A LIFEGUARD from Bude made a different sort of rescue recently, when he and a team of lifeguards managed to rescue a very weak, tired and hungry goat from the cliffs of Lesvos, Greece, writes Rosie Cripps.

Richie Heard, originally an RNLI lifeguard at Widemouth Bay, near Bude, has been working overseas in Lesvos for the charity Refugee Rescue, helping struggling refugees trying to make it across the border — mainly from Turkey.

However, on a recent mission, Richie and his team came across a goat, who had found itself stranded at the bottom of some cliffs. Richie was going to film the entire ordeal.

Richie and the Refugee Rescue team had been told about the goat by Frontex, the EU’s border agency, who had been watching the goat, located at the bottom of the cliffs of the north coast of Lesvos, for a few days. When Richie and his team reached the goat, she was looking very tired and had clearly been stuck at the bottom of the cliffs for some time.

“At first she did put up a bit of a fight, but she eventually gave in,” Richie said. “I think she’d probably been there quite a few days, and had fallen down the cliff.”

The next step of the rescue was to be a tricky time. Somehow, the crew had to figure out how to transport the goat from the cliffs to their rescue boat, and they had no choice but to ‘swim her’. Richie continued: “We put her in yellow slings, typical of what we’d use on the beaches at Widemouth when on a rescue, and we sort of made it up as we went along. I thought she might really struggle at this point because she was so tired, but she kicked her legs and kept her head afloat — she did really well.”

Once the goat, named ‘Dolly’ by crew members, was safely sat in the boat, with blankets sheltering her from the cold, the team tried to contact the animal’s owner when they got back to land. However, no-one came forward to claim her. The goat was then taken back to a camp that also houses refugees, and she spent the night in a tent.

“She was quite weak, so I thought she might die overnight, but the next morning she was fine so we walked her about 500 metres down the road and put her on a bit of vegetation so she could make her own way. It was 45 minutes later when we got back to the camp and were sat having coffee, that we discovered she had followed us and was stood right behind us.

“She stayed with us for a while, just chilling out, which became a bit of a problem because you can’t have a goat wandering around the camp.”

After around two to three weeks, a farmer eventually came forward and took the goat into his own flock, to the team’s delight. “Now she’s in a new flock, and is part of a herd used for milking,” Richie added.

Richie is now back in the UK and has all his focus on the time he will spend with Refugee Rescue in Lesvos in the spring. Speaking about the current situation in Greece, Richie said: “I’ve done my winter run out there, so at the moment, I’m concentrating on the spring period.

“It is very much still there (the struggle experienced by refugees); we had lots of refugees land at 5am this morning (Friday, February 23). We’re expecting things to get very busy in the spring.”

Following Dolly’s rescue, Richie’s video reached social media page ‘the dodo’, which shared the footage in January and has since received 212,000 views with 38,716 shares across Facebook.