Rodent Infestation Antidote: Cream Sauce

Here comes another in a long and raggedy line of scamps and scalawags, pirates and privateers who have profited in Louisiana while the state suffered.

This latest invader is straining Louisiana’s traditional tolerance of scoundrels. He’s an outsider who’s made himself right at home; his gluttony is laying waste to the southern half of the state, and his self-serving agenda is changing the shape of the border.

Previous troublemakers have been called dirty rats or even weasels. This new marauder is, in fact, a member of the rodent family. He’s a nutria: a nearsighted, rat-like South American import who for 50 unimpeded years has been reproducing wildly and flourishing in the Louisiana wetlands, all the while eating all the vegetation he could get past his pronounced overbite.

Nutria--several million of them, officials estimate--are destroying the coastal wetlands that are crucial to Louisiana’s water-control efforts, vital to the fishing and trapping industries and home to scores of protected species. Environmental and wildlife experts have for decades been stumped at how to rid the swamps and bayous of this damaging creature, whose rampant feeding threatens to destroy an all-important buffer zone for hurricanes sweeping in from the Gulf of Mexico.

Now the state is striking back. Officials with the Wildlife and Fisheries Department have launched a five-year program aimed at downsizing the nutria population and reclaiming denuded wetlands by tapping into what people in Louisiana do exceedingly well: eat.

Officials have recruited the state’s top chefs to create dishes to entice citizens to devour nutria. They have an abiding faith that they can saute, braise and fricassee their way out of this crisis.

“We’ve tried other approaches and they haven’t worked,” said Noel Kinler, project manager of the state’s nutria project. “We don’t have much choice at this point.”

So far it’s been a tough sell. People here may be famous for their adventurous eating habits, but they appear to have drawn the nutritional line at nutria. Call it what you want, it still looks just like a rat.

Brought In by Tabasco Creator

Spud doesn’t give the impression of being an ecological terrorist. The 6-month-old orphan has been hand-raised at the Louisiana Nature Center here and is roughhousing with his handler, Lisa Spardel. Ungainly on land and ill-designed for walking, Spud waddles around the office of the center’s director unchecked, happily chewing on phone cords and computer connections. He makes a break for an open door, but his myopia drives him headfirst into a wall.

Bob Mayre, whose office is being littered with Spud’s pellet-like calling cards, is tolerant of his little guest. Spud is a typical young nutria: with sleek brown-black fur, sloped head, tiny ears, beady eyes, scaly rattail and the trademark elongated orange incisors, parted in the middle.

At this age, it’s possible to consider him cute. Mayre says his daughters have swaddled young nutria in blankets and played with them like dolls.

As Mayre, a biologist, tells the story, nutria, Myocastor coypus, were brought to Louisiana after 4 million years of living in South America. In 1937, Edward A. McIlhenny, a naturalist and creator of Tabasco hot sauce, brought 13 nutria home with the intention of breeding them for their fur.

The animals did well in pens, and a few years later McIlhenny released about 100 into the marshes around Avery Island, thinking he would hunt them as he wished.

That first group went forth into the vast Atchafalaya Basin and thrived in an environment that has hardly any competitors or predators. They began to treat the Mississippi Delta as their personal salad bar.

The environmental problem grew out of the ruthlessness of the nutria’s eating habit. It feeds by paddling around a heavily vegetated marsh and seeks out the tender roots of aquatic plants, chewing its way up to the leaves, which it ignores. Biologists call the damaged sections “eat outs.”

“The rule of thumb is they eat only 10% of what they destroy,” said zoologist Bob Thomas, a professor at Loyola University here. “Ninety percent of the plant floats away.”

Replanting has been tried on a limited basis, with little success. Nutria follow behind, gorging on the tender shoots of the new plants. Even when they aren’t eating, nutria burrow into levees, causing them to collapse.

They are strong swimmers. Adults grow to about the size of a small beaver, propelling themselves with webbed back feet and steering with their rope-like tail. Their vegetarian diet provides little fuel, so nutrias must eat constantly.

When they aren’t eating, they have one other major interest. Nutria’s mating habits make rabbits seem standoffish. They begin breeding at six months and have three litters a year, with up to 13 pups in each litter.

At one point, officials estimated there were 20 million nutria in Louisiana, but the current population may be half of that. The creatures have popped up elsewhere in the country but nowhere else on this scale. One natural population control is the alligator, which is happy to include nutria in its diet but is dormant four months a year.

State officials began the new nutria-control program, which got underway this year, as a response to the damage to what they conservatively estimate is 80,000 acres of coastal wetlands. Forty percent of the nation’s coastal wetlands lie within Louisiana, where 80% of the total national wetland loss occurs.

If the population is not controlled, tens of thousands of acres of wetlands are in serious jeopardy, Kinler said.

And not just along the coast. Like everyone else in Louisiana, nutria eventually gravitated to New Orleans to eat. No one in the cities much cared about the furry fiend when it was devouring far-flung swamps, but when it began to scuttle along drainage canals in New Orleans and urban Jefferson Parish, residents shrieked.

A More Traditional Response to Rodents

Sheriff Harry Lee decided to rid Jefferson Parish of the “swamp rats” by utilizing another Louisiana custom: hunting. Every Wednesday night the sheriff sends out teams of sharpshooters who drive trucks onto the levees and pick off the nutria as they stare, blinking, into spotlights trained on them.

Watching little Spud scamper around his office at the Nature Center, Mayre shakes his head at the mention of the nutria hunt. These are animals who are known to practically pry open the doors of cage-traps to get to a wilted lettuce leaf.

They are not intelligent, he concedes, but they endure.

“Nutria are very good at being nutria,” Mayre said.

Officials would like nutria to join blackened redfish and alligator meat as part of Louisiana’s must-have cuisine. They are spending $2 million to develop a market for a meat that has been tested as highly lean, low in cholesterol and rich in protein.

The key to the program is to add incentive for nutria to be harvested. The state will essentially subsidize the hunting and processing of nutria meat. There is currently only one licensed nutria processor in the state, Tommy Stoddard of Hackberry. He says the animal is difficult to dress and takes a trained person five minutes to clean. He has processed about 5,000 pounds of nutria meat this year.

State officials are offering $1 a hide to trappers so that they will hunt nutria for their fur, which used to support a solid market.

Tourists Go for the ‘Louisiana Experience’

Before there is a steady supply of meat, there must be a demand. That’s where chef Philippe Parola comes in. Parola is the director of the Louisiana Culinary Institute in Jackson and the man chiefly responsible for developing enticing nutria recipes.

At his restaurant he offers nutria fettuccine, marinated nutria salad, nutria a l’orange, culotte de nutria a la moutarde and, for the health conscious, heart-healthy Crock-Pot nutria. Parola was dispatched to Japan in March to test the waters for the product.

“Look, I am French; I know about eating odd things,” Parola said. “I would like to meet the chef who first went outside, picked up a snail, cooked it, put it on a table in front of someone and said, ‘This is snail. Eat it.’ ”

Enola Prudhomme, owner and chef at Prudhomme’s Cajun Cafe and the sister of the fabled Paul Prudhomme, has developed her own recipes. “It’s difficult to get, but I can sell it when I do have it. Mostly it’s the tourists who want it; they also want the alligator. It’s the ‘Louisiana experience,’ I guess.”

The chefs report that when they can lure anyone to try nutria, they like it. The tender meat tastes like rabbit, it is said. But it’s getting anyone to take the first bite that’s difficult.

“Here’s the deal,” Thomas said. “The problem here is that we see them dead and puffed up on the side of the road all the time. It’s a road-kill issue.”

It’s also a rat issue. Because nutria are so well known in Louisiana, people are familiar with what they look like. Naturalists may say they are closely related to the guinea pig, but to the untrained eye, a nutria looks like a well-fed rat.

“We know, we know,” Kinler said. “That’s why we have high hopes for the foreign market. People will never see the nutria, just the processed meat.”

For Art Cormier, nutria is just another of nature’s bountiful appetizers. Cormier brought 100 servings of his nutria tamales to the Nature Center’s Nutria Fest in March.

“Didn’t bring home no leftovers,” he said with pride.

Cormier, who lives in Bridge City outside of New Orleans, has eaten nutria since 1950, along with squirrel, alligator, venison, raccoon and much else that travels on wing and hoof. It’s all protein to Art.

“I call it a rat hang-up,” Cormier explained. “This ain’t a rat. It’s very good meat. With all the people in the world who are starving, how can we turn our backs on all this low-fat food just because we don’t like its tail or its teeth? Don’t make sense to me.”

That’s the spirit that state officials are looking for. They dream of a time in the not-so-distant future when, all over the world, it will be common to hear: “Nutria. Very good. How about a nice chardonnay to go with it?”