Navy Plans to Start Shooting Goats on Thursday

Despite an appeal by an animal rights group for extra time to continue trapping wild goats on San Clemente Island, a spokesman for the U.S. Navy said Friday the animals will be shot from a helicopter beginning Thursday.

“The Navy seems determined to shoot,” said Cleveland Amory, founder and head of the Fund for Animals. “I called (Secretary of Defense Caspar W.) Weinberger Thursday, and could only get to a secretary who wouldn’t say much.”

Hunters were to have started shooting the goats early in January in an effort to eliminate them from the Navy-owned island because they are believed to be destroying the habitats of several creatures on the federal endangered species list. At that time, Weinberger intervened and the Fund for Animals was given permission to carry out a rescue operation.

That operation will end Monday, by which time Amory said he hopes that approximately 900 goats will have been caught--in nets fired from a helicopter--and returned to the mainland for adoption.

By Friday morning, he said, 780 of the animals had been corralled and more than 450 already had been adopted by individuals. He estimated that only about 300 or 400 goats still are at large on the island, which is used most of the year by the Navy for bombing and shelling practice.

At the Navy’s North Island Air Station at Coronado in the San Diego area, Cmdr. Robert Herning, a civil engineer in charge of the operation aimed at ridding the island of goats, said Friday that as far as he knew no formal request for an extension of the trapping program had been made.

He said the shooting is scheduled to start Thursday and continue for 4 1/2 days, during which time “four or five” goats will be captured and fitted with radio transmitters so that, later on, they can lead hunters to the remainder of the herd.

“That is, if we don’t get all of them during the 4 1/2 days,” he added.

Los Alamitos resident Hal Baerg, vice president of the Animal Lovers Volunteer Assn., said the use of such transmitters was “inhumane” and that actions seeking a temporary restraining order against the Navy’s plans, on file in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, probably will be reinstituted during the next few days. “Other legal procedures” are also being considered to forestall the shooting, he said.