More federal dollars are now available to keep nutria from damaging Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. That’s the result of legislation signed into law by President Trump. South Louisiana Congressman Garret Graves sponsored the measure and he says it triples the funding for an ongoing nutria bounty program.
“And so what this does it helps to create a program to put a bounty on them, it’s just not fun to take them out, but you can actually get paid to do it,” said Graves. “It also provides funds for restoration, 12-million dollars a year.”
Graves says we have lost 2,800 square miles of our coast and an estimated 20-million invasive nutria living in our state is contributing to the problem. He says it took a while to get other members of Congress to understand this problem.
“It’s sort of like a beaver, but with a different tail, the number of times I said that during the debate, we also had pictures that we showed people, yeah there were a lot of puzzled faces during the debate,” said Graves.
Graves says there will now be 12-million dollars available annually for the federal nutria bounty program, which was nearly depleted. He says there used to be a huge nutria fur market, but that market went away allowing nutria to multiply.
“The population exploded because there was not that sort of competing market to control the population, so what this does is it helps to re-establish a market by putting a bounty on the actually hides of the nutria,” said Graves
For the 2018-19 nutria control program, 223,000 nutria tails worth over $1.1 million in incentive payments were collected from 241 active participants. Terrebonne Parish turned in the most tails.
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