The Platonic ideal of the Judas goat

They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The story so far. Pirates introduced goats to the Galapagos as a source of food. The goats multiplied and ended up posing a threat to the native giant tortoises. The view was taken that the Galapagos' strength does not lie in diversity and rather than cherish the contribution these immigrants were making, the goats needed to be exterminated. So, an attempt was made to eradicate goats from parts of the Galapagos. What does that mean in practice? Helicopters, special hunting dogs from New Zealand, semi-automatic weapons from Italy and lots of rotting goat carcasses. "Carlos, another hunter, talked to me with embarrassment about his experience with corralled goats in Santiago. His task was to shoot goats, one by one, for hours." But the goats started to get good at hiding. So a vet called Karl Campbell suggested capturing goats, fitting them with radio collars and releasing them, as the natural sociability of these "Judas goats" would lead the hunters to other goats. That helped a bit, but sometimes the Judas goats would get pregnant, or just find other collared goats.

The story continues here:

"“I started then to think about how to improve this,” Campbell explained to me in an interview. “What would be the perfect, ideal Judas goats?” He was thinking about a Judas goat that would search for, and be searched for, by other goats in perpetuity. What may sound like a Platonic quest for an ideal animal in fact unfolded in the realm of actual goats. Since veterinarians identified males searching for mates as the main driver of gregariousness, strategies to increase estrus became key. According to Campbell and his colleagues, the literature had established that “estrus duration may be increased by denying penile intromission during estrus” (Campbell et al. 2007, 14)—admittedly rather impractical in the wild. The other known cause of a longer estrus is nymphomania, “a poorly understood condition often diagnosed as cystic ovarian disease” (Campbell et al. 2007, 14). Campbell and his colleagues went on to reflect that “while nymphomaniac behavior would be desirable in Judas goat operations, it is unknown how to induce this condition” (Campbell et al. 2007, 14).

Putting aside the desire for an always desiring goat, Campbell resolved to capture female goats, terminate any pregnancy, sterilize them, and inject hormone implants. As a result of a new procedure, estrus would not last for the typical twenty days per year but for an astonishing one hundred eighty days. Since transportation to a veterinary camp would have been costly and time-consuming, Campbell operated on goats, one by one, on the scorched slopes of Isabela’s volcanoes or the treeless volcanic plains of the lowland. Famous as “the natural laboratory of evolution” (Larson 2001, 125), the Galápagos became less a site for observing gradual changes over time and more a setting for artificial and deliberate variations on mattering: the making of a new goat. With a scalpel, anesthetics, and hormones, PI recombined the elements of female goats into oversexualized individuals, devoid of the ability to bear life but with an irresistible talent for delivering death."

This is clearly a metaphor for something. If you are in any doubt, consider this: after they had been finished with, they also killed the dogs.