Goats survivors of Old English breed

Press, 6 July 1977, Page 2

Goats survivors of Old English breed

The feral goats of Arapawa Island in the Marlborough Sounds are almost certainly the last survivors of the OH English breed, and direct descendants of the goats left behind by Captain Cook in 1777.

Mr M. Willis, director of the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve in Christchurch, who recently led an expedition to the island and brought back 135 goats of all ages, said yesterday that Mrs TV. M. Rowe, of Arapawa, had received a letter from the Rare Breeds Survival Trust in England saying that the animals “probably represent an important surviving repository of the genes of the Old English breed.”

Mr G. H. Alderson, the trust’s technical consultant, said after receiving photographs and a description from Mrs Rowe that the goats appeared to resemble very closely the original Old English goat standard.

Mr Alderson said that because there were no specimens of the breed left in Britain, there were no registration facilities and no official breed standard.

The unofficial standard used was from a descrip-

tion tn “The Book of the Goat,” by Holmes Pegler, published in 1897.

He also said that the modern milking goat did not appear in Britain until the last decade of the nineteenth century. It therefore followed that any left in New Zealand by Captain Cook were native English breeds. The Old English was not a high yielder. but gave a moderate yield of milk under hard conditions, the letter said. “The conservation of such a breeding group (the Arapawa goats) is very much in line with the policy of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.” Mr Willis said that the deadline for the Forest Service to exterminate the remaining goats was still eight months away. His expedition had removed about 10 per cent and he thought they could get another 10 per cent if anything of better type than previously, and bring them back to Christchurch. Because it was now more definite that they were the Old English breed, it was becoming more worth-while to mount another expedition.

“We would also like the chance to get a better selection,” Mr Willis said.