They’re everywhere in the Caribbean, these free ranging fowl and livestock. Ramble down any road and you’re sure to see some cocky roosters, rounded hens, peeping chicks and an assortment of goats big and small. They roam without permission from neighbor to neighbor, always on the hunt for food.



The chickens are messy but harmless, eating bugs and scraps from the ground and garbage. The goats, though, can do some serious damage, consuming anything green that’s not penned up.

In St. John I watched a gathering of goats clean a ball field of grass before moving on to a flower clad house for dessert. “Who do they belong to?” I asked a friend.

“Well,” she replied, “If you hit one with a car, the owner will step forward and collect the animal’s value. But if one eats your precious tree or wipes out your garden, that goat is a free agent.”

Our seventy-some year old friend in Anguilla, Ralph Carty, reminisces about the old days when people ate island grown food. These days it arrives half ripe by boat or plane. I thought the change came because people gave up gardening. “No," he said. “De goats. It wuz de goats. De people duz let dem loose and dey eat it all. Dey wreck up de place. But back den, we have so much. Dem wuz happy times.”

One quiet Sunday we were chatting to a local fellow and commented, “There aren’t many cars today, are there?”

He jokingly answered, “No. On Sunday we duz lock up de cars and we lets de goats free.”



These pesky goats can be a curse yet somehow they’re revered. Anguilla’s Philatelic Bureau features the four-legged creatures on a beautiful set of stamps with t-shirts and postcards to match. The island of Antigua was recently represented at the world’s largest sculpture garden in Changchun, China by a two-meter high goat named Calypso.

And of course, they’re featured on every menu…curry goat, goat water, goat roti, and stew goat. The chickens are just as popular: baked, fried, curried, barbequed, stewed, roasted, jerked and in roti.


Now if goat or chicken doesn’t entice your taste buds, there’s always bull foot or oxtail. Thankfully, they don’t roam free.