A small New Jersey town became an open pasture for about 75 sheep and goats who bolted from a livestock auction Wednesday night — and at least a dozen of them still roamed free Thursday morning, a police spokesman said.

The animals escaped through an unsecured gate at the Hackettstown Livestock Auction on West Stiger Street around 9:30 p.m., cops said.

It took about an hour for police and locals to herd about 50 or 60 of the livestock back to their pens before police resecured the gate with a piece of rope, spokesman Sgt. Darren Tynan told the Post. Cops caught four more by the morning — but between 10 and 20 of them were believed to still be on the loose, he said.

“Come on guys! Let’s go, let’s go!” Instagram user @cmca2108 can be heard saying on video as she herds about a dozen of the animals down a dark street. “Let’s go cross the street!”

“Never did I think I would herd goats and sheep but @boost90 and I can take that one off the bucket list,” she wrote of the comical scene.

It wasn’t clear how the gate became unsecured — but locals jokingly point the finger at another goat nicknamed Fred that escaped from the same auction market more than a year ago and sporadically pops up around the town. In fact, cops received reports that Fred was in the area a couple of hours before the escape.

“Now people are thinking that it’s a conspiracy that this goat unlatched the gate and let out these other animals,” Tynan said.

“Maybe they wanted to join the goat that’s running around with the deer,” Facebook user Diane LaBella Palen commented on the Hackettstown Police Facebook page. “They might have seen him enjoying [his] freedom.”

No one was at the auction at the time, and no injuries were reported.

The escape came less than a week after about 100 goats went on the lam in Idaho, munching their way through a suburban Boise neighborhood in an incident dubbed “Goat-a-Palooza 2018.”

“They are going house to house eating everything in sight,” tweeted Joe Parris of local station KTVB.

The animals were later wrangled onto a truck by the firm We Rent Goats, which appeared to have accidentally set the animals free.

There is no known connection between the Hackensack and Boise incidents, Tynan said.