ALLIGATOR COLLECTION
When you’re a kid learning your alphabet in South Louisiana, A is for alligator.
I don’t know how many people know their state reptile, but where I’m from, we treat ours like a badge of honor.
We grow up hearing tall tales of Pawpaw’s gator hunts or the time one came into the backyard with a flood. We hunt them, we wear them, we eat them, and we use their likeness in every way imaginable, but more than anything, we respect them.
That wasn’t always the case, though. For decades, their population dwindled because of overhunting and disappearing habitat. By the 1970s, fewer than 100,000 remained. Hunting stopped, protections were put in place, an alligator management program was developed, and the undertaking to save a species began.
After more than 50 years of monitoring, research, responsible farming, habitat protection, and managed harvesting, Louisiana’s wild alligator population is more than 3 million and thriving.
Our alligator is a story of survival and resilience, of a people learning to live with the wild world without depleting it to extinction. It’s a story of learning to use our power to preserve what could so easily be lost.
