UNITY, Maine — The kids are alright at the Unity College Barn.
They’re really cute, too — and quite special. The four San Clemente Island goats born in the barn during the last few weeks of May are tiny brown-and-black bundles that seem equally comprising super-soft fur and rambunctious activity, but they’re extra special because they’re among just 800 or so in the world.
The kids belong to a breed of feral goats that ran wild during the late 19th and early 20th century on San Clemente Island, one of the Channel Islands located off the southern coast of California. According to legend, the goats are descended from animals brought to the islands by Spanish missionaries, sailors and settlers. Unity College Farm manager Megan Anderson said this week that they are a little different from ordinary goats.
“They’re very quizzical and deer-like,” she said as she watched Turk, Tilly, Mushu and Marlin bump into their mothers and scamper around their enclosure. “They do very well in lots of different climates or terrain. They’re wild hoofstock, like gazelles and zebras. They’re unique, genetically. They’re not a genetic match for any known breed.”
The breed also is critically endangered, Anderson said. According to the website for the San Clemente Island Goat Association, the U.S. Navy has administered the island since 1934, and beginning in the 1970s the military branch made a concerted effort to re-establish the native ecosystem. That effort included removing the 15,000 or more goats that roamed the island. Some were taken off San Clemente and brought to the mainland on barges, where they were sold at auction. But others were killed by professional hunters riding in helicopters. Because the goats remained breeding throughout the years of removal and extermination, the association estimates about 30,000 were killed in total.
By 1991, the last goat on the island was killed.
However, before this grim finale, some of the San Clemente Island goats were saved by The Fund for Animals, which trapped and resettled more than 6,000 of them. Although many of those goats were neutered, the association said a handful of breeding stock was saved.
Unity College came by their San Clemente Island goats a couple of years ago, when a Maine farmer was selling her stock.
“We took four of them, including two pregnant females,” Anderson said. “They had their kids in the dead cold of winter. We raised them in the nice heated storage room in the barn.”
But this year’s kids were sired by a male goat the college leased for a month over Christmas vacation. When he went home, two of the goats were pregnant with the kids due to be born in May.
“It takes a lot of collaboration to breed these goats,” Anderson said, adding many of the goats in New England are too closely related to make good parents.
Caring for the goats is part of the curriculum for Unity College students. They’re used extensively in animal health coursework, animal training, exhibit design and enrichment and more, Anderson said.
“The animals provide a living laboratory,” she said. “Our whole mission is conservation and environmental education. It’s a way to teach about preserving wild animals on the verge of extinction.”