CROCLIST: Alabama's Alligators

[Steve Grenard]

 from today's New York Times:


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August 5, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Alligators All Around
By PADGETT POWELL
Gainesville, Fla.

IN the non-Darwinian evolution I subscribe to, the alligator is a cross
between a snake and a dog. By the vigor of hybridization, it can eat a snake
and a dog, which is why, when its numbers get out of hand, it wants control.

Alabama, a vigorous hybrid of dirt-farming lower Georgia and proud Texas,
does not often find itself in a vanguard — one should say positive vanguard
if the phrase is not redundant. In 1938, Alabama became the first state to
outlaw alligator hunting, 39 years before the federal government moved to
protect the American alligator from extinction. This month, the state will
allow alligator hunting there for the first time in 68 years, a surprising
fact to a resident of Florida, where alligator hunting has been legal since
1988, the year after alligators were removed from the endangered list.

Alabama does not often strike one as a place in the foreground of liberal
causes like wildlife preservation. If it is a state of greens, it is because
they are eaten there. And it is difficult to determine what might have
inspired the state to protect an animal regarded still by the innocent as a
monster and by the less innocent as more valuable dead than alive.

The motives for having been first to protect and for being last to hunt
struck me as worthy of inquiry. I wrote to a game-commission officer and the
state’s leading journalist on hunting in Alabama. The outdoor writer
politely referred me to another writer closer to the action, in Mobile, and
the game officer referred me to another game officer. I blame them not. I
called Shirley’s Bait and Tackle in Mobile and spoke to a woman who said she
did not know much about it but that she was in favor — “There’s too many of
them” — and referred me to Pete Burns, who was in the store at the time and
did know something about it.

Mr. Burns said he thought the hunt may have to do with poaching’s having
fallen off lately, causing a bloom in the population. I asked him why he
thought it might have fallen off. “I have no idea,” he said. “I stay out of
that side of things.”

Fair enough, we all do. I told Mr. Burns that what I really wanted to know
was why Alabama was the first to protect them. “I have no idea,” he said
again. “Especially since the delta is so small.” By which he meant that the
area of habitat in Alabama is so small that it’s hard to see how gators were
a state-level issue, plentiful or extinct.

We agreed that protecting them there and then was as weird as Georgia’s
protecting harmless snakes. My investigation into murky motive was
concluded. I am now free to commend Alabama and its alligator management for
these tangential reasons with this tangential reasoning:

In 1967, just as the federal government was protecting alligators, I first
heard a rock-and-roll band with 14-year-old schoolmates of mine in it that
in a few years would make a very big pile of money with a very big song
called “Sweet Home Alabama.” Isn’t it sweet, one could think, listening to
this catchy tune, that someone — we were boys from the poor side of
Jacksonville, Fla. — earnestly calls Alabama sweet, and that Alabama helps
you make it big.

My mother’s family came out of lower east Alabama, and if you said they left
Alabama with nothing on their backs but dirt I think they’d have thanked you
for lying on their behalf. My grandfather rose as high as accountant and
school principal, painting houses on the side, woke up in jail both times
that he drank, was poisoned twice by his third wife, losing his hair the
first time, and never lost his cheer. Alabama is a sweet home, somehow.

And lastly, there is the alligator himself. Alligators look like monsters,
but they are softer to the hand than the shoes that can be made of them.
They are shy and they are fragile, which is why they were nearly gone in the
60’s.

Their successful protection is something of a miracle. It owes, I suspect,
to a final reverence and respect by the men who would have hunted it to
extinction (the same bizarre force that prevents the potting of buzzards)
and to the difficulty of poaching and selling a gator out of the eyes of the
law (a relatively easy matter with, say, a deer), but we stay out of that
side of things. The important thing is that this dinosaur has made it —
rarer and rarer in the walk-away-from-Kyoto world we favor — and if Alabama
was the first to help, then Alabama is the first to be saluted. Would that
the state had included the ivory-billed woodpecker in that odd legislation
back in 1938.

Padgett Powell is the author of “Edisto” and “Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men.”