U.S. Takes Aim at Destructive Goats in Park : Environment: The non-native animals are threatening rare and endangered plants in a virgin wilderness area and may have to be shot.

When an estimated 400 Rocky Mountain goats munch and trample the wilderness preserve in which they have been allowed to roam freely, their fate is bound to be grim: They could be sterilized, expelled or shot.

“Personally, I have a hard time doing these animals in,” said Doug Houston, a U.S. Park Service biologist who has been studying goats at Olympic for the last decade. “But professionally, their removal is the only way to go.”

The shaggy, black-horned, majestic white goat-antelopes are destroying rare plants and virgin wilderness in the 1,441-square-mile national park on northwestern Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Some of the endangered plants can be found nowhere else.

Olympic’s mountain goat problem is the latest Park Service dilemma over populations of non-native species that were brought into the areas by man. Since the mid-1970s, officials have been forced to kill wild boars in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, feral burros in Grand Canyon and Death Valley parks and feral goats in Hawaiian parks.

“We didn’t join the Park Service to slaughter animals, but we are also dedicated to the management of native ecosystems,” said Paul Crawford, Olympic’s resource manager. Mountain goats are disrupting the natural balance of one of the few isolated alpine ecosystems in the United States.

Since 1981, about 400 of the most accessible goats have been removed from the park, whose dominant big animals are bears, elk and deer. Helicopters helped capture most of the goats for transport to other suitable habitats, primarily on U.S. Forest Service lands. But the removal program was halted in 1990 because it was considered too dangerous to people.

The fate of the remaining 400, about 80% of which are inside the park, may be decided this winter, after a series of environmental impact studies and public hearings. Park Supt. Maureen Finnerty says that shooting is on her short list of solutions.

Leaders of the Sierra Club and many other mainstream conservation groups in the Pacific Northwest support the Park Service goal of protecting the plants and wilderness, even if it means shooting goats.

Dale Crane, who heads the northwest office of the National Parks and Conservation Assn. in Seattle, says he initially didn’t like the prospect of killing the goats, but he changed his mind after witnessing their destruction of Olympic’s vegetation. “Do we let them do that because they’re fuzzy and cute?” he asked.

Federal law allows officials to shoot destructive animals only if the animals are not native to an area.

Citing old newspaper accounts, Park Service biologists say that 11 or 12 mountain goats were brought to the peninsula from their native range in Canada and Alaska between 1925 and 1929 in part to establish a hunting region.

Archeological excavation in Olympic Park has turned up no evidence that goats were present before the 20th Century. Today as many as 100,000 mountain goats may inhabit the rocky high country from Alaska through western Canada into Montana, Idaho and the Cascade Range in Washington.

Cathy Sue Anunsen of Salem, Ore., regional representative of the New York-based Fund for Animals, disputes the claims that the mountain goats were introduced to the peninsula. She recently found two written accounts in Park Service files from pre-1920 explorers who reported sighting goats here.

Three other archeologists have separately reported finding Indian blankets and ladles on the peninsula that they believed were made from mountain goat hides and bones.

Anunsen and University of Missouri anthropologist R. Lee Lyman say that the accounts provide enough evidence to discredit the assertion that goats were not native to the peninsula.

“You can’t say all five of these people were crazy or hallucinating,” said Lyman, who thinks the goats should be left in the park.

But park biologist Bruce Moorhead said that the two reported sightings are not substantiated scientifically and that the Indian goods probably were obtained through trading.

“We’re going to fight this with all the muscle we can exert,” Wayne Pacelle, national director of the Fund for Animals, said. “The Park Service is on such shaky ground they would be injudicious to make it a big fight.”

None of the estimated 60 alpine and subalpine plant species that are threatened by the Olympic goats is in danger of extinction, park ecologist Ed Schreiner concedes. But, he says, evidence is strong that goats reduce the survival chances of many sensitive plants.

The federal government, which has spent more than $1 million studying the mountain goat problem, has not yet ruled out always-preferred non-lethal solutions.

“People just like to see goats up there,” Paul Crawford admits. “They look as if they belong.”