Six Rocky Mountain goats that came from Canada in the early 1920s escaped a facility in a South Dakota state park named for a war criminal but because of a dead-end gene pool they peaked at about sixty head so SD Game, Fish and Plunder began transplanting goats from Colorado in 2007. The State of South Dakota began a goat season in 1967 but only two were killed in 2022 after only two licenses were issued.
Non-native goats are aggressive and even killed a hiker in 2010 in Olympic National Park so the feds removed them. But even after contractors working for US, the People shot scores of invasive goats from helicopters between 2019 and 2022 in Grand Teton National Park a herd is rebuilding. Those critters are the descendants of goats released by Idaho Fish and Game sometime before 1977.
In South Dakota, goats at odds with efforts to reintroduce native bighorn sheep in the Black Hills. Bighorn sheep are native to the region but because of uncontrolled hunting they were extirpated from the Hills by the early 1900s. In 2002 the Grizzly Gulch Fire opened nearly 13,000 acres of overgrown and beetle-killed ponderosa pine but invasive weeds and cheatgrass moved in because cars and hunters have killed off the elk, white-tailed and mule deer. After they were reintroduced in 2015 bighorn
sheep have taken up residence in Deadwood where they have become accustomed to some protection from predators like cougars.
So recently, the SDGFP Commission approved one license to kill a bighorn sheep in the Hell Canyon (site of the 2000 Jasper Fire), Deadwood, and Rapid City herds, two licenses in the state park named for a war criminal, three licenses for the Elk Mountain herd and one license for auction.
Spearditch Canyon has become home to at least twenty five goats so it's just a matter of time before one kills
a looky-loo or a biker.
