Navy Rejects Pleas to Save Island Goats : San Clemente Hunt to Be Conducted From Helicopters

WASHINGTON —  The Navy rejected a last-ditch appeal today to cancel a massive goat hunt on San Clemente Island, an uninhabited California island it uses for target practice.

Rep. Bobbi Fiedler (R-Northridge) and Cleveland Amory, president of the Fund for Animals, tried unsuccessfully to convince Navy brass to postpone the weeklong goat hunt, scheduled to start Friday.

The Navy says a helicopter will spend a week flying over the island, carrying civilian hunters who will blaze away with shotguns at an estimated 1,500 Andalusian goats. The animals are descended from a herd that reached San Clemente perhaps a century ago.

The Navy, which uses the island 65 miles northwest of San Diego as a shooting range for warships, says the goats are being killed to protect a type of lizard and several species of birds and plants that are on the federal endangered species list.

‘Disappointing’ Meeting

“It was extremely disappointing,” Fiedler said after meeting with Vice Adm. Tom Hughes, deputy chief of naval operations for logistics. “We used every ounce of persuasion, but it appeared the Navy had made up its mind.”

She said the Navy did make a “minor concession,” agreeing to allow the Fund for Animals to visit the island next summer in an effort to remove any goats that survive the hunt.

“We have to get all the goats off. We’ve done everything we feel is humanly possible to save them,” said Ken Mitchell, a spokesman for the naval air station at North Island, Calif.

Mitchell says that since 1973, about 16,000 of the brown and black animals have been taken off the island, most of them in the last four years by the Fund for Animals.

These goats were rounded up and trapped, but the effort reached a dead end for two reasons, according to Mitchell. The trappers could not pursue fleeing goats into the island’s deep canyons or into the southern end, which is off limits because of the danger of unexploded shells left over from target practice, he said. The second reason, he said, is Mother Nature: “They double their herd size in 18 months. They’re very prolific.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recommended that the goats be removed--but not necessarily killed--because they are destroying habitat needed by two types of birds, the San Clemente loggerhead shrike and the sage sparrow, and the island night lizard.

The Navy, which has fought a series of court battles over the fate of the goats, ran a hunt for a weekend in 1983. An estimated 600 goats were killed before a court order silenced the guns.