When Audubon Zoo refused Nutria Rodeo's 10-ton heap of dead rodents, organizers got creative

Standing on a boat dock in Venice, Gabe Macormic faced a unique challenge: Find someone willing to take a sun-baked, 10-ton heap of dead nutria off his hands.

Macormic had, on a lark, revived the long-dormant Plaquemines Parish Nutria Rodeo, an event that aims to knock back the booming population of orange-toothed, South American rodents that have been devouring Louisiana marshes for almost a century. He expected an extended circle of buddies to participate. They’d zip around on airboats, have few laughs, maybe shoot a couple hundred swamp rats.

But when the rodeo began Friday, about 200 hunters showed up. By Saturday night, when prizes were awarded for the most kills and biggest nutria, Macormic was confronting a body count far beyond his expectations: about 1,500 nutria.

“I thought we’d get a couple hundred,” he said. “I had no idea we’d shoot so many.”

The nutria were starting to stink, but Macormic wasn’t worried. Before the rodeo, Audubon Zoo had agreed to take the entire haul. It was a win-win situation: Macormic would offload a bunch of dead nutria, and the zoo would get free meat for its alligators. 

It was good for the marsh, too. Nutria have eaten away at least 40 square miles of Louisiana’s coast line over the past 20 years, contributing to a land loss crisis that has made the state more susceptible to rising seas and stronger, more frequent storms.

There’s no market for nutria fur, and few people want to eat nutria meat. A state bounty program isn’t coming close to reaching the goal of killing at least 400,000 nutria per year, despite recently upping the reward from $5 to $6 per nutria tail.

The zoo was fully onboard with the rodeo, calling its agreement with Macormic an “opportunity to eliminate waste and contribute to wetlands conservation.”

But as a truck and trailer were en route to New Orleans with the first load Sunday, the zoo suddenly called the whole thing off.

“When I said they were getting fifteen hundred, they said, ‘Oh, God. Please, no,’” Macormic said.

The condition of the carcasses was also an issue. Macormic admits they were coming in hot and smelly.

“The time of death of the animals to the time that we received them, paired with the record heat, was not conducive to feeding these animals to our alligators,” zoo officials said in a statement. Bottom line: They were disgusting.

“They smelled like what you’d expect a pile of dead rats would smell like,” Macormic said. “It was pretty bad.”

The Venice marina with the corpse-laden dock had been supportive of the rodeo, but the manager’s patience was wearing thin. It was an unusually warm late February day. Temperatures had climbed above 80 degrees, and the stench was worsening.

“They said you've got to figure this out — like now,” Macormic said.

As Macormic racked his brain about what to do with the fetid heap, a deckhand sidled up and offered to help. “He said he knows a guy who deals with this sort of stuff,” Macormic said.

As in, a guy who knows how to deal with 1,500 dead nutria?

“I guess,” Macormic said. “And he was correct.”

A short time later, a crab boat pulled up and offered to take the entire load. Macormic didn’t get the crabber’s name or ask many questions.

“He said he’d use them to bait his crab traps,” Macormic said. “He seemed happy to have them.”

It’s not so far-fetched that a crabber would take a pile of dead nutria, said Julie Lively, a crab fisheries expert with the LSU AgCenter.

“Crab will eat anything,” she said. “Using nutria as bait isn’t anything I’ve heard of before, but it doesn’t surprise me that a crabber would try it.”

Crabbers often use whatever’s cheap and readily available. When Louisiana had a lot of catfish processing plants, traps were baited with catfish heads. Nowadays crabbers spend about $1 per pound for menhaden, a small schooling fish that’s caught mostly for fertilizer and fish oil production.

Many commercial trappers run several hundred or 1,000 traps at a time. The bait slots are just about nutria size. The rankness of the rodeo nutria might have just been lagniappe for the crabber.

“If something smells nasty or a little decayed, [crabs] are happy to go for it,” Lively said. “It can help attract them.”

For next year’s rodeo, Macormic plans to work more closely with the zoo to keep the dead nutria on ice and get them transported sooner.

“Yeah, I was little bummed when I had to get rid of all of them,” he said. “But shooting too many nutria — that’s a good problem to have.”

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