New Zealand Arapawa Goat Association
Help save this critically endangered breed
Arapawa Buck #238 Kaipara Coast Tennax
Photograph Courtesy of : Shane Docherty
The Arapawa Goats
of New Zealand
Without doubt, the most interesting feral goats remaining in New Zealand are those of Arapawa Island in the Marlborough Sounds.
They are a relatively small breed (smaller than modern milking goats) and come in a variety of colours – patterns of white, fawn, brown and black being the most common colours – and they usually have distinctively patterned faces. The males have widely sweeping horns, the females shorter backward-pointing horns.
It was widely believed that these goats were the surviving descendants of Old English goats released by James Cook in the late 1700s. The colour and markings of the animals appear to be very similar. However, recent DNA testing has provided evidence that the Arapawa goats are from a now extinct South African breed.
The Old English myth will remain a myth since no DNA material of the now extinct unimproved original Old English goat is available for comparison.
On 23 May 1773, Cook and Furneaux gave a doe and a buck to Maori who resided at Grass Cove on Arapawa Island.
Under the pretext of collecting antiscorbutic grasses, on 2 June 1773 a second pair – a fertile doe and a young buck – were secreted into the dense bush of Arapawa Island’s East Bay by Cook, Furneaux and Georg Forster.
A third pair, the doe already in kid, were given to a Ngai Tahu chief on 25 February 1777. This was Cook’s final voyage and his last gift to the people of New Zealand. The particular breed of these goats was not recorded.
Wild Arapawa goats on Arapawa Is.
Photograph Source Unknown
Betty Rowe with her herd of Arapawa Goats on Arapawa Is.
Photograph Source Unknown
According to stories handed down through his ancestors, James Henare Kura Te Au believed that wild pigs and nanny goats were plentiful in the northern region of Queen Charlotte Sound during the period between Cook's voyages and the arrival of the sealers and whalers. Even so, it was not until 1839 that we can definitively place goats on Arapawa Island, when Europeans observed and reported their presence at the Te Awaiti shore whaling station.
The goats lived undisturbed on the island for another one hundred and fifty years. Because the goats were feral and genetically isolated over a long period, they adapted to the ecological environment and evolved into a unique breed.
In the 1970s, the NZ Forest Service took notice of the goats, declaring them pests and destructive to the forest. Unable to produce acceptable proof of their antiquity, rarity, or any immediate commercial potential, the goats faced a programme of severe culling under New Zealand's Department of Conservation (DoC), placing the Arapawa breed under threat of eradication.
Fortunately, the dedicated efforts of Arapawa Island resident Betty Rowe, ably assisted by numerous volunteers, managed to thwart the cull team to some extent, saving a small but viable population. However, with the Department of Conservation's priority remaining the protection of native fauna and flora on its Arapawa Island reserves, culling of the existing goats continues to this day.
To ensure their survival, a number of these goats have been removed from the island and are now being bred by enthusiasts at various locations throughout mainland New Zealand. A breeding group was exported to the USA in 1993, followed by another to Great Britain in 2004.
Then in 2013, in a bid to expand the genetic pool, Alison Sutherland — founder of the New Zealand Arapawa Goat Association — secured the cooperation of the Department of Conservation to recover nine more goats from various locations on the island: three bucks and six does.
Isolated on the 75 square kilometre island of Arapawa in New Zealand’s Marlborough Sounds, there is historical evidence to support the claim the Arapawa goats are direct descendants of three breeding pairs released during Captain Cook’s second and third voyages to the Southern Ocean.
DNA analyses undertaken in Spain in 2007 indicated that the Arapawa goats is a genetically significant breed in its own right, only distantly related to the other breeds investigated at the time.
More recently, analysis using 50K SNP chips and Genotyping by Sequencing has linked them to a now-extinct South African indigenous goat - evidence that supports the histroical record of Cook collecting goats when he anchored at Cape Town.
Today, the American Livestock Conservancy considers the Arapawa one of the rarest goat breeds in the world, with fewer than 500 recorded worldwide.
Yet on Arapawa Island itself, the goats have no future and no formal protection - national or international. Their survival depends entirely on the dedication of people around the world who are passionate about their welfare and determined not to let this beautiful, critically at-risk breed fate into history, preserved only in written records and photographs.
The Arapawa goat deserves a place in the future - our future.
A wild Arapawa Buck on Arapawa Is, Marlborough Sounds, NZ
Photograph Courtesy of : Cameron Leslie
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