Old goats in these islands 'very much alike'

Another Life:Once, high on the flank of Mweelrea, I caught up unexpectedly with one of Connacht's unofficial wild animals. She regarded me thoughtfully through the amber embrasures of her eyes, then snorted explosively and leaped away down the rocky mountainside to warn her troop to move on.

All my meetings with feral goats carry a snapshot of landscape, such is their memorable presence: a bearded billy in the Mediterranean heather in Mulranny, horns curving back like two-foot scimitars; a roadside troop in Maam Valley, hooves stretched up the trunks of willows as they reached to browse the leaves; and, of course, the watchful flocks of the Burren, clattering raggedly over the stone as the plateau's eerie familiars.

I have yet to meet the goats of Bilberry Rock, a quarry-faced height in Waterford City, but they are obviously something special (for photographs, search at www3.flickr.com/photos/joecashin). They have flowing, silky coats and beards and supposedly the longest horns of any goats in the world, spreading like curving antennae or the wings of mythical beasts. The experts of the British Feral Goat Research Group, who know their stuff, have seen nothing like them in these islands and they may be a uniquely rare breed.

Some local historians think they were brought in by the Huguenots, who would have valued their fine cashmere (Kashmir) wool for weaving.

There are 28 animals left, with only eight females, and needless to say, they are "under threat". It's up to Waterford City Council, voting next month, to protect their commonage land or let it go for housing. They face a petition with a remarkable 20,000 local signatures, organised by the Bilberry Goat Herd Protection Trust, some of whose members belong to families that have cared for the goats for generations. Moving the herd, say British and Dutch goat specialists, could be overly stressful and lose the goats key minerals special to their habitat.

Such expert appraisal has extended to Ireland's feral goats in general, encouraged by voluntary conservation groups in Waterford and the Burren. A distribution map of the animals shows them ringing the island in almost every county with coastal uplands. In their book Exploring Irish Mammals, published in 2000, UCD's Tom Hayden and Rory Harrington of the NPWS listed locations from Fair Head in Co Antrim, Bray Head and Glendalough in Co Wicklow, and Lahinch in Co Clare, as good places to go looking for them.

"Goats are considered to be part of our wild fauna," they wrote - yet the animals still lack any protection under the Wildlife Act. Their official conservation is limited to some national parks, where numbers are carefully controlled.

Hayden and Harrington put the number of feral goats in Ireland at the end of the 20th century at "probably less than 5,000". This fits oddly with some local estimates of a massive reduction in the Burren since 2002 at the hands of farmers, dealers and shooters, amounting to a cull of perhaps more than 80 per cent and numbering thousands of animals.

The farmers joining the Rural Environmental Protection Scheme, it is suggested, found the necessary maintenance of dry-stone walls incompatible with the goats' nomadic progress; the dealers are serving an expanding "ethnic" meat market for younger animals; some shooters just want a horned head for the wall.

The Burren population, now put at around 1,000 by the Burren Feral Goat Preservation Society, is genetically a very mixed bag.

Its surge in numbers in the late 1900s showed up the long admixture with farm animals and the many large, white goats deriving from escapes from dairy herds.

When modern breeds go feral, their genes can swamp those of ancient breeds - notably the Old Irish goat, reaching back into a prehistoric past.

The Old Irish goat was, according to the UK goat ecologist Dr Raymond Werner, "almost exactly like the Old Welsh goat, Old Scotch goat and Old English goat", a small, squat, hardy, "unimproved" type of goat originating with the pre-agricultural, hunter-pastoral nomads of northern Europe and adapted to the cold. As such, it formed an ancient landrace, as authentically Irish as "native" ponies (or, indeed, the introduced red deer).

Perhaps 10 per cent of the Burren goats are predominantly of the Old Irish breed. Dr Werner, who founded the British Native Goat Preservation Society, believes that it is still perfectly possible to breed for an Old Irish type in the Burren feral goat "as, remarkably, the types have yet to be inextricably mixed up".

The Burren Feral Goat Preservation Society (tel: 087-7597307; e-mail; roundiehouse@eircom.net) is hoping to establish such herds of true "old breed" animals, isolated from contact with modern genes, perhaps with the help of the Heritage Council.

Meanwhile, the Irish Wildlife Trust has taken up the cause of the Bilberry goats. With the help of UCD, it has instigated a DNA analysis that may cast more light upon their origins, somewhere between Waterford and Kashmir.