ABBEVILLE, La. — Jacob Sagrera unrolls an alligator skin and lays it flat on a metal table, brushing off flecks of salt and checking for blemishes. He grades the hide so a tannery “an ocean away” can prepare it for use in luxury goods such as boots, watch bands and handbags, with each skin tracked through the supply chain using yellow tags for legal trade enforcement, the Associated Press reported.
Sagrera does the work at his family operation, Vermilion Gator Farm, where the grading is one step in a decades-old system built around farming American alligators for meat and skins, then releasing some young alligators back into the wild each year. Advocates of the program say commercial farming has helped preserve a species long viewed as scary or bothersome, while some conservationists and animal welfare advocates question whether linking conservation to a market for skins is the right approach.
George Melancon, an alligator research biologist with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, argued that conservation needs a value proposition to endure. “These wetlands, these alligators … it has to have some kind of monetary value,” Melancon said. “Otherwise, people just forget about them.”
Supporters and critics diverge on the program’s ethics, but agree on one practical point: the farming system is tied to regulation designed to distinguish legal products from wildlife trafficking. Farmers and state officials say the tracking tags help ensure products came from legal operations. Col. Littleton, a leather goods company in Lynnville, Tennessee, keeps records of its tracking tags, according to Hayley Holt, the company’s director of corporate and specialty sales; Holt said the records help retailers document where materials were sourced, including when products are shipped internationally.
State officials said Louisiana has become the largest producer of farmed alligators in the U.S. The department produces around 400,000 farmed alligators each year and valued farmed skins in 2024 at over $56 million. Using nest surveys and hunting tags, the state decides how many young alligators to release annually, and the department estimated that about 3 million alligators are now in the wild in Louisiana.
The department’s figures also show that the share of farmed gators returned each year has fallen as wild numbers increased. The report said the percentage of farmed animals released dropped from almost 20% in the early 2000s to about 5% now. It also said American alligators were delisted as endangered in 1987 and are now listed as “Least Concern” on the IUCN Red List, though trade remains regulated because of the similarity of alligators to other crocodilian species that are more vulnerable.
Conservation groups and advocates of farming also point to a market that, they say, can be monitored. Oliver Tallowin, a senior program officer for the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources on wildlife use and trade, said, “Alligator farming benefits from a large legal market and strong regulation.”
Animal rights advocates dispute that framing. Sarah Veatch, principal for wildlife policy for the nonprofit Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society of the United States, said, “That shadow trafficking industry is going to be there because you’ve rooted your system in profit,” adding that trade “not only meets the existing demand, but it normalizes it, it legitimizes it and it grows that demand for wild animal skins.”
As luxury brands have become more involved in sourcing, the state has also expanded efforts to market the program. Christy Gilmore, a consultant who communicates between Louisiana alligator officials and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), said brands began asking questions and pushing for changes. “The brands started asking questions and digging deeper and quite honestly, just doing things that those of us who were small family businesses didn’t think about,” Gilmore said, adding: “We’re not sitting around thinking about what our carbon footprint has been.”
Gilmore’s comments came alongside details of the Louisiana wildlife agency’s funding for alligator programming. The report said the agency increased its marketing budget over the years from a cap of $300,000 to $500,000, with the money coming from the industry, including sales of hunting tags each year, and directed into a fund dedicated to alligator programs. Jeb Linscombe, the state’s alligator program manager, said the budget increase reflected having more money to spend and competition from hides of other crocodilian species entering the market, while he also said there was concern that animal rights groups could push the luxury market away from alligator hides.
Research tied to the program is also part of the debate over what alligators do beyond luxury fashion and meat. Melancon said the program supports efforts to better understand alligators’ biology, including work on developing a vaccine against West Nile virus that can cause skin lesions affecting valuable hides. Other researchers are examining whether alligators influence wetlands and carbon storage, including a Scientific Reports study last year that the AP said found a strong correlation between alligator abundance in a wetland and the amount of carbon the wetland stores.
Chris Murray, an adjunct professor of biology at Southeastern Louisiana University and lead author of the wetland-carbon work, said, “Alligators can’t stop climate change,” but added, “there’s the chance they are participating in the global challenge of climate change for the good and not the bad.” Murray said he was pursuing the research for conservation generally, not to help the industry, describing his goal as showing that alligators have a role in the functioning of the earth. “It’s more than just this cool thing for kids to look at,” Murray said. “It’s, ‘hey, they have an important role in the functionality of the earth that you live in.’”