Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Predators and Varmints New Zealand goats are varmints

I was in New Zealand the last couple of weeks working and some friends invited me down to some deer/pig/feral goat hunting.

I was hunting some planted pine forests that bordered the sheep and dairy farms outside of Piopio, New Zealand. I got a couple of pictures on my phone but forgot my digital camera in the truck. We walked the forest blocks and jumped four separate mobs of goats (about 25 animals total) during the hunt. I wound up shooting 11 of them including 2 good billies but one of them fell into a deep ravine and I was not climbing down there just for a picture. The friends I hunted with were gracious enough to let me do all the shooting, including handing me another loaded rifle when I ran mine dry so that I could continue shooting.

I started out with a Tikka T3 in 270 Win and also shot some of them with a Remington Model 7 in 260 Rem. If I had my own rifles I probably would have gotten a few more but the right handed bolts, slow me down a lot.

This is feral goat culling as the country has 100,000s of wild goats competing with all the farm stock for pasture land. The idea is to kill as many as possible and the normal method is to spot and stalk the mobs and positioning yourself to shoot the adult nannies and billies as quickly as possible then finish the rest of the young ones.

Here are a couple of adult nannies that fell near each other:


And the biggest of the two billies, he had about 26"-28" spread on his horns:

I could get into this!!!!!

Yeah, not as many goats around as there used to be but they're still fun.
I used to help a guy who had several culling contracts, one block we did you could go out and shoot up to 100 goats in a day when we started. Another one was clearing goats off a steep seaside cliff, we tried shooting them from the bottom but couldn't get back far enough for a clear shot so we took the boat out but that just got us a lot of wounded goats falling off the cliff. We ended up shooting from the top with him sitting on my legs while I leaned over the edge and shot straight down.
I currently do pest control on a couple of big roading projects, one of them cuts through a lot of steep, rough country with bush on the edges and goats and pigs running on it. They're waiting to see if the goats and pigs stick around once work starts on the rougher sections (I'm picking they will because they learn fast to come out after dark and feed on the pushed down and cut trees and scrub) If they do I'll have the job of culling them out.

25-30 years ago there were goats in highland county in va.i guess they gotten out of someones pen years back and they became fairly populated where we deer hunted.we started seeing some really wide billies and i think we killed 8-10 in a few years time. only goats i ever killed.