How was the Española population of giant tortoise saved? The Galapagos Islands National Park Service began a program of captive breeding and reintroduction in 1973. Using an enclosure on another island to help some of the remaining tortoise to focus on breeding, they were successful in reintroducing more than 1500 of the captivity-raised giant tortoise offspring on the island of Española.

For this effort to be successful, the non-native goats had to be culled, and eventually exterminated. Otherwise, the life-sustaining catci could never have recovered:

"[The goats] would feast on the roots... and chew away at the bark, and eventually that would topple these cacti. And then they had an incredible buffet of maybe 500-1000 years of cactus growth, demolished in a week or two," explained Professor Gibbs, from the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York.