Four new Arapawa goats were added to the Goat Yard in the Lacerte Family Children’s Zoo housed within the Dallas Zoo.
Zoo officials announced on Tuesday that the new residents include a 3-year-old female named Solana and a trio of males: 6-year-old Hansel, 2-year-old Vision, and 2-year-old Legolas.
Arapawa goats are believed to have originated from Old English goats that were brought to New Zealand by explorers and gifted to the indigenous Maori people in the 18th century. They later emerged as a feral breed on the island of Arapawa but were nearly wiped out in the 1970s by the New Zealand Forest Service since they were considered a plight on the local plantlife.
While roughly 600 of these distinctive goats continue to live in New Zealand in the wild today, an estimated 200 have been bred in the United States.
While the Dallas Zoo made no mention of how the four new goats would fit into the breeding program, previous posts discussed the effort to help bolster the population of the critically endangered goat breed.
In 2020, two young males named Sven and Moko were brought from the Sedgwick County Zoo to mate with females Susan and Daisy.
In 2021, the pairings resulted in three new kids — the first to be born at the Dallas Zoo — named Oleander, Aster, and Bluebonnet.
This spring, four more kids joined the herd, adding to the zoo’s growing number of animal babies.
As covered in The Dallas Express, new miniature arrivals at the zoo this year include a klipspringer, four lemurs, a giraffe, and an elephant.
Yet some more common goat species can be encountered beyond the zoo premises.
The Dallas Water Utilities Department is piloting a new vegetation management program this summer using goats, as these hooved animals have a natural knack for clearing plant debris.
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, the City aims to use targeted grazing to solve its heavy underbrush problems along its creeks and floodway management areas.
While grazing, goats consume on average 3.5% of their body weight or roughly 5 pounds of dry foliage a day.
