Rescue of Goats Ends for the Time Being : Fate of Remaining San Clemente Island Animals Is Uncertain

The latest attempt by an animal rights group to rescue a herd of wild goats on San Clemente Island ended Friday with 550 of the creatures rounded up, but with no final decision made on the fate of those remaining.

Early this year, the U.S. Navy, which owns the island about 60 miles west of San Diego and which uses it during most of the year for shelling and bombing practice, had planned to shoot the goats because, biologists said, they were destroying the habitats of several species of wildlife that appear on federal endangered species lists.

870 Offered for Adoption

The killings were put off when U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger intervened on behalf of the Fund for Animals, which proposed to save as many of the goats as possible by capturing them in nets dropped from a helicopter.

During late February and early March, according to the Fund’s president, Cleveland Amory, 870 animals were caught and brought back to the mainland where they were offered for adoption by private citizens.

The Navy allowed the rescue effort to resume from July 5 to Friday, and with the capture of 550 more animals, Amory said the herd has been reduced to “somewhere between 100 and 300”.

The goats, descendants of animals put on the island about 200 years ago by seamen to provide food for other passing vessels, at one time numbered more than 20,000. Since 1972, Navy trappers and hunters, plus Fund for Animals workers, removed all but an estimated 1,500 to 1,600.

Between forays on their numbers, the goats multiplied rapidly, and as they nibbled away at the undergrowth they threatened the well-being of certain birds, lizards and plants protected by the federal Endangered Species Act, prompting the Navy to take steps to exterminate them.

Amory said he would make a new proposal within the next few days that his group be allowed to return to the island sometime next winter to capture as many more animals as possible.

But Navy spokesman Ken Mitchell said ordinarily the island is “cold” (not under fire) only during July of each year, and that the fact the fund was allowed to capture goats last February was “a unique situation” because of Weinberger’s action.

“The Navy will take a census of the goats next Wednesday,” Mitchell said. “After that, we expect to make a decision on whether to carry out our earlier plan to shoot them.”