ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION (Georgia) 25 December 04 Era ends for gator grower - State officials kill, seize reptiles they deem illegally held (Anna Varela)
(AP): This is a story of 800-pound reptiles worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and the state officials who ruined a man's dream of running an alligator farm in South Georgia.
Or it's the story of a man who broke the law by fencing in wild alligators and feeding them dead chickens and pigs until they grew huge and dangerous and unafraid of people.
It depends on who's doing the telling.
Winston Wright struggled for 40 years to establish a profitable alligator venture in Atkinson County, even suing the state in what officials say is probably the only alligator property rights case in Georgia history.
His son, Kevin Wright, says it "aggravates" him to see the family's pond, once home to more than 500 alligators, with only a couple of dozen left.
"It's basically like a big old cesspool," he said.
Actually, the 35-acre pond has smelled bad for years because of the huge volume of gator waste, Kevin Wright admits.
Winston Wright, a lifelong farmer and pastor of a Baptist church, said he's hurt and angry. "Would you like for them to come take something you'd worked on for 40 years? . . . I feel the same as if they'd taken the cows."
The story starts in the early 1960s, when Winston Wright fenced in his property, including the pond. He'd already started tossing dead birds from his chicken houses into the water to feed the wild gators that lived there. Barely 40 miles from the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, the area is thick with the big reptiles.
In the 1980s, Wright decided to go into the alligator farming business. He got a state license and fenced in a separate area to breed alligators purchased from captive stock from a Florida farm.
But Wright's plans fell apart when the family's cows knocked down some of the fencing in 1991, allowing the farmed gators and the wild ones to mix.
Wildlife officials already had grown concerned about the booming population of wild alligators on the place, thriving on a regular diet of chicken, and argued that they were a danger to humans, including people who fish and swim on the nearby Satilla River. When the alligators commingled, it became impossible to tell which ones were wild — and illegal for the Wrights to sell — and which were family property. Officials with the state's Department of Natural Resources finally said the gators had to go.
But Winston Wright fought back, filing a lawsuit in 1998 that said the state shouldn't be allowed to take the alligators without compensating him. His case got to the state Supreme Court last year. The court ruled against Wright, saying that under state law, wild alligators are public property, which means no private individual can claim them.
He was working to find a buyer but missed the deadline, and Natural Resources officials showed up at the family's farm a few weeks ago. Wildlife officers spent two days trapping and hauling out live animals.
Then the officers started shooting the alligators they couldn't trap.
They said it took 3 1/2 days to remove a total of 119 gators from the property, including two that were more than 13 feet long.
Department officials say that Wright made several missteps over the years: fencing in wild alligators; not filing required paperwork to keep his alligator farming license, which lapsed in 1996; and allowing the wild and farmed gators to commingle. Department officials say they've tried to work with the Wrights, even agreeing in the early 1990s to an arrangement that would have allowed Wright to hire a licensed trapper to capture some of the wild gators, which Wright then could have added to his farm population. But the Georgia Wildlife Federation went to court and stopped what they called "the privatizing of wild alligators."
The family never managed to sell any of the animals, and the Wrights feel that wildlife officials threw up roadblocks at every turn, said Kevin Wright. "We finally just quit tending to them."
There are 11 licensed alligator farms in Georgia, not many compared with industry leader Louisiana, which has more than 100.
It's not easy money, said Mark Glass, who farms alligators in Mitchell County and has worked with an organization that promotes the industry.
"The business is cyclical," said Glass, who got into alligator farming in 1995. "It's really dependent on the fashion industry."
Glass has about 50,000 alligators, ranging from hatchlings to 14-footers kept for breeding. He raises them in climate-controlled buildings, now the industry standard in Georgia. Expenses are high. Profit margins are small.
The current demand for alligators is only fair, and growers have to compete with cheaper alternatives such as South American caymans and crocodiles. Glass, who sells his gators when they reach about 4 feet, said his hides fetch $50 to $100. The meat sells for $4 to $5 per pound, and alligators that size yield only 3 to 4 pounds of meat. That's a big drop in value from 15 years ago, when hides were worth around $100 per foot.
Kevin Wright said his family estimated the potential value of the alligator operation at more than $500,000 when the dispute with the state flared up in the 1990s. At that time, family members say there were more than 500 alligators, though their numbers have dwindled in recent years.
Natural Recources spokeswoman Lisa Doty said the state got a little more than $5,100 for the 119 animals taken from Wright's property, which were sold to a meat and hide processor in Florida. That money will go toward reimbursing the state for the removal effort.
The Wrights say they don't know what they'll do next. They can apply for a new alligator farming license. They say they worry that the state will return to take the remaining alligators in the pond.
Natural Resources officials say the case is closed. The nuisance alligators are gone, and the fence is down.
"What can move in and out of there now is up to nature," Doty said.
Era ends for gator grower