GARCIA-NAVARRO: Meaning they can reduce a forest to a lawn in a few years, leaving vulnerable animals like the Galapagos tortoise struggling to survive. CAMPBELL: When they go into a feral state, they absolutely trash the place. They bred widely and there ended up being possibly as many as a hundred thousand goats on Isabella, an Island which is the size of Rhode Island. They were dropped of by fishing and whaling fleets as a means to ensure that fresh meat would be available to them for future trips. Goats arrived on the volcanic islands centuries ago. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Conservationists say the project is the largest of its kind to ever take place. KARL CAMPBELL (Isabella Project): The goal of the Isabella Project is restoring the ecosystems on Isabella and Santiago islands, devastated in the last few decades by feral goats. Both the dogs and Campbell work on the internationally funded, multimillion-dollar Isabella Project. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Karl Campbell walks around a large kennel containing dozens of highly trained hunting dogs, located at the Charles Darwin Research Station, the main conservation and research body on the islands. It involves the regular tools of warfare, helicopters and guns, and then there are the dogs.
Make no mistake, there is a war taking place on the Galapagos Islands.
NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro has the second part of our series. Goats, red ants, even berries are pushing out native species found nowhere else but on this isolated archipelago. The goat is one of a number of species that have arrived on the islands. On the Galapagos Islands off the Pacific coast of South America, conservationists are waging a battle of man vs.
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