved dry areas in test.
“Without large herbivores, sooner or later this biomass would be ‘eaten’ by fire. Unlike the herbivores, fire consumes it suddenly — with wide-ranging consequences for the ecosystem and risks to people,” Bartolomé stated.
European wildfires launched a document 13 million tons of climate-heating carbon in 2025, and their injury outlasts the flames: a burned forest stops absorbing CO₂, and the smoke can persist for weeks, threatening human well being even hundreds of miles away.
Cedó took inspiration and recommendation from “El Burrito Feliz,” (Happy Little Donkey) a pioneering nonprofit in southern Spain the place rescued donkeys have grazed the sides of Doñana National Park since 2014.
Similar tasks are arising throughout the nation. Rewilding efforts in Galicia, northwestern Spain, are bringing again wild horses to behave as “natural lawnmowers” in the nation’s most fire-prone area.
In Catalonia, the “Ramats de Foc” (Fire Flocks) initiative pairs sheep and goat shepherds with native firefighters to graze fire-critical zones. The meat and cheese from these flocks is offered below a wildfire-prevention label, so consumers assist fund the work.
Authorities acknowledge the worth of livestock in stopping fires, Bartolomé stated, however are uncertain easy methods to act on it. He argues that grazing initiatives will scale solely when governments pay for them as an ecosystem service, in the identical method “as mechanical clearing is paid for.”
Cedó stated shepherds are paid 70-80 euros per hectare cleared ($32-$37 an acre) — too little to maintain their work. Currently, Tivissa Donkey Firefighters depends on donations and partnerships to look after the herd.
“This project was born from nothing, by chance,” Cedó stated. “But it’s been a profound lesson — socially, personally.”
“We aren’t doing anything our ancestors didn’t do,” he added. “All we’re doing is putting value back on those rural tasks, that way of life that depended so much on animals.”