A new bill would create a recreational alligator hunting season in Louisiana, with a $50 lottery entry fee for those interested in partaking. While the Senate will debate the bill in the near future, details are still being ironed out in the Natural Resources Committee when it comes to numbers, methods, and other intricacies. However, according to Don Dubuc, former host of Louisiana's Outdoors on WWL, alligator populations are booming and something creative may need to be done to address the problem.
At one point in the 1970's, alligators were declared an endangered species in Louisiana. Back then, pretty much anyone could go out into the swamp, shoot as many alligators as they wanted, and use them however they pleased. That amount of unregulated hunting caused alligator numbers to plunge. Through different management programs that were implemented at the time, alligators were then augmented from "endangered" to "threatened" in the area. Since then, the gator population has continued to grow fairly unabated.
"With an abundance of alligators and a reduction in the need for them, it's not worth the effort for the hunters to go out and harvest them," notes Dubuc. "By allowing recreational season, that's going to increase the harvest of them. A lot of commercial harvesters are not even filling out their tags because there isn't enough value in it for them," he went on to say. This is a problem because rural areas have seen alligators encroaching into yards and even attacking pets as they become more used to humans and boundaries between property lines and swamp land have been blurred.
The bill is still in its infancy and plenty of details will need to be ironed out moving forward. Details such as when the recreational hunting season might run, how many alligators could be collected, methods of hunting, and other issues will need to be dealt with, so anxious potential gator hunters will need to wait a while before they can hit the swamps.
