Feral goats in Australia
Invasive animal species in Australia
Feral goats are an invasive animal species in Australia. First arriving in the 18th century with European settlers, feral goat populations originated from escaped domestic individuals. Today, feral goats are found across Australia, where they cause economic and environmental damage through overgrazing and competition with livestock and native marsupials.
History
Feral goats came to Australia with the first fleet in 1788. For instance, cashmere goats were brought into South Australia in 1837. In the 1860s, angora goats and cashmere goats were imported from Asia in an order to start a goat fibre industry. Some herds were set free when the industry collapsed in the 1920s. Goats were also taken around Australia with settlers, railway construction groups and miners. The recent populations of the feral goat have established from goats used to control weeds in plantation forests and woody weeds in inland New South Wales and Queensland. The current feral goat populations in Australia represent a mixture of these origins.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Feral goats in Australia” is invasive animal species in Australia. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Feral, goats and Australia, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “invasive animal species in Australia” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5443749. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1788 and 1837.
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This entry incorporates text from “Feral goats in Australia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.