CROCLIST: Alabama's Alligators

[Steve]

Odd, but interesting . Seems like I could read his writing style better if I 
was drinking. Maybe he sips bourbon as he writes(?)
A gentler, milder, less gonzo Hunter Thompson type?



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Grenard" <sgrenard at si.rr.com>
To: <croclist at lists.gatorhole.com>
Sent: Saturday, August 05, 2006 11:52 AM
Subject: CROCLIST: Alabama's Alligators


>
> from today's New York Times:
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> 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."
>
>
>
>
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