Barbara Jamison has an old, red Toyota pickup, and when it's parked at her Maple Valley home, you just might find it decorated in goats.

They climb into the bed. They pose -- mountain-goat style -- on the hood. They sometimes perch on top of the cab.

There's Granny, an 11-year-old La Mancha who's down to just one tooth, but can go to the front gate and pull a rope to ring a bell to get Jamison's attention.

There's Violet, black with white ears, a mellow 4-year-old Nubian so sweet she's been "adopted" by the King County Conservation District. She lives with Jamison, but makes yearly appearances at the organization's picnic.

There's the Nubian-cross named Dante, a handsome fellow -- at least by goat standards.

"He's gorgeous," Jamison says.

Jamison, 50, a former wildlife rescue manager in Colorado turned corporate sales representative for FedEx in Seattle, got her first goats seven years ago. Blackberries were threatening to overrun the farm she'd just bought, and she wanted goats to help clear them.

Then, one rainy night, a friend called to say two goats had been abandoned at a feed store in Renton. Jamison brought them home.

Then, at an auction where she was looking for chickens, she realized many goats were being sold for meat. She started rescuing them, bringing them home and keeping them until someone would adopt.

"There's two kinds of animals," she says. "Animals raised for meat and animals raised for pets. The bad news is, at the auction there's no delineation. I try to go and rescue the ones who have been socialized, who have been raised as pets."

To date, more than 300 goats have been rescued and adopted through the privately run effort named Puget Sound Goat Rescue and Adoption. A dozen or so volunteers pitch in to help.

Among them is Bonnie Curran, 59, a retired Boeing manager who spends retirement doing "odd jobs." She heard about Jamison's project last fall.

It's a "goat fix," says Curran, who loves sitting quietly and letting baby goats crawl into her lap.

One of her favorites is Huey, a goat so sickly for a time that "we didn't know if he was going to make it," she says. "He and his friend Pang came to live with me for six weeks."

Curran kept them in a pen outside during the day and parked them on the deck outside her bedroom at night. "Every morning we'd have this 'goat walk' and walk the goats down the stairs," she says with a laugh.

Jamison, who charges $100 to $120 for an adoption, works to dispel what she says are myths about goats: They don't eat tin cans, and male goats don't smell if they're neutered, as all of hers are.

What most people don't realize is how much fun they can be, she says.

Frodo, a Nigerian dwarf-cross, was raised in a dog kennel at home because he was born in winter and there were no other kids to keep him company.

"He was a tiny little thing, a favorite of all the volunteers," she says. "We'd go for walks down the road. He'd get distracted and forget about us. We'd get all the way to the end of the road and he'd suddenly realize he was by himself. He'd leap up into the air and almost do a back flip."

Friends from Maryland come every year to have their family Christmas-card photo taken with the goats because they fell in love with them on a visit, she says. But she knows not everyone understands her fondness for goats, or her passion for rescuing them.

"The initial reaction of people who have never been around them is that I'm from Mars. If they meet them, there's usually a 180-degree turnaround," she says.

"Barbara is not crazy," Curran says.

"She's just very dedicated to rescue work. It's a passion. It's what you feel you were meant to do. There's no pay for this."

For more information, contact Jamison at rescuegoats@yahoo.com.