Video footage shows dozens of goats storming through the wide-set streets of Silver Creek, a neighborhood in San Jose. In the clip, the animals are seen trotting past detached houses and taking breaks to munch on hedgerows and sniff out trash cans.
Silver Creek resident Terry Roelands told East Bay Times the goats escaped from an enclosure on a nearby hill at around 5.30 p.m. local time.
The animals are brought in each year to clear the brush, he said. This has been happening since the hill caught fire around 15 years ago, when a tractor clearing weeds hit a rock and set the hill alight.
However, it appears things didn’t go quite to plan this time. On Tuesday, the goats made a break for it after one of their number, which had been eating flowers, tapped one of the electric fences, Roelands told NBC Bay Area. This caused the boards on the fence to break, he explained.
From the video, it appears the goats took advantage of the gap in the fence and broke free.
“I’m dead,” Zac Roelands, Terry Roelands’ son, tweeted. “When I got back from the store all the goats had broken through the fence and were recking havoc on our street.”
He added: “This is the craziest thing to happen all quarantine”
The goats were swiftly rounded up and removed.
It is not the first time goats have gone runabout during the coronavirus lockdown. In March, 122 Kashmiri goats ran free in the streets of Llandudno, a coastal town in north Wales.
The goats were pictured chilling in churchyards and grazing on hedges. Some more daring animals were spotted atop stone walls and low roofs.
The goats typically graze in Great Orme, a limestone headland northwest of Llandudno. Under normal circumstances, the animals only enter Llandudno when the weather is bad, but town councilor Carol Marubbi said social quarantine may have encouraged the goats to enjoy the town while people were not present.
Last month, a flock of sheep visited an empty McDonald’s in the Welsh town of Ebbw Vale. The unusual sight was photographed by a local man on his way out of a nearby supermarket. A separate flock was filmed playing on a roundabout in a children’s playground shut during the COVID-19 pandemic, again in Wales.
Elsewhere in the world, lions have been photographed sleeping in the middle of tarmac roads, wild dogs have been filmed playing on golf courses and sika deer have been taking to city streets.
Brian Silliman, a Rachel Carson Distinguished Professor of Marine Conservation Biology at Duke University, told Newsweek animals have changed their behavior in response to the lockdown and, specifically, the absence of people during.
“These are behavioral responses on the order of weeks,” he said. “They are responding quickly to the absence of human disturbance.”
After weeks of lockdown, California Gov. Gerry Newsom has announced plans to begin an easing of the statewide stay-at-home order, including guidelines for dine-in restaurants and allowing certain businesses to reopen. Measures are being taken on a county-by-county basis.
The below infographic from Statista shows the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases by country.
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