As Sales Vanish, Skins Stay on Alligators

After five years, Tommy Fletcher and his alligator farming business are facing irreconcilable differences.

“It’s like a marriage,” he said. “It was a bumpy road, and then all of a sudden it was over.”

The alligator industry makes for an odd mix of hardy men on the bayou who smoke Camels and drive crumbling pickup trucks, and Paris and New York fashion setters who consider it reasonable to spend $12,000 on an alligator-strap watch.

This peculiar relationship worked well enough for decades, but it has soured as of late. Last year Louisiana farmers, who produce most of the world’s alligator skins, collected over 500,000 eggs from the wild. This year, for the first time, most farmers did not pick up any.

The economy is the lead culprit. Since the fall of 2008, even wealthy customers have begun balking at the price of alligator skin products, which can range from the expensive to the wildly expensive. Bumper crops in previous years, people in the industry say, left an oversupply just as the luxury market began to falter.

But some farmers insist that the newfound frugality of the Gucci set cannot by itself explain the absolute washout of the alligator business. More than a few are beginning to blame the practices of executives in the European fashion business.

“How can this industry fall out so quickly?” Stephen Bonnecarrere asked while tossing live alligators into bins at his father-in-law’s farm outside Houma. “It happened too fast.”

Since the 1980s, the State Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has worked with farmers to maintain the state’s alligator population, estimated at one million to two million.

Alligator farming is hard, messy, costly work, and the lifestyle could not be further from that of the eventual Bergdorf Goodman shopper browsing for a pair of alligator skin loafers. Farmers, often in father-son teams, mark alligator nesting sites from helicopters, then go into the swamps by boat to gather the eggs, fending off mama gators with a pole. (By law, 12 percent of the grown alligators are returned to the wild.)

The landowners are paid for the eggs, and it is expensive to raise an alligator once hatched. The big ones — those that could end up as lavender handbags — tend to bite one another, making the skins worthless. So roughly 9 of 10 alligators reach their demise when they are only about four feet long.

Stolid men wade into shallow tanks and pull the alligators out by hand. Biting happens. After the gators are killed with a stab to the brain, they are skinned and sorted: heads and claws for the French Quarter souvenir shops, meat for the Cajun restaurants, guts for turtles, dogs or anything else whose tastes run that way.

full article:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/us/30gator.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss