Spanish

From the 1500s the Spanish carried goats to the Caribbean and then into what became Mexico and the United States. The foundation animals were an undifferentiated Mediterranean type, once ordinary in Spain and now gone from it entirely. That is the conservation argument for this breed: the American population is what remains of a type that no longer exists where it came from.

Goats did well here. They gave milk, meat and hides, they went wherever the Spanish went, and they became a mainstay of subsistence farming across the southern half of North America and down through Central and South America. There was a second reason to eat goat. It kept the cattle free for draft work, which crops and transport depended on.

For more than three hundred years these were the only goats across the southern United States. Isolation and natural selection produced many regional types and strains, some domestic and some feral.

That ended when other goat breeds began arriving in the second half of the 1800s. Most Spanish goats in the US were crossed into them, usually for dairy.