Anu the goat — scourge of the farmyard

Press, 31 October 1981, Page 16

Anu the goat — scourge of the farmyard

Goats are pretty bright animals, and it didn’t take Anu, our new Angora, very long to demonstrate this. Anu is a ditch goat. His mission in life is to eat weeds, tidy up rough corners, and clean up the rank grass where we can’t get at it with a mower.

We didn’t plan for him — we were going to have pet lambs, but the lambs were thin on the ground this year, and the weather was good at lambing time, so there weren't any orphans offering. Anu became a blue-eyed substitute, travelling home from a goat farm with his little horns securely tied to the trailer crate. In the first week we almost despaired of him, because he didn’t want to eat at all, and he subsisted, getting thinner and thinner, on a daily nibble of sheep nuts and wheat. But once he got the hang of eating he bloomed, and now the weeds around him are starting to go down as quickly as his weight is going up.

He’s smart, as well as fat. At first he'was a tiny, terrir fied thing, jumping at every noise and ready to put his head down and charge at anything — cat, dog, or human — that came within his chain's length, but within a week he was eating out of our . hands, and pockets, too, if anyone was foolish enough to put a sheep nut in a pocket.

There is no doubt which of the animals about the place is on top . of the totem pole. Anu is. The cats, even the nosy Siamese, give him a wide berth; my dog, Fritz, w’ould like to be friendly but isn’t too sure of his ground after getting a sharp bunt in the ribs; and last year’s pet lambs, who are now hoggets and, accidentally, about to have lambs of their own, are thoroughly cowed (we won’t have any sex problems with Anu; he’s a wether). The way in which he set about subduing the sheep was. interesting: though they are not big hoggets, they are yet bigger than Anu is, and probably heavier and stronger, too, because his little horns aren’t sufficiently developed yet to do much damage. They must have looked frightening when they charged across to greet him on his first visit to their paddock. But did he run? Not a bit of it. He stood his ground and reared up on his hind legs, so that to the sheep he must have looked enormous. It was the sheep who scattered in all direc-

tions, if two sheep can be said to scatter in all directions; and now, on his daily visits to the paddock to nibble broom twigs and gorse flowers, it is Anu who is very firmly the boss. Like all goats, he is agile and very, very fast, and what we could do if he took it in his head to depart while off his tether I don’t know. But either he likes human company, or the call, of sheep nuts and wheat is stronger than the call of the wild, and when our daughter unchains him-in the evening for his daily constitutional gallop down the road he is invariably first back to the gate. He is definitely a diverting and captivating animal, much more interesting than the sheep. He has historic precedence over the sheep, too, because there were herds of goats in New Zealand years before the first sheep arrived. Captain Cook landed goats in Dusky Bay, Queen Charlotte Sound, on his second voyage in 1773. He landed sheep, too, but they were in such poor condition after the

voyage that they had no chance of survival and were found dead the morning after their- release. Four years later, on his third voyage, Cook landed at Queen Charlotte Sound again, bringing more goats, which he presented to the local Maori chiefs. Legend has it that all the wild goats in the South Island descend from these animals.

More likely, Cook’s goats were eaten by the Maoris, and the wild herds descended from animals brought later by pilgrims and whalers. Cook himself was not too optimistic about the future of his tiny flock: “They (the chiefs) made me a promise not to kill them,” he wrote. “Though I must own I put no great faith in this.” Wild goats were certainly present in the hills of Nelson in numbers in the 1840 s. Some escaped from a large herd kept tethered in the Maitai Valley by a settler, and eventually made their way into the high country of Marlborough, where they multiplied so rapidly that an

explorer some 20 or so years later complained about the constant danger in the gorges of fusillades of stones showered down on his party by the herds of goats that they disturbed. Akaroa had the first goats in Canterbury, presumably brought by the French, and by 1850 there were flocks numbering several hundred providing a supply of milk for the township. Ten years later there were so many wild goats in the hills of Banks Peninsula that the settlers . were getting up shooting parties to control them.

These weren’t Angoras, though; the Angoras didn’t come along until later, when the Melbourne Acclimatisation Society sent two pair as a gift to the newly-formed Canterbuy Acclimatisation Society in 1867. Two years later, after a prominent member questioned the worth of keeping animals with no sporting future, and succeeded in having the cost of a goat house deleted from the society’s estimates, the Angoras were sold to the curator, A. M. Johnson, who ran them on Mt Pleasant. A shepherd kept an eye on the herd, which had increased to 120 by 1873, and shore them every November. The Otago Acclimatisation Society also brought in two pair of Angora goats in 1867, and liberated them somewhere in Otago. Two years later the Auckland society joined the circle by importing a small flock, which it subsequently sold to a Mr Howick. Numerous individuals imported Angoras, too, and inevitably some escaped to become feral and hybridise with the other feral breeds. The Auckland farmers didn’t mind this, because one of the favourite foods of the Angora was the blackberry plant, which was already becoming a pest. Our little Angora hasn't had a taste of blackberry yet, but he has shown a decided preference for gorse flowers, rose shoots, and “Spanish gorse” — an ornamental broom that I grow in the garden. He likes to jump on things, too, and in this he reminds me of Skippy, a friend’s pet chamois who died a few months ago. Skippy loved to jump on the bonnet of his owner’s Land-

cruiser; Anu favours the dogkennel.

Chamois and Angoras are distant cousins, but the chamois is a much more recent immigrant, having been introduced only in the early years of this century to Mount Cook — as a tourist attraction that quickly became a pest. An earlier attempt to introduce chamois, led by the Canterbury Museum director, Julius von Haast, in the late 1880 s, had been unsuccessful, but had at least prompted a curious debate in the House of Representatives.

Mr Kerr, the member for Motueka, protested vigorously against the introduction of more pests into the country when a vote of £l5O appeared on the 1889 Estimates for the importation of chamois from the game park 'of the King of Bavaria, near Munich.

“The honourable member,” reported the “New Zealand Times,” "said he was reliably informed that this animal was a cross between a pig and a sheep, and that it bred scab; and in case it might be a goat he reminded the Government that there were already enough of these animals running wild. “The climax was reached when Mr Kerr unsuspectingly quoted from the book handed to him by Mr Turnbull . . . ‘Was it reasonable,’ Mr Kerr asked, ‘to import animals no bigger than a mustard seed?’ The House, however was quite resolved, and deliberately passed the vote, in spite of the earnest protests of the member for Motueka.”

The book happened to be a copy of Mark Twain's "Tramp Abroad," and the passage quoted by the member for Motueka was this one? “The chamois is a black or brown creature no bigger than a mustard seed; you do not have to go after it, it comes after you: it arrives in vast herds and skips and scampers all over your body inside your clothes; thus it is not shy; but extremely sociable; it is not afraid of man; on the contrary, it will attack him; its bite is not dangerous, but neither is it pleasant; its activity has not been overstated — if you try to put your finger on it, it will skip a thousand times its own length at one jump, and no eye is sharp enough to see where it lights. “A great deal of romantic nonsense has been written about the Swiss chamois and the perils of hunting it, whereas the truth is that

even women and children hunt it, and fearlessly; indeed, everybody hunts it; the hunting is going on all the time, day and night, in bed and out of it. It is poetic foolishness to hunt it with a gun; very few people do that; there is not one man in a million who can hit it with a gun.”

Mark Twain’s “small deer” was, of course, the flea.

But Mr Kerr was a goldminers’ representative who was renowned more for his vigour in debates than for his accuracy. He is credited with another boo-boo when the Nelson Borough Council announced that it planned to import half a dozen Venetian gondolas to put on the lake in the Nelson Public Gardens.

“Why not,” said Mr Kerr, “import a pair, and let nature take its course?”