| San Clemente Island Goats We don't know with certainty how goats first arrived on San Clemente Island. Often repeated stories claiming they were left behind by Spanish explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries are unfortunately just that - romantic stories. Spanish exploratory activity in the area was very limited, and is well documented. Of the four Spanish expeditions to the general area of the California Channel Islands, three didn't land on San Clemente, and the fourth one reached the Island only after having been shipwrecked and so short of food, that they had already eaten the ship's dog, hide and all! For a long time most of us SCI breeders nonetheless believed that the goats were of Spanish stock, likely derived from those brought to California with the Franciscan missionaries at the end of the 18th century. Livestock census data from that period show the presence of goats in mainland California, albeit in low numbers compared to cattle and sheep. In 2007, however, a DNA study conducted by the University of Cordoba in Spain that compared the SCI goats to many other goat breeds of Spanish, and some non-Spanish, origin showed the SCI goats to be completely unrelated to any other goat breed included in the study! The search for the genetic and historical origins of the SCI goats continues... It is likely that the goats didn't arrive on San Clemente and the neighboring island Santa Catalina, which also had a feral goat population, until after the evacuation of the indigenous peoples from the islands in the 1820s or 30s. Once there, however, they quickly made themselves at home. By 1869 a US geographical survey of neighbouring Santa Catalina found 15,000 feral goats there! There is some evidence that a rancher by name of Ramirez introduced goats from the Catalina Island herd to San Clemente in 1875. For more than 100 years the San Clemente Island goats continued to do their thing, undisturbed by humans apart from being occasionally hunted for meat, until the 1970s. Growing environmental awareness led to the realisation that the goats had been causing a significant degradation of the habitat they were occupying. It was decided that they had to be removed from the Island. For years animals were hunted by various means, with varying success. A protest by the Fund for Animals led to a live capture of some of the goats. Ironically the organisation was only concerned with saving individual goats and insisted, in a similar fashion to dog and cat rescue operations, that all animals had to be spayed or neutered before placement! An intervention by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy ensured that a very small number was permitted to be placed intact as breeding animals with interested farmers. All current San Clemente Island goats are descended from that handful of foundation animals.
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