Local man suspects DoC cull behind goat carcasses washing up at Castlecliff Beach

One of the feral goats DoC are culling.

The Department of Conservation says it is doing all it can to manage a large scale goat cull in the Whanganui area.

Last week Castlecliff Beach guardian Potonga Neilson discovered a number of goat carcasses had washed up on shore and declared the beach unsafe for children or pets.

Neilson suspected some of the washed up goat carcasses were from a DoC cull up the river.

DoC's biodiversity ranger, Tai Edmonds, said during large scale goat control operations all efforts were made to ensure the hunted goats were managed carefully.

Some of the culling took place on private land, he said, where goats were pests and hunted throughout the catchment area.

Edmonds said goats devour the shrub layer and ground cover of the forest, especially the seedling and saplings of broadleaved canopy trees.

"This reduces or prevents the recruitment of these species into the canopy to replace older trees. It eventually results in changes to the composition of the canopy or even canopy collapse," he said.