First Batch to Arrive Today : Island Goats Due on Mainland

The first batch of wild goats recently captured on Navy-owned San Clemente Island is due to arrive on the mainland today, and animal-rights activists will begin taking the first steps toward putting the goats, once marked for slaughter, up for adoption.

Cleveland Amory, author and head of the Fund for Animals, which is carrying out the goat rescue, said 219 of the animals have been netted since the operation began last Friday.

“I am most definitely pleased and gratified at our successes so far,” he said Wednesday. “If we can keep up the pace during the time remaining to us (the first week in March) I’m sure we’ll reach our goal of 750 or 800.”

Today’s batch of goats will be put into closed trucks aboard a barge for the 12-hour trip to the Navy’s North Island Air Station on Coronado.

The animals are part of a goat population estimated at 1,200 to 1,500 on the island, 60 miles off the coast of San Diego. The goats have been marked for slaughter since Navy biologists several years ago said they believed the goats were ravaging the habitats of several plants, birds and animals that appear on the federal government’s list of endangered species. In accordance with the U.S. Endangered Species Act, the Navy said, the goats should be eliminated.

Since 1972, more than 20,000 of the goats have been removed from the island. At various times, hunters killed more than 1,000 of them. Between 1973 and 1980, the Navy itself rounded up about 15,000 animals and sold them to farmers and ranchers and, in 1983 and 1984, during short periods when the island was not being used for Navy and Marine Corps bombing and shelling operations, the Fund for Animals was allowed to try out its trapping program, which brought in about 1,000 of the animals.

Weinberger Gives Order

But the goats, which “breed like rabbits,” said Navy biologist Jan Larson, have since increased their numbers. With a new breeding cycle due to start soon, Navy officials decided to resume shooting them early in January, claiming that the goats could almost double their population in one season.

However, appeals by the Fund for Animals and by Rep. Bobbi Fiedler (R-Northridge) convinced Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger to order the Navy to allow the Fund’s trapping effort to be carried out during the month of February.

The goats are captured by Fund for Animals workers in helicopters using a technique in which a net is stuffed into a metal box with a pipe-like attachment joined to a sawed-off shotgun. When the gun is aimed at a goat and fired, it releases the net, which settles over and entangles the animal.

Those interested in adopting the captured animals may telephone (714) 628-1980 for further information.

Navy spokesman Ken Mitchell said Wednesday that it has not been decided whether the shooting program will be reinstituted when the netting deadline passes.