Law made it illegal to capture, kill alligators
by YAHOO, houmatoday.comOctober 20th 2012 1:25 AM
Well more than a century ago, around 1900, coastal Louisiana residents began to take action toward maintaining the balance of nature, recognizing that without natural predators, muskrat populations exploded, to the detriment of crops and levees.
"Alligator Versus Muskrat," an article published in Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer in 1908 told why a law against the capture and killing of alligators passed in Plaquemine Parish some 10 years earlier. It was likely to be followed by a similar state law.
The Plaquemine law, the article says, "would have made the persecuted Saurians of the Lower Coast smile with happiness," if it had been respected and enforced.
"Now Representative Welsh, of Calcasieu Parish, has made alligator protection a Statewide matter. ... This law ought to, and probably will, be passed before the fast approaching adjournment of the present session of our State Legislature."
The reasons for defending "our harmless and peace-loving Louisiana alligator are founded on desires and intents to preserve the local balance of predatory animal life. Within the years of this living generation of men the alligators of Louisiana and Florida have been almost exterminated by hordes of hide hunters on account of the high and steadily rising market value of their scaly skins."
The "recent decrease of our alligators has been followed by a correlative increase in the swarming millions of muskrats that inhabit our marshes, infest our rice fields and depredate to a considerable extent our cane fields located in reclaimed swamp lands.
"And, worst of all, the enormously augmented supply of muskrats increases the menace from these vermin to the safety of our Mississippi River levees in seasons of high vernal and summer floods."
The muskrat explosion, the article reasoned, "betokens that these rodents of the marshes must have always formed an important part of the Saurian's bill of fare."
Adult muskrats, "although slow and clumsy ashore, are as nimble as fish in the water. The muskrat villages are usually placed in the most treacherous part of the "trembling marsh," inaccessible to man, but easily accessible to alligators.
"Conjecture alone may suggest how many fat and juicy young muskrats might be consumed in a breeding season by one good and healthy alligator comfortably holed in the midst of an average-sized muskrat village. Alligator hunters usually find the muskrat marshes the best alligator marshes."
Another natural muskrat predator, the article says, was the mink. "Minks are more destructive to muskrats in their maturity than are alligators. The mink follows the muskrat ashore, trailing and running him down, murdering him and sucking his blood, just as he hunts to the death the nimble wood rabbit and the fleet marsh-hare.
"He may also pursue the aquatic rodent in the water, being swifter as a swimmer than the little beast he hunts and an equally good diver. Of late years the enhancement of the value of mink skins by several hundred percent, or from one dollar apiece to three or four for first class skins, has resulted in the trapping of many thousands of these animals during recent years. Hence the multiplication table of the muskrats has had the advantage of the large elimination of its two principal negative factors." Yet, a prohibition against mink trapping was judged unlikely.
Enforcement of the alligator ban would be crucial. "Although the efficient sheriff of Plaquemine Parish has occasionally captured and confined a hermit alligator hunter, and made formidable cruises after squads of them, who have evaded him by fleeing to the marsh domains of neighboring parishes, that parochial law has been largely and persistently violated.
"A state law would be likewise disregarded by the professional alligator slayers unless it could be enforced by the seizure and confiscation of all alligator hides at their points of sale and distribution. ... Officers of the law might as well hope to find the proverbial needle in the haystack as to catch professional alligator-hunters in our tidal marshes.
"In the meantime ... these vermin have already added to the cost of rice-culture by cutting the levees meant to hold in the irrigation water and devouring the rice shoots and stalks in extensive fields.
"To a more limited extent they have thinned out stands near the ditch banks in our more depressed Lower Coast cane fields; and, as our state engineers and sugar planters well know, they are proving a source of annually greater danger to our great levee system during periods of high water along the lower part of the Mississippi River.
"If the salvation of our alligators should not result in the desired damnation of the vastly multiplied muskrat species, the parochial governments of the parishes most affected and the state at large will be forced to take some practical means to bring about their reduction or destruction. Perhaps public trapping, wholesale poisoning of their villages, and the payment of bounties on their scalps might accomplish this result. The muskrat must go."
Coincidentally, a state program aimed at reducing the loss of swamp vegetation to the invasive nutria, uses "tails," not scalps, as a basis for paying a bounty.
The Courier and Daily Comet are looking for your old photographs and the memories that go with them. In order to protect your valuable photographs, do not send unsolicited photographs. Instead, contact Bill Ellzey at 876-5638 and leave a message. You may also write to him at: The Courier, P.O. Box 2717, Houma, LA 70361 or contact him via email at bill-ellzey@att.net.
Original Page: http://www.houmatoday.com/article/20121020/ARTICLES/121029986/-1/opinion
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Victor Cuvo, Attorney at Law
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