Off topic -- Nutria (marsh-chomping swamp rat varmint) / Tabasco creator.
March 3, 2001
Tabasco Creator Blamed For Swamp Rat
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:43 p.m. ET
AVERY ISLAND, La. (AP) -- Louisiana's most despised varmint, the
marsh-chomping swamp rat called nutria, has long been linked to one of the
state's most beloved products -- Tabasco sauce.
It's a story that's been told so many times that folks in the bayous stopped
questioning it. And it would have been little more than a historical footnote if
not for one problem: The nutria have multiplied.
There are now untold millions of the cat-sized creatures across the state, a
web-footed, orange-toothed army that's chewing miles of ecologically
sensitive marshland down to bare mud.
They've been reviled as furry cockroaches, used for target practice by sheriff
SWAT teams and singled out for mass destruction by the state. But nothing
has stopped them.
For years, no one disputed the idea that Tabasco heir Edward Avery
McIlhenny introduced the nutria to Louisiana. He imported them from
Argentina for their fur in the late 1930s, only to have them escape from their
escape-proof pen and vanish into the marshes.
``In anything in print that talks about the history of nutria in Louisiana, E.A.
McIlhenny's name will come up,'' said Don Reed of the Louisiana State
University Agricultural Center.
Added Greg Linscombe, the resident nutria expert at the state wildlife
department: ``It has not been a disputed fact.''
Until now.
Enter Shane Bernard, a historian for Tabasco-maker McIlhenny Co., who has
taken it upon himself to set the story straight.
Bernard does not dispute that McIlhenny brought 20 nutria to Avery Island
sometime between 1938 and 1941 and some of them got loose. But he
doesn't accept the idea that McIlhenny's were the first.
He says documents show McIlhenny was at least the third nutria farmer in
Louisiana, buying his stock in 1938 from a New Orleans fur dealer.
Bernard has a letter from the owners of a nutria farm across Lake
Pontchartrain from New Orleans that says they started their farm in 1933 and
set the animals loose in 1937 after the venture proved unsuccessful -- months
before McIlhenny ever bought his nutria.
An article written in 1947 by the then-director of the state wildlife
department's fur and refuge division cites another failed nutria farm in
Covington in 1933.
Even though McIlhenny wasn't the only one releasing nutria, some people
thought his were the only ones surviving. McIlhenny apparently helped give
credence to that idea.
``I suspect that E.A. McIlhenny may have promoted the story because in
those days nutria was a boon to the state,'' said Paul McIlhenny, the current
president and CEO of McIlhenny Co. ``I don't know if he and any of them
realized that this might someday come back to haunt them.''
State officials thought introducing nutria to the marshes was good for the fur
trade. Bernard has a 1930 letter by the state of Louisiana suggesting to
McIlhenny that Avery Island, prime marsh land in south Louisiana, would be
a good location for raising nutria.
Bernard thinks that McIlhenny himself took the credit.
``E.A. was a larger-than-life figure, but he had to take a good story and make
it better,'' Bernard said.
He said McIlhenny loved to exaggerate, like the time he said he gave author
Jack London his pen name after the pair were marooned in Alaska together.
McIlhenny was on that ill-fated whaling trip, but London wasn't there, and
the development of the pen name ``London'' is well-documented to have
nothing to do with McIlhenny, Bernard said.
Louisiana's fur trade declined by the 1980s, but the nutria's reproductive
prowess continued at alarming rates since female nutria can carry two and a
half litters per year.
``You put a small population of nutria in a good habitat, and they're not going
to stay small for long, especially if there's no way of controlling them,'' Reed
said.
While nutria have moved into other states, Louisiana offers the best climate
and no natural means of eradication.
However they got here, nutria aren't going anywhere.
Bernard said there has been no discernible backlash against the company for
its role in the nutria explosion. Sales of the vinegary hot sauce continue
unabated and E.A. McIlhenny is still remembered more for his work as one
of the Louisiana's first major conservationists.
``It's not something the family gets outraged about,'' Bernard said, ``but it's
like, 'Oh no, not that story again.'''
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press |
