The race to save the tortoise

The following is a script from "The Race to Save the Tortoise" which aired on Dec. 9, 2012. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent. Andrew Metz, producer.

Not since the dinosaurs disappeared, have animals been going extinct as fast as they are now. Entire species vanish every year.

And while our hearts are moved by the plight of the biggest, whales or elephants, the fiercest, tigers, even sharks and certainly the cutest, like pandas, what about the slowest?

For more information on the Turtle Conservancy, click here.

The turtle, and its land-loving cousin the tortoise, have been plodding along, slow and steady, for more than 200 million years. But their hard shells are little protection from human predators and a booming illegal animal trade.

It may be too late to save many of them, but they have found an unlikely protector in a man named Eric Goode.

Some of New York City's hottest hotels, restaurants and bars are owned by Eric Goode.

[Eric Goode: Hello, I need to say hello to people I haven't said hello to...Hi.]

That's made him rich and comfortable with the glitterati and fashionistas, but behind-the-scenes, he caters to a far less glamorous clientele, endangered turtles and tortoises.

Lesley Stahl: How did the whole interest, if not obsession, with turtles and tortoises begin?

Eric Goode: As a child at six.

Lesley Stahl: At six?

Eric Goode: I was given a small Hermann's tortoise. And that created a budding interest in the natural world and in reptiles, and snakes and lizards, and in my hard-shelled friends that I just fell in love with. And so it was a progression.

It's an obsession that takes him as far from the glitz of the New York scene as imaginable. He wades through swamps, turns over rocks, wrangles exotic snakes and other reptiles, as he searches for his first love.

[Eric Goode: What a beautiful tortoise. This is our first Psammobates tentorius trimeni.]

Turtles and tortoises trace back before the dinosaurs. But now today, about half of the over 300 species are headed toward extinction, largely because of habitat loss and an insatiable market for them -- particularly in Asia -- as food, medicine, rare collectors items and pets.

Lesley Stahl: How big a business is the turtle, tortoise trade?

Eric Goode: China alone is probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This trade flourishes because the payoff is huge and the chance of getting prosecuted and incarcerated are very low.

Lesley Stahl: If you're going to be in something illicit this is the safest or one of the safest.

Eric Goode: And that's a tragedy.

Eric Goode is spending a million dollars a year of his own money to fight the trade in places like Madagascar, an island off the coast of Africa, that's vastly undeveloped.

Eric Goode: People are so poor, some of these villages make less than a dollar a day. Or it's basically subsistence living. And there just simply isn't the political will of the country to really enforce, you know, what's going on with their natural heritage. Whether it's tortoises or other wildlife.

Fly over Madagascar and you can see why conservationists say it's bleeding to death: rivers run red with soil erosion from logging and slash-and-burn agriculture that have wiped-out animal habitats and 90 percent of the country's forests.

And yet because of its isolation, Madagascar is a paradise of plants and animals found nowhere else - like the wide-eyed lemurs, chameleons that sparkle with color, geckos that hide in plain sight, more than 200 kinds of frogs, and five species of rare turtles and tortoises.

Eric was taking us on a trek to find the fastest-disappearing animal in Madagascar -- the plowshare tortoise whose shrinking habitat is so deep in the wilderness it's only accessible by boat.

Eric Goode: This tortoise is one of the world's most endangered animals. It is the world's most endangered tortoise. And it has an incredibly high price on its head. Asian countries love gold and this is a gold tortoise. And so literally, these are like gold bricks that one can pick up and sell.

We were following the path the poachers take, landing on a deserted beach and off we went on a long hike. We walked through scrub brush in blazing heat for almost an hour.

Eric Goode: If the sun gets too high up, they just disappear.

The once plentiful plowshare population here, he says, could be down to as few as 300 adults.

Eric Goode: And this is where the guards are based.

Goode has helped hire around 40 locals to go out and find the tortoises before the poachers do.

Angelo: We have to be on a team of many people.

Eric Goode: Different lines, 30 feet apart.

Angelo: Yeah

Eric Goode: Alright, let's go.

We lined up the way police do when they search for a missing person and by midday, with a lot of help, we got lucky.

Angelo: They found one!

Lesley Stahl: Oh, look at that.

Eric Goode: Wow.

Lesley Stahl: How did you ever find it?

Eric Goode: Wow, oh, it's a beautiful female. This is a just a perfect, perfect female. This tortoise is a crown jewel. This is a beautiful animal.

Lesley Stahl: Look at her.

Eric Goode: And you see this, this incredible domed shell that's unique with this tortoise. Nothing has-- no turtle has this shell, like an army helmet. This is a very, very valuable tortoise.

Based on his own research, Goode says a tortoise like this could sell for $60,000 in Asia. To try and stop the trafficking, he and his colleagues have begun doing the unthinkable.

Lesley Stahl: It's a drill. Oh my god.

Eric Goode: He has to be very careful not to hit the bone 'cause then we'll draw blood. So he's going just that very carefully, 16th of an inch into the shell.

They want to leave an indelible gash - a scar -- that makes the tortoises undesirable to collectors.

Lesley Stahl: I have to tell you, watching Angelo do this, it's painful. It is painful to watch.

Eric Goode: Yeah. No, it's very hard. But I think we're at a point where we're down to so few animals. There's so few of these tortoises left, that we have to really take extreme measures.

Lesley Stahl: Scarring the shells of these animals, defacing them, etching, is that working? Can you tell yet?

Eric Goode: It is too soon to know if that's working. It breaks your heart to have to do that to this beautiful, beautiful shell. I mean you can compare it maybe to chain sawing off a rhinoceros' horn to save a rhino. I mean, how horrible is that?

To show us what he's up against, Eric took us to a market in a small city called Mahajunga - where we saw - with our hidden camera - shells of endangered tortoises out in the open on display for sale. And soon we were being offered live tortoises.

Lesley Stahl: So what is this?

Eric Goode: This is a spider tortoise from southern Madagascar. This is critically endangered. And the Chinese sometimes just puncture the shell, just to eat the liver out of this tortoise.

One of the vendors showed up with something in a plastic bag.

Lesley Stahl: What is it?

Eric Goode: Wow.

It was a radiated tortoise, on the endangered species list. Asking price? Just $400. We were even offered a plowshare tortoise if we paid up front and waited several days. But that would've meant breaking Madagascar and international laws against smuggling an endangered animal.

Lesley Stahl: How hard was it for you to not take that tortoise and save its life? If you leave it behind, who knows where it's going to end up.

Eric Goode: It's incredibly frustrating. This animal is from such a tiny geography. You'd think you could wall it in and protect it.

There is one place in Madagascar that is trying to wall them in and protect them behind locks and razor wire: this national park, deep in a forest.

Lesley Stahl: Are these automatic rifles?

Richard Lewis: They certainly are, yep.

Richard Lewis is with the British conservation group Durrell, which runs this refuge and breeding center.

Richard Lewis: Be careful of the youngsters here.

Lesley Stahl: They're all over the place.

Richard Lewis: Yeah, just be careful--

Lesley Stahl: Oh, here's some.

Richard Lewis: Watch where you step and then come on over.

Lesley Stahl: Oh my word--

Richard Lewis: These are all adult males.

Lesley Stahl: Look at them. Do you know how old they are?

Richard Lewis: This could be 50 years old, 100 years old, 150, 200 years old.

Eric Goode: I mean, this is the longest-lived animal on the planet.

Their longevity is one of the reasons they're so valuable. Asian collectors believe owning one confers long life on them. The black market trade is now so lucrative that crime syndicates are involved. The center was robbed in the late 1990s in what was called one of the heists of the century.

Lesley Stahl: So people actually broke into this compound, the breeding center with all the security, and stole--

Richard Lewis: Seventy-five youngsters and two adults. They stole-- at that moment in time it was half of our-- half of the youngsters we'd ever bred.

Since then, with the help of Eric Goode, the population of plowshares here has rebounded.

Richard Lewis: This is the female enclosure.

Eric Goode: These girls are responsible for producing 300 offspring, 300 animals that you are looking at in this entire enclosure.

Very few people have ever seen them actually produce offspring, even here. But as we were just about to leave, one of the females wandered off - and to everyone's surprise -- began to dig a nest for laying eggs.

Lesley Stahl: Richard, have you ever seen this before?

Richard Lewis: No.

Lesley Stahl: You have never seen it?

Richard Lewis: Me, personally, no. It's the luck of the draw, as it were.

Being a tortoise, the work was very slow and very plodding.

Eric Goode: It's remarkable. You think those legs are just these stubby, elephantine feet, but they're very good at cupping the soil and digging this incredible little hole.

Lesley Stahl: Yeah and she could be what, 60, 70 years old?

Eric Goode: Yeah, 100 years old.

It took her almost an hour and then!

Eric Goode: Oh! There's the egg

Lesley Stahl: Oh my god.

Eric Goode: Oh my god.

Lesley Stahl: Is she going to do another one?

Eric Goode: Yup, yup! There it goes, there is goes. Number two.

Eric Goode: This is what you work for. And even more so when the little tortoise, when the hatchling comes out, it is-- you feel like you've broken a secret code.

Goode wants to emulate this kind of success back in the United States - with not just plowshares but dozens of other species. He has his own breeding center in the mountains outside of Los Angeles that he began with 150 turtles and tortoises given to him for safekeeping by the Bronx Zoo.

Eric Goode: They were trucked across the United States and they were the first guests in my tortoise hotel.

Each species is pampered like a guest at one of Goode's hotels with fresh cut flowers, salad greens and a tortoise smoothy blended with organic milk.

Eric Goode: Each species needs a different ecosystem. Like this tortoise, for example, is from Burma. And this is biologically extinct in the wild.

Eric Goode: And these guys need to be kept warm and-- very high humidity.

He now has 680 animals from 30 endangered species.

Eric Goode: This is a turtle from India and Bangladesh-- maybe a little bit into Pakistan.

And these turtles-- that elsewhere would be on the menu.

Eric Goode: It's called the golden coin turtle, probably one of the top 25 most endangered turtles in the world.

And young Galapagos tortoises that'll grow to 400 pounds.

Eric Goode: These were bred at a zoo in Texas and they've been raised here.

Lesley Stahl: Don't come for my toes.

But Eric Goode says he doesn't want any of his guests to stay too long!

Eric Goode: Ideally, we'd like to send these animals back to the wild.

Lesley Stahl: Why would you send them back? There's no protection for them back in the wild.

Eric Goode: It may be too soon to send a lot of them back.

Lesley Stahl: And can you? I mean, let's be realistic.

Eric Goode: I don't know yet, but I think it's important to show that we're not just bringing animals into captivity and keeping them there forever.

For now, he's fulfilling his dream by protecting 11 plowshares and trying to breed more. Last year he hatched 250 other tortoises and turtles. Eric Goode is like Noah, building a safe haven for - in some cases - the last of these animals on earth.