Shooting Times & Country Magazine

A silver medal feral goat

Is it possible for me to get a wild goat I have recently been given scored for a medal, as I understand that it is big enough to qualify? I have checked the score levels online and it should be a silver medal.

This is a question that has been asked before and which comes up regularly. While some measuring organisati­ons continue to measure wild (or feral) goats taken in the UK and Ireland, the CIC stopped doing this in 2014. The scores and measuring methods you can find on the internet are those that applied until 2014 when the CIC moved on from using the Red Book and went on to its current system.

Since 2014, there have been motions presented to the CIC on behalf of some continenta­l hunting associatio­ns to reinstate feral goats, but these have not been successful. There is no doubt that some mature feral billies produce large and impressive sets of headgear and that this appeals to stalkers, particular­ly those from the Nordic countries and the USA.

The main objection to the reinstatem­ent has been the long expressed view that the establishe­d population­s are not truly wild and that their numbers have been augmented in all the areas in which they occur in the UK and Ireland by the release of domestic animals. In other words, feral goats are a hybrid of a number of types of domestic goat.

In addition to this, there is a clear perception that they do not offer a sporting target, a view expressed in Shooting Times as far back as the 1970s by the late Lea Macnally, then one of the national foremost deerstalke­rs and naturalist­s, who observed that they are not challengin­g to stalk and they don’t run away.

It’s unlikely that feral goats will return to the CIC lists in the future, and no score levels will be reinstated for them.