Every tahr in New Zealand can trace its bloodline back to a small group of animals presented as a gift in 1904 by the 11th Duke of Bedford from his private herd at Woburn Abbey in England. Six animals were sent. Sources disagree on whether five or six survived the trip and on the exact mix of bulls and nannies, but everyone agrees that a small founding population was released in the alpine country near The Hermitage at Aoraki/Mount Cook.
A few more were added in 1909 and 1919. Failed releases were attempted at Rotorua and at the Franz Josef Glacier. The Aoraki population took. By 1920 there were perhaps a hundred tahr in the central Southern Alps. Within a few decades they had spread north to Arthur's Pass and south past the Haast.
The animals were originally protected to encourage hunting tourism, then unprotected in 1930 to encourage hunters in general. By 1937 the government had begun cull operations to protect alpine vegetation. By the late 1960s the cull had gone industrial: the helicopter arrived. Through the early 1970s tahr were shot from helicopters and recovered for the wild-meat trade — sold, often, as "roe deer" — at rates exceeding a hundred carcasses a day. Roughly forty thousand animals were killed in just over a decade. The population very nearly collapsed.
In 1983 a moratorium on commercial hunting brought the slaughter to a halt. The tahr population recovered fast — around 20% per year by the best estimates — and by the early 1990s the question of how to manage them had become a political problem.
The answer, in 1993, was the Himalayan Tahr Control Plan. Drafted under the Wild Animal Control Act 1977, it set a maximum population of ten thousand animals across a defined feral range of 706,000 hectares of public conservation land, Crown pastoral leases and private high-country farms. The plan was meant to be reviewed every five years. The first review was due in 1998. It never happened.
Three more things matter from the modern era.
In 2013 the Game Animal Council Act passed into law. It recognises tahr (and chamois, deer and a few others) as game animals, distinct from the pest framing of the 1977 Act, and creates a category called a Herd of Special Interest. A herd designated under this category can, in principle, be managed for hunting. So far no tahr herd has been formally designated, but advocacy groups continue to push for it.
Through 2018, 2019 and 2020 the country went through what hunters call Tahrmageddon: a sequence of aerial cull operations approved by the Minister of Conservation that targeted bulls inside the national parks and dramatically increased flying hours elsewhere. Hunters mobilised. A petition gathered tens of thousands of signatures. The NZ Tahr Foundation took the Minister to the High Court.
In NZ Tahr Foundation v Minister of Conservation [2020] NZHC 1669, Justice Dobson found that the Department of Conservation's consultation process had been unlawful — too rushed, too cursory — and ordered DOC to reconsider its decision. Approved flying hours that year were halved, from 250 down to 125. Costs were awarded to the Foundation. The substance of DOC's eradication mandate inside the national parks was not overturned, only the process around it.
Today the population sits at roughly thirty thousand animals across the seven Management Units. Aerial surveys carried out in 2023 give a mean estimate of around 29,800, with a confidence range running from 22,000 to about 40,000. Politics aside, the herd is healthy, hunting is open, and the bulls are out there.