Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Predators and Varmints Not your typical varmint....

Not sure if this counts as varmint hunting...but here's some video of a New Zealand feral goat cull

http://www.realoutdoorproductions.com/2008vids/Goat1/goat1.html

Looks fun to me.

Thanks for the comments.... We had a great trip, and learned alot. We were a bit shell-shocked when the details of the cull that we were invited on were explained to us....but here is a bit of what we learned....

North American sensibilities (our own included!) would have us stalk through several groups of goats until we could get a crack at a large billy...and then we would take trophy photos and talk about the great hunt. However, we quickly learned that actions like that would get us banned from the property as we have now educated more goats then we shot making it more difficult for the next group of shooters to take down numbers.

This particular ranch has groups of shooters comming in several times a month shooting big numbers of goats and they still can't get the population under control (no predators and no winter in NZ = 0% die off). The farm manager mentioned that they may call in for a helicopter and have goats shot from the air to try and bring down the numbers. He would not have been impressed that a potential shooter was spending much of his time filming rather than shooting

What a difference from what we are used to doing here in Canada...where I may only fire 2 rounds this year and still have a wildly successful season! This cull is definitley not for everyone.....but it is what it is. Thanks again

An interesting shoot but what did they do with the dead goats? If they left them there to rot that doesn't sound too healthy to me.

I thought the same thing....and considering how many goats get culled on this ranch, I expected to see goat remains everywhere. In reality it was quite rare for us to find anything left of past goats. The locals told us that the feral pigs come out of the bush at night to tidy up.

What caliber were these being shot with?

Bob

My dad and I were shooting 30-06 and 7mm rem mag loaded with barnesxxx. The kiwi's were using 243 and rem 260 loaded with v-max, I think.

The goats were very tough for thier size. They would not drop on the spot with a double lung shot from the barnes, but would walk 30 ft and then fall over. The high velocity v-max were much more dramatic.

Now THAT'S a varmint Jihaad I wanna take a scoped AR10 over there with at least 5 buckets of ammo...

Dang, I could into that!

bcjames, just tell them to send me an airline ticket and I'll be there.
Have gun will shoot!

bcjames, how much did just a "varmint" hunt like that run you?

IAK, we spent about $2000 flying from Canada to Auckland. Then there is a $25 NZ fee at the airport for a temporary firearms license. After that, the hunting was free. Because all big game in NZ is introduced and because there are no predators, they have no seasons, tags, or bag limits. We had some local friends who were nice enough to take us out....so this wasn't a "paid" guided hunt.

Thank you so much for the fabulous story and video's.

Would you use X bullets again? Did you end up "aiming for the bone"?

Thanks Savage,
Because the Barnes work so well for us back home, and because we are very familiar with how they perform in our rifles, I would use them again for a one time trip to NZ....rather than site-in and learn another load. We tried to start aiming for bone by the end of the cull....but it was surprisingly hard to do after a life time of not ruining meat!

Your videos are so unusual. They are nothing like what we experiance at home and I guess I can include you in that.

As you know 'here' we hunt all day and most likely we may not even fire one shot! And thats hunting -here-.

Where you were in NZ it was the opposite. Only perhaps in trying to get that second coyote or a double on birds do we shoot like that here.