Hunters quit as tanners prefer farmed alligator skin - leatherbiz: Lea Leatherbiz

News

Hunters quit as tanners prefer farmed alligator skins

23/05/2011
A sharp fall in the price of skins has led to hunters in Florida giving up their work as state-licensed alligator trappers, local media have reported. The state pays a number of expert hunters a bounty of $30 per alligator in areas in which the reptiles presented a potential danger to communities. The hunters are then able to sell the meat and the skins of the alligators they trap.

The average price for an alligator hide, a valuable spin-off from this community service, has fallen to between $10 and $15 a foot, reports said, whereas the money trappers were able to bring in as recently as two years ago was five times that amount. They have said that tanneries are also rejecting wild alligator skins in favour of material from alligator farms, where the reptiles are bred for meat and the skins become a valuable by-product because they have fewer blemishes than in the wild.

“I’m still sitting on hides from 2008,” one former trapper, John Douglas, told a newspaper. “The prices of hides has always have been up and down, but not like now. It’s at a standstill.” The newspaper said there were 55 licensed trappers still operating as part of Florida’s Statewide Nuisance Alligator Programme.

Alligators were regarded as an endangered species until 1987, but numbers have built up and the state of Florida says it now has a population of 1.3 million of the reptiles. Last year it received more than 14,000 complaints from concerned citizens and its licensed trappers killed more than 5,000 alligators as a result.



Leatherbiz.com cannot be held responsible for content if the language setting is changed from English.

The translations provided by Google Translate are automated and therefore might not be accurate and may contain incorrect, offensive or misleading language. We offer this facility as a guide only.