Chelsea’s and my relationship with alligators extends back to 2002 when we started kayaking the Loxahatchee River. It was common for us to see alligators, and after 4 years of weekly all-day kayaking trips, we got to know a lot about alligators in the wild. We saw them hang out in their favorite spots, we knew the moms and we’d track the nests and the babies, and we’d see them grow or disappear over the years. We knew when they hung out together (very unusual) and we knew the ones that had some kind of deformity. At least half a dozen of these gators were clearly identifiable personalities to us over the years. We got really good at spotting the gators in the water, and we knew where they’d usually hide.
It was inevitable that we’d be interested in knowing more about them. I’ve already written about Shane Stelly and the alligator farm and what an eye-opener that tour was! As long as I live, I will never forget the pungent smell and the massive thrashing sound of those hundreds of tails swishing when Shane opened the shed door, nor will I forget the sight of those red beady eyes and those hundreds of writhing bodies down in the pens.
We then saw the collecting of alligator eggs down at White Lake, but there’s another blog on the alligator egg collecting, so I’ll continue on to skinning the gators and harvesting the meat and skins.
We had met Heuetta Benoit when she took our photo for the honorary citizens at City Hall. She had told us about her husband catching the gators, and that she helped salt the skins. We ran into Heuetta again at the Duck Festival and she repeated her invitation to come and watch the process.
It turned out that the first day of alligator season was going to be my birthday – easy to remember that date! Her husband’s brother is one of the principals in D&D Seafood, a company with its offices on Main St, right downtown. They process alligators for themselves and for a number of alligator hunters in the area, and they process crawfish as well. It’s an efficient and impressive operation.
Gustav blew in two days before my birthday so we had no idea if the skinning would go on, but a short bike ride down Main St. told us the answer – the activity outside and the “seafood” smell were unmistakable.
I didn’t think I really wanted to see it, but I can’t resist something awesomely new and different like that, so we somehow found ourselves standing at the edge of all the action, saying hi to Heuetta.
Legal Requirements
Before alligator season, which is only a month long here in Louisiana, hunters are required to get permits – each registered hunter is allowed a certain number of alligators, in a specific area. When the alligators are caught, each one must be tagged. The tag numbers are then logged and compared to the license at the time of processing. Each skin can be traced this way.
One common method of catching the alligators is to bait a hook, tie the hook on a line to a pole, and set the pole. When the alligator bites the bait, it’s hooked and can’t get free, unless it takes the hook and all.
A number of traps are set and the hunters check their areas every day. When they find a gator hooked, they shoot the gator in the back of the head. After the gator is dead, it has to be tagged, and it’s gotten up to a boat, depending on where they are, and then they need to be gotten into the truck to be transported for skinning and processing the meat.
At the processing plant, the gators are tallied and counted by “owner”. Depending on what’s going on with the skinning facilities, they are put directly into the cold storage locker or they go straight into the skinning room.
How it’s done – the process
When the skinners get the alligators up on the table (often an amazing process in itself), they make an incision in the skin near the pelvis and inject pressurized air into the slit. The alligator looks like a balloon inflating – it’s an awesome sight. This process separates the skin from the meat and makes it easier to skin the alligator.
The alligators are then skinned, gutted, and partially filleted. During busy times, the meat goes in the cold storage locker for further handling at a later time. The skins go to stainless steel booths outside to have any remaining bits of meat and fat pressure washed off; after pressure washing, the skins are salted and stored in bins, ready to head off to the tanners.
In front, long stainless steel tables were set up, where the skins were being salted. Each table had huge sacks of salt on each end. Each person salting would pick a skin, lay it out in a specific position, covering it with handfuls of salt, thoroughly and evenly. The sides were then folded in and the whole skin was rolled up, in a big burrito-style roll.
Several boxes about 4’x4’x3’ were already filled with alligator skins lined up for salting; at least one was quickly filling up with salted skins.
Trucks pulled in at regular intervals, disgorging yet more dead alligators. When we arrived there were stacks of alligators on the ground, and at least one small forklift was ready to move boxes of skins or newly arrived alligators, as needed.
The processing place was a beehive of activity. A few folks were just watching, like we were; some handled the paperwork of the arriving alligators; some were unloading more alligators; others were keeping the process going by moving out the boxes filled with salted skins, and moving in the boxes with skins ready to be salted. Still others were skinners and gutters on break from inside the main room.
We had to watch where we stepped, as much of the area was covered with gators, and much of the area was running in blood. We peeked in through the door to the skinning room whenever it was opened, and that was another beehive of activity. Wearing only sandals, we weren’t too thrilled about walking in all the blood, but Heuetta said that we should at least step inside the main room.
The inner sanctum
What an eyeful! There was virtually no room for us to stand, so we stayed pressed against the door. The entire room was filled with stainless steel tables, and each table held one or two alligators of various sizes, in varying stages of being skinned and gutted.
The skinners and gutters were intently focused on their jobs, walking about the tables to get the angle they needed to get the job done. Dressed in high rubber boots, gloves, and full-length waterproof bib aprons, some were intently quiet, while others laughed and chatted and threw good-natured insults back and forth.
Wide-eyed, we took a few photos, trying to stay out of the blood flowing everywhere. There were piles of alligators under one table, piles of heads under another, and lots of skin and pink flesh. We backed out of the room pretty quickly and headed for Heuetta again – safe ground…
Stories, bacteria, and getting ready to see more
Heuetta’s husband Kenneth was outside, sitting up on a forklift. Chatting with him I noticed a big gash on his leg above the ankle. He told us the story of an alligator he’d loaded into his boat earlier that day. While Kenneth worked to get it in, the gator twisted and rolled, landing on Kenneth’s leg. Unable to get it off his leg quickly, it twisted one more time, and a claw gashed his leg.
Shrugging off the injury, he entertained us with more stories of the scars he’s still got from hunting and trapping gators. He did say that this kind of work is an incredibly unhealthy environment, infested with bacteria. Kenneth simply goes to the doctor each year before the season starts and gets a prescription for antibiotics and takes them the whole month as a precaution.
We were pretty overwhelmed by that time, and it was my birthday after all, so we headed out to Johnny’s for my fast-food birthday dinner. Heuetta told us we should get gumboots and come back and really take a good look inside another day.
Since we’d used the big gumboots from Lynn and Hansford for walking in the rice field, we asked if we could borrow them for our new adventure. Good-natured as always, Lynn said sure, and even dropped them off at the house for us. Now we had no excuse to not go back and see the operation in more depth. Heuetta suggested that we come by on Sunday, as things would be much quieter then, and she’d be able to give us a tour of the inside.
Sunday tour of the skinning
We came ready for anything on Sunday. With a borrowed camera and the boots strapped to our back racks, we showed up only to find organized chaos. Not only was it not quiet, it was significantly busier than the prior few days. There were alligators everywhere, people everywhere, trucks coming and going, skins everywhere, and the forklifts just kept moving. Three or four people alone were doing the salting, and every possible spot inside was filled with the gators and skinners.
We did get our boots on and squeezed inside, trying to stay out of the way. The most immediate impression was how efficient the whole scene was – all those people calmly and quickly “deconstructing” the alligators. We’d watch a gator being lifted up on the table, then the incision was made down near the pelvic area. The skinner then grabs the air hose, inserts it into the incision, turning the high-pressure air on. The alligators immediately blow up like some macabre balloon. The genitalia pop out like a smaller balloon, in two stages, pop, pop. While we watched in fascinated awe, one gator blew up, up, up, then the genitalia popped out, and when they looked about to pop like a balloon filled too full, it sprayed all over the front of the skinner, as if it were going pee (which it was).
Severed limbs were everywhere, with blood squirting out of eyes and limbs on the table. Heads piled up in stacks, and back in the gutting area, buckets of organs filled quickly. We decided if were there we’d have the full experience, so we made our way through the room, trying avoid the blood on the tables and the blood occasionally squirting our way. We had to watch our steps carefully because of the body parts and blood on the floor. The gutters were entertained that we were there and took time out to introduce themselves and to tell us stories. One woman, a few years younger than I am, has three generations (three women) in her family that are skinners and gutters. Another gutter found eggs in a female and brought them over to show us. Still others showed us the knives they use.
Out back we saw the pressure washing of the skins. Two metal booths are side by side, and the skins are in the 4x4x3 boxes. The guys take a skin, looking pink and fatty, put it on the booth table, and wash it carefully with the pressure washer. This blows off all the remaining fat and gristle and gets the skins ready to be salted. The clean skins are now white on the inside, and are then brought around front to the salting table. The pieces of fat are blasted everywhere, and have to be specially cleaned up and disposed of at the end of the day.
Observations
A couple of things really stood out for us. One is how clean they keep the place despite the astonishing mess being made. Water ran constantly keeping things cleaner, and it was clear that everything had its place and things were cleaned up and moved out regularly. We heard later that the entire room is thoroughly cleaned with disinfectant every night.
Another is the very matter-of-fact approach to life and death. Gator meat is healthy and tasty, gator skins are useful, gators are nowhere near extinction, and this is a useful service being performed, so they do it. It’s simply another commodity.
Still another is the family approach. D&D Seafood is a family owned business, and brothers, sisters-in-law, cousins, aunts, uncles, and whomever are all part of the season’s work and part of getting things done. Family members like Heuetta will take days off from their regular jobs for the peak week or so of the season. Many fathers who were bringing in gators came with their young sons, and they’d clearly gone to kill the gators together and bring them back in for processing. We noticed that there weren’t any girls.
Adrenaline rush
One family story we heard was pretty amazing. A guy and his nephew, with the nephew’s 5-year old son, were out in their boat checking the lines to see what had been caught. One of the lines was pulled up out of the water on the bank. When the guys saw the rope, they figured that the alligator was tangled around the trees. Since they couldn’t see from the boat, the nephew got out of the boat to look for it, leaving his 5-year old son and his uncle in the boat, and taking the guns with him to shoot the gator. The alligator got spooked, and headed for the water, right where the boat was.
When the nephew went to shoot it, he didn’t have a clear shot, and meanwhile the alligator was still heading right at the boat, very alive and plenty mad and scared! The uncle in the boat didn’t have a gun, so he couldn’t shoot it. The trunk half of the body (the biggest part) was in the boat, before the tangled rope caught and tightened, halting the alligator’s forward progress, only a few inches from the 5-year old. Meanwhile, the 5-year old, completely unaware of his danger, was yelling in total excitement “Shoot ‘im, Daddy! Shoot ‘im!” The nephew then had to pull the live alligator out of the boat, so the uncle could move the boat, so the nephew could get a clear shot to kill the alligator. How’s that for a nasty rush of adrenaline?
Exhausting work
When the season is at its peak the crew often works 18-hour days, day after day. We found out later that they processed 300 alligators just on the Sunday we were there. The alligators come in from all over, and we even saw a rental truck pull up with a Texas license plate, piled with dead gators.
Keep in mind that the average weight of a 12 ft alligator is 800 lbs. These men and women are typically dealing with 300 to 600 lb alligators that they skin and gut, many times a day!! It’s not big to most of these guys, but they sure are tired by the end of the day, and by the end of the season they are whupped. Just turning the alligators is a challenge, never mind getting one of those suckers up on the table. We watched several gators that were so heavy they had to be lifted onto the tables with a forklift. The skin alone can weigh over 100 lbs! Heuetta had finished salting one skin and the resulting roll was huge – we asked her how heavy it was and she said it could have been 175 lbs with the salt – it can take as much as 50 lbs of salt!
More stories
Kenneth had one more amazing story for us – laughing and pulling down his shirt, he showed us an ugly wound on his chest. He’d been out that day again pulling in more of the gators they caught. Kenneth does the shooting, so he aimed his gun and pulled the trigger. The bullet ricocheted back off the alligator’s head and hit Kenneth in the chest! He simply dug the bullet out of his chest with his fingers and kept going. His son, who is a local sheriff’s lieutenant, didn’t feel that Kenneth got bragging rights for having shot himself on a ricochet… 🙂
When for some reason the meat of the alligator isn’t salvageable, like the time the electricity went out and the meat spoiled, the skins are harvested and the gators are brought back to the marsh and dumped in a pile. We saw several loads of gators that had spoiled, that were whole, minus their skins, being forklifted onto trucks to be taken out. Out in the pile in the marsh the meat is stripped by animals, leaving only a bone heap. Later, the skulls and the teeth can be harvested from the pile.
Still another story is that of the alligator that was brought in with another alligator in its mouth, with the tail and a big chunk of body still hanging out. Talk about a classic “two-fer”! Unfortunately the one gator that was in the mouth had already been partially digested, so they didn’t get to use all of it.
Riding the gators
In the midst of all this, I decided that I really wanted a picture of us on an alligator. After all, how many people would ever have that experience? I thought it would make a great cover photo for our upcoming book.
Chelsea wasn’t nearly as keen on the idea as I was, but Heuetta spotted a 10 ft gator for us, and we maneuvered around to sit on it. No one was available to take a photo of both of us, so I sat first while Chelsea took my photo and then we swapped. One guy told me to hold the mouth open, and that pushed it to a new level of daring! Of course I did it, but I couldn’t believe how heavy the jaw was! Chelsea was moving around to get the best spot for a photo, and meanwhile my arm was quivering from holding the weight up at that angle.
After the photos, wanting to be respectful of the crews’ time, I tried turning the alligator over by myself (it was originally on its back), as I wanted to get it back where it had been. I carefully tucked the legs back under like I had seen them do inside, then used my legs as leverage and pulled. That thing wasn’t going anywhere with just me pulling it. One of the skinners took mercy on me and got at the other end and together we pulled it over. What a feeling that was – handling a big gator and turning it over…
When we got the photos on the computer I laughed out loud. Chelsea was so squeamish that she would not sit down on the gator – she said she didn’t want to get blood on herself. We ended up getting a photo of her crouched over the gator with her bums and upper legs in a perfect parallel to the gator! I couldn’t believe she could even do that! She admitted later that her muscles were sore for a few days from the effort of crouching like that. I laughed until I cried.
We still wanted a photo with both of us on an alligator at the same time, and we were hoping for a really big gator. Heuetta took our phone number and called us the very next day, saying “Come on over right now…we just got a 12 footer in and it’ll be out here for about 20 minutes”. We hopped on the bike and pedaled over.
This alligator was truly big and impressive. We finally had help in getting it positioned from one guy who was just coming in to work, and we have an hilarious picture of him “riding the gator”. Finally ready, we had Heuetta’s daughter take the photos. I was up front, holding up the jaw again, and this one was much heavier! I was really ready to put that jaw back down.
We finished just as the crew came for the gator. That thing was so big they had to use the forklift to get it up and they brought the forklift right inside to slide it off on the table. I found out later that that alligator could easily have been 800-1,000 lbs! Not all the skinners will even handle a gator that big.
Alligator teeth, glad we saw it all, and footnotes
Wanting a memento of our amazing visit, we asked about getting some alligator teeth, and Kenneth and Heuetta rounded up a couple of teeth for us. We are delighted, and they’ll definitely go in our memory case when we finally arrive home. Meanwhile we are thinking about drilling a small hole in them and using them for a necklace.
Even though D&D Seafood is right on Main St, and anyone riding by can see the activity and can smell the “seafood” smell of the gators being processed, very few people know about it or ever go see it. We are so glad we did – we had an experience that we won’t be forgetting anytime soon!!
There’s one final footnote – one of the really pleasant and talkative gutters, one we have a great picture of, dropped dead of a heart attack less than 48 hours after we took the photo. We provided a copy of the photo to them, since it was a great photo, and it was one of the last memories they have of him alive.