Mischievous goats causing chaos in small Orange County town
BLOOMING GROVE, N.Y. -- Residents in a quiet corner of Orange County are grappling with a goat problem -- nanny, billy, and baby goats wandering into their yards, and even onto their porches.
Neighbors told CBS2 on Wednesday the encounters were funny at first, but no more.
There is a new garage door at the Zapata-Melendez home in Blooming Grove. It was replaced after a billy goat butted a hole in the old one.
"He broke my garage door!" Katia Zapata said.
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Residents of Orchard Lake Park have been documenting the problem for months, which includes goats in the yard, goats at the door, and goats outside the window.
Residents say the critters keep escaping from their enclosure at a property being developed into a resort. They said when it first started happening, they laughed about it. They thought it was funny. They thought the goats were kind of cute.
"It was like, 'Oh, look, goats in our yard.' But after I contacted the town in January, it actually got worse. It went from once a week to sometimes being every day, or twice a day," Blooming Grove resident Ray Morgan said.
Morgan said his wife runs a licensed day care in their home, and the goats have on occasion been aggressive.
"One morning, a parent was dropping off their child and literally had to pick the child up and scurry up the sidewalk because all the billy goats were harassing them while they were trying to get into the house," Morgan said.
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Carlos Melendez said a similar thing happened to his grandkids, who were approached by goats in the yard.
"They came and started getting really close. Now, I can't run. I'm disabled. So I couldn't scare 'em off. It was pretty scary. I didn't know if they were gonna attack them or what," Melendez said.
On Friday, police came to capture a baby goat that had escaped. The town said it is working with the goat owner to resolve the problems, and keep the critters corralled where they belong.