Cristobal Colomb Cuenca herding captured wild goats
© AFP/File Rodrigo Buendia

GALAPAGOS ISLANDS, Ecuador (AFP) - "In order for the Galapagos to survive, all animals -- dogs, cats, wild goats and donkeys -- introduced to the archipelago by humans must perish," said one guards as he reloaded his weapon some 60 meters (100 feet) above the arid terrain.

Felipe Cruz, who heads the hunt against the island's goats, says that pirates first brought the wild herbivores to Isabella Island, where they have bred to such an extent that giant tortoises that compete with goats for the same food suffer as a result.

Some 90 percent of the giant creatures that brought these islands acclaim disappeared over the past three decades, their number now reduced to a few tens of thousands.

A poacher with a captured wild goat in the Galapagos
© AFP/File Rodrigo Buendia

"We get more than three million dollars for hunting the goats, and we have already killed 80,000 of them," Cruz said, adding that dogs, cats, donkeys and pigs will be his next targets.

The mission functions on a 12.5 million dollar fund from the Charles Darwin Foundation, an organization intended to preserve research and the environment on the islands, and directed by European and US scientists.

However Ecuadoran natives, for whom goat meat is a staple, are at best indifferent to the researchers and scientists of the world who consider the islands a unique window and laboratory to evolution.

Cristobal Colomb Cuenca, a poacher who poorly hides his distaste for what the national guards are doing, makes his living off of hunting these very animals.

"These people, when they are not going about massacring our goats, spend their time sleeping, poisoning our dogs and stealing money from international organizations," he said.

Manuel Valverde(R) and his son pack goat meat in the Galapagos
© AFP/File Rodrigo Buendia

He has just captured five dogs and six goats, that he will sell later in the day for about 15 dollars a piece.

"Hunting brings me between 300 and 500 dollars a months, but sometimes it happens that I capture 100 goats in one day and earn 1,500 dollars," he said.

Luis Moreno Baragan, a goat meat trader, said the islands' economy depends mainly on the lucrative market and calls people who consider goats an ecological threat "total hypocrites."

Carlos Valle, a Princeton-train Ecuadoran biologist who is viewed as one of the leading specialists on the Galapagos, believes that it is necessary to "correct the predatory influence of man" in order to preserve the 8,000-square-kilometer (4,800-square-mile) archipelago.

"Although evolution here has been preserved some 95 percent thanks to the late discovery of the archipelago by man, at the start of the sixteenth century, the current rate of environmental pollution is one of the highest in the world," he said.

Poachers herding captured wild goats
© AFP/File Rodrigo Buendia

"The dogs have decimated the marine iguana population," he said. "And the pigs destroy the nests of the marine tortoises, uproot the native plants, while the rats feed off of the iguana eggs," he said.

"But the main plague is the humans -- because of the tourism and fishing industries, they have grown in number from a few hundred thirty years ago to 30,000 inhabitants," he aid.

"Of course, the main difference is that we will not be able to eradicate them like we do the goats."

©AFP