LETTERS

What’s that over tahr?

In January this year, I hiked up to Kloof Corner on Table Mountain. Our group was going up the first cliff section when we saw nine mountain goats – two of them were kids. I had never seen such an animal before and neither had the other members of our group.

We later did some research and found out they’re Himalayan tahrs, the ancestors of which escaped from the Groote Schuur Zoo in the 1930s and made Table Mountain their home.

There have been several attempts to cull the tahrs because they’re an exotic species and they damage the sensitive fynbos, but at the moment they seem to be thriving on