Park got its goats: ‘Safer than RoundUp’
BY ALEJANDRA
O’CONNELL-DOMENECH
Goats are cleaning up another
Gotham park.
The Riverside Park Conservancy
unleashed 24 goats in a fenced-in
stretch of Riverside Park from 119th St.
to 125th St. as part of a new “Goatham”
initiative.
Hopes are that the herd will fi nally
be able to tame the unruly area, which
has become overgrown due to the prevalence
of viney invasive plants, poison
Skittles, one of the grass-guzzling crew currently busily munching in
Riverside Park.
ivy and a slope too steep for a lawnmower.
“It’s cheaper than machinery, cheaper
than people with machinery and
safer than RoundUp,” Larry Cihanek,
owner of Green Goats Rhinebeck, told
ABC news when he brought the goats
to the park on May 21.
According to the Riverside Park Conservancy,
the animals are a more environmentally
friendly means to remove
unwanted plants from a landscape and
are much more effi cient than humans.
Goats can daily consume up to 25 percent
of their body weight in vegetation,
including poison ivy, and can traverse
places that humans cannot.
Goats have been used locally to get
rid of invasive plants before, on Staten
Island in 2012, when phragmites,
an invasive reed, started choking the
shoreline. In 2016, Brooklyn Bridge
Park used four Nubian goats to tackle
weeds, and the Prospect Park Alliance
enlisted the help of goats for the same
reason.
But this is the fi rst time the grassgobbling
animals have been used for
this purpose in Manhattan — although
their close cousins, sheep, have been
doing similar work for a few years in
the southern part of the borough.
Since the summer of 2015, St. Patrick’s
Old Cathedral on Mulberry St.
has used three sheep to maintain the
cemetery’s grass in the summer.
“They were the biggest hit,” said
Frank Alfi eri, a ministry director at the
cathedral. “The only problem was the
bi-product.”
According to Alfi eri, the cathedral
will be getting a new pastor this summer,
and it will be up to him to decide if
the bleating trio will return to the cemetery
grounds again. The community is
hopeful that they will be baa-aa-aa-ck.
When Brooklyn (black) and Charlie (brown) take a break from challenging
each other for dominance in the Riverside Park herd, they’re
busy chowing down on invasive vines and other unwanted foliage.
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