I know many hunters who prefer hunting for ibexes to other hunts but they never call themselves hunters for goats but only hunters for sheep. Why is it so?
There is a subculture of wild sheep hunting in the world. It's the highest castle in the hunting world. The sheep are not so cautious as other antelopes or deer. They can't rip you to shreds like a bear or some of the big cats or to blast you out as the elephant or a bison can do. But the wild sheep are gorgeous in any case and they make you to travel by the most exotic places on our planet with the most beautiful landscapes. But you can say the same about ibexes. But! The most of hunters identify themselves as the sheep hunters first. I'd never heard during my long hunting career that any hunters bragged that he was a hunter for ibexes.
It's not clear why. Are the wild sheep more beautiful the ibexes or markhors? The only thing, why the hunting for sheep (Ovis) can be more preferable, is meat quality. It doesn’t smell and is much tasty. But we don’t hunt for meat! Hunting for goats is also difficult as for sheep and takes place in even more remote and hard-to-reach places, and no less beautiful mountains. The goats habitat in the places where the sheep are afraid to go. Wild goats form several families with different numbers of species, horn configurations, and external coloration. They are very diverse. We know that animals belong to Capra can be different size from small like chamois to big ones like ibexes or markhors. There are the real originals like a white goat from the Rocky Mountains or a Asian Tahr. We know about several goats, like turs from Caucasus who are considered to be sheep by some hunters. There are transition forms between ibexes and sheep - like an aoudad, a dwarf blue sheep, the sheep hunters treat them like sheep.
The cult of hunting sheep hasn't appeared long time ago and it was Jack O'Connor's doing. Jack O'Connor was fond of sheep hunting. The nature has deprived the Western hemisphere of ibexes! Four varieties of sheep live there and only one type of North American goat - the goat of the Rocky Mountains. In the post-war era, a new generation of American hunters, such as Herb Klein and Elgin Gates managed to instill in the world that the most prestigious hunting in the world is hunting wild sheep.
It was not always so. One of the classics of North American hunting, William T. Hornaday, spent many days and nights with a rifle in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. At the beginning of 20s in the last century, the trophy of a goat was a nice and the main trophy while sheep were the additional bonus. Same years Kermit Roosevelt traveled to Tian Shan (it's the Western China now) and wrote the detailed report about that expedition “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”. He described an Ibex as the main and the best trophy while they met argali very often and hunted them for meat only.
Today, everything is different. Wild sheep are the most prestigious trophies not only in North America, but also for mountain hunters around the world. The cult of sheep hunting has possessed to all hunters’ minds and make prices for such hunts to rise. Ibexes ... They belong to the second sort now. Snobbism is the partial reason of it. In part, this phenomenon has quite justified reasons. Goats live in the places that are not available for a habitat of other species including sheep and are better protected from the predators by the nature. It should also be taken into account that most species of goats are fertile and hardier than sheep, and more resistant to diseases. It means that ibex hunting is more available then sheep hunting. It’s good if you are fond of mountain hunting because the price for a ibex hunting is lower than hunting for a sheep though they can dwell in the same area.
But the situation changes. Ibex hunting is gaining more and more fans. GSCO confirms: CapraWorldSlam has the same status as OvisWorldSlam. There are several exceptions. The hunting for markhors and bezoar ibexes are allowed in Pakistan but not all trophies can be legally imported to USA that's why this hunting is the most expensive hunt even if we compare it with the most expensive sheep hunts in the world. But in total, the hunting for ibexes with the same service level is cheaper than the sheep hunting.
Hunting for a American Mountain Goat is organized in the same area as hunting for sheep. The price for that hunt has risen so much that I’m not sure that it’ll be called “The mountain hunt for the poor” as it has been not long time ago. In 2009, the price for a hunt for a American Mountain Goat was in twice cheaper than hunting for a Dall sheep.
Elsewhere, the differences can be even more striking. In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, you can hunt for Ibexes in the same mountains where you can hunt for Marco Polo. Kermit Roosevelt paid for the ibex hunting just a quarter of the cost of hunting argali. Mongolia is another great example. A couple of years ago I admitted that couldn’t allow myself to pay for a Gobi argali hunt, not talking about the monstrous cost of hunting the Altai Argali. But I dreamed to hunt in Mongolia and Bob Kern suggested me the next. We'd start from hunting for a Siberian roe deer and a wolf, then travel to Gobi and to hunt for a Gobi mountain goat and gazelle, after that we should travel once more to Altai and to hunt for a Siberian mountain goat. I spent three weeks in Mongolia, visited three geographical zones and took seven trophies. I paid the half price for all of them as if I had to pay for a Gobi argali hunting.
If you look at the problem globally, you will notice that hunters have identified many more races of sheep than ibexes. You should have twelve trophies of sheep or ibexes to get the WorldSlam. GSCO established awards for hunting for twenty, thirty and even forty kinds of mountain ungulates. Rex Baker, winner of the Weatherby Award, said in a conversation with me: “It's easy to get thirty sheep/ But not so easy to hunt for thirty ibexes!” But it was so. Or is it just my imagination?
The North America is an abnormal territory in the sense that there is only one ibex for every four (or six, if you count the California and Fannin bighorn) sheep. The situation in Europe is different. There are six (depending on what taxonomy you follow) mountain goats and six chamois to the only mouflon. You can get CapraWorldSlam even not leaving the continent. Asia offers a wide variety of both. Prices for ibexes there are lower because the outfitters have more permits. Africa is the complete opposite of everyone: hunting for Walia ibex are prohibited for years while an aoudad and a Nubian ibexes are the most complicated animals to hunt. There are not original bovids in the southern part of the Pacific Ocean and South America, just the introduced ones.
Today, there is a great opportunity to hunt ibex on almost all continents of the Old World. In recent years, I have spent very little time hunting sheep. I want more but can't allow to myself. But I traveled a half of the world, hunted for two Mongolian mountain goats, for a couple of Spanish ibexes, for a Kri-Kri ibex in Greece, I got several chamois in Europe, Pyrenees, Carpathians and Balkans, had Dagestan tur in Azerbaijan and a tahr in New Zealand. Well, what's wrong with being an ibex hunter?
THE GOAT HUNTER
By Craig Boddington
