Morning Rural News for 19 November 2025

On 19 November, RNZ Rural News (1:27), our Project Manager, Charmaine Petereit, discussed the impact of feral goats on our native forests. It's one thing to protect native species through predator control, with the noble and increasingly unreachable Predator Free 2050 goal, which is likely to exclude feral cats from the upcoming release of the Predator Free 2050 Strategy in the new year. And the hugely intensive and expensive rare species intervention programmes.

All this is happening without considering the health of the forest habitats that these rare species rely on to flourish! Ungulates, deer, pigs, and goats are silently devouring our native forests to the extent that they cannot regenerate through natural forest succession. Trees are stripped, seedlings are browsed and trampled, leaving some areas as moonscapes of bare dirt and a forest with no ground cover—just fallen leaves and exposed roots of mature canopy trees standing sentinel as the surrounding forest slowly dies.

The Trust is committed to executing its goat control programme through our goat control contractor, who has the social licence to operate on our private land project area bordering Abel Tasman and Kahurangi National Parks. Our contractor will also cull pigs during this process. As Morning Report journalist Corin Dann noted, it would be much easier if goats were a bit more responsible and respected borders; however, all feral ungulates go where the food is, and nature knows no boundaries!