Original subtitles

- This was a jungle.

When I grew up it was a jungle.

There was nothing but big oak trees.

When I look out now, it looks like a disaster.

These animals came out in 1958 like an invasion.

All that grass that the muskrats used to eat,

they cleaned it like a baseball field

and now it's all water.

Look at the roots. They don't go deep at all.

Any time that the water hits it,

it just washes it away.

The nutrias took over,

so he's gonna destroy the land,

so we gotta keep fighting them.

There's no signs of vegetation coming up there,

the kind of vegetation that this soil needs

to hold it together.

That thing that comes from South America,

they brought here to breed it with a muskrat

and it was like trying to breed a German Shepherd

and a Chihuahua.

You got to do this because if he stays alive,

he could eat you up with them teeth he's got.

Like these leaves here.

See like this leaf here?

The momma crushes these mangroves

down and feed them this green vegetation, the little ones.

And they're nursing.

The breasts on a nutria is on their back,

not on their belly.

She'll swim around and all the little nutrias

are on here back.

They breed so much.

Every three months, she's having a litter.

There's no natural predator.

The only thing we got now

that eats a little bit of them is the alligators,

and he can't eat enough of them.

Hurricane Katrina didn't get rid of them.

Hurricane Katrina took my house,

but it's we still had plenty of nutria.

There's still millions around and they're gonna have more.

And that's why they got a bounty,

$5 for this tail.

I want to tell you all a tale

that's crazier than hell,

a story of how a bunch of folks out here

on the edge of the world had to take a stand.

Back in the 1930s, during that Great Depression,

people were hurting,

and pretty much everyone had gone a little crazy

thinking of ways of making groceries.

And a few folks, including that guy,

E.A. McIlhenny,

whose Daddy invented Tabasco sauce,

decided to do everyone a favor,

and started breeding these exotic 20 pound rodents

that had been brought all the way from Argentina

up here to Louisiana.

Y'all heard me right.

20 pounds.

These things were huge.

Nutria is what they called them

and they had webbed feet and big orange teeth.

The idea was you could raise them on fur farms,

make beaucoup bucks turning them into hats and jackets

and then get people down in the bayou back to work.

Well, as things go down here,

a storm hit and these nutrias escaped into the bayou.

Either that or some goddamned fur farmer

just let them loose.

Either way, once they were out, they were out

and they took a hell of a liking to the swamps.

Now at first, no one was complaining too much

because nutria was good business for everyone

up and down the bayou

and folks ended up exporting the furs all over the world.

Those fellas were right.

Nutria fur was a hit.

Even movie stars like Sophia Loren was wearing it.

But in the '80s,

the bottom fell out of the fur market

because somehow nobody wanted to wear fur anymore.

All of a sudden,

folks couldn't make nothing selling nutria pelts

and everyone pretty much gave up on trying to hunt them.

But the problem was that those trappers

were the only thing keeping the nutria under control.

And boy, those things could eat,

Pounds and pounds of vegetation a day.

So as their numbers grew,

the more they ate and ate and ate up the swamp,

what was once beautiful green

turned to mud where nothing could grow no more.

Louisiana went from having 5 million to 10 million

to 20 and more,

until the whole coastline was filled with nutria.

So that's why everyone out here

on the bayou has to take a stand

against an invasion like you never,

ever seen of big old swamp rats.

- We start shooting as soon as we get here

and we shoot till we run out of shells.

You could make a living off of it if you hustle.

- The only controlling factor historically

nutria had in South Louisiana was man,

was the trapper that was out there trapping nutria.

When trapping was drastically reduced,

populations exploded and eventually,

That's the reason why the Department started

the Nutria Control Program.

- I got a real big one.

- I just want to make sure.

You're able to go out and harvest nutria

with no limit for a $5 incentive

for every nutria tail you turn in.

- You're out there to help the land,

but I mean, every nutria you put down,

that's $5 in your pocket and that's the way I look at it.

By putting an economic incentive on the tail

versus the pelt, it was trying to emulate a good fur market.

- We usually average anywhere from 150 to 200 a day.

Last year, we got as high as 1200 in one day.

I like to go try to find tall grass

and run the air boat back and forth through it,

you know, to flush the nutrias out for the hunters to shoot.

If I see more than three or four nutrias in a spot,

then I'm gonna go over and try to flush them.

- Historically when trappers brought in fur-bearing animals,

they'd bring the whole animal into the fur dealer

and he would process the whole animal.

Well, in the Nutria Control Program,

the only thing they're collecting is a tail

which shows that that individual has taken that nutria

so he could be paid that $5.

- We used to cut it way back here.

They asked us to quit and just keep 6 inches of it,

because it's easier on them to dispose of them

and everything.

- This is the one without no tail.

- Yeah, that one.

- You just make sure you cut

where they got hair on the back of it so they'll buy it.

People realize that what they're doing

is benefiting the environment,

but the bottom line is the money that's paid

in an incentive program...

- What did you do this week?

Because the incentive payment emulates

what historically they were making when their fur

was worth money.

- All right, I see one.

See if we can get him.

Got him.

I love it.

I love it when I hit 'em.

Like a champ.

He ain't gonna eat no more grass now.

Before they started the Nutria Control Program,

people didn't care about killing them too much

because it was you had it cost gas in your boat,

it cost you time, it cost you bullets in your gun

and you wasn't making nothing doing it,

you know what I'm saying?

Now you was helping out your coast,

but you wasn't getting paid for it.

When they put a bounty on it,

now everybody's out there really hunting them hard.

Cajun women, they're not afraid to get their hands dirty.

I'll kick a man's ass

and I can do everything that they can do, you know?

And I'm gonna do it better just to show him.

I promise you.

All my family is from over here.

But if the land's gone then

me and my family don't have a future.

So if I help wipe out the nutrias,

then that's better for me

and better for generations coming down.

- This is pretty much one of the best college jobs

you could ever do is coming out here and seeing hundreds

of these which it's like looking at dollar signs

on the land.

And each one I kill is pretty much getting me closer

and closer to my degree to pay for school.

- Good morning.

- How you doing?

- How you doing, man?

I'm sick.

- I don't think I've missed a turn in

since I've been on the program.

I mean, it's not a necessity,

but I still enjoy it, you know.

That's 90, right?

- That sounds close enough to me, you know.

- Not bad for the first week, Charles.

- The Nutria Control Program is so popular

and it's so effective and the one thing is

it offers these guys money when there is none.

This is the time of the year there are no crabs,

they're not able to shrimp.

It is their income for the year.

That's why they're so motivated

to go out there and get as many as they can.

- Yeah, you're gonna wear out my legs.

I'm not gonna be able to dance Saturday nights.

I think I got about 80 this week.

You know, this bounty helps me feed my family

and it helps to pay the bills, you know.

Yeah, that's $10.

That's $15.

That's $20.

That's $25.

That's $30.

That's the more you get, the more money you make.

But if there ain't no bounty,

I will not kill it because that's the way I was brought up.

Never kill something unless you make something with it.

This little one was $5

because he eats vegetation, too.

So if you see him, we kill him.

Something was digging here that looked like a nutria.

They got around here.

That's it right there.

A nutria turd.

It's nothing but grass.

It's dried up, though.

Been a while he ain't been here.

But they had one here.

You talk to these animals

and they'll understand your language.

He could be behind the grass eating and I'll call him,

he'll come out, he'll stick his nose out.

Y'all ever heard them holler?

Heh?

You ever heard a nutria holler?

Wah, wah!

That's how I hunt 'em.

Yeah, we're heading on the end of the line.

There ain't many people from here left

because they didn't want to get flooded no more.

But I'm hard head,

I'm a diehard so I'm still here.

After the last hurricane,

my freezer's right there on the levee there,

under the trees.

Isaac put it there.

This is where I was born.

I grew up right there on that property, eh.

My Momma and my Daddy's house,

it look like a trailer.

It was 16 foot wide, four rooms.

I slept where they laid bodies out in that house.

28 bodies were laid out in that house.

You know, so I grew up with life and death.

I been evacuating out of this island

since before I was a year-old.

So I done everything there is for survival.

I'm born to die, so I'm gonna get all the gusto

out of this little body that I got.

When I go, this world don't owe me nothing.

Nutrias are the real threat to the whole country

and they'll wipe away the land

because once they started destroying everything

and there's no roots or nothing,

it washes away when it rains.

- Louisiana's coastal wetlands are very fragile.

It's the highest rate of erosion

in the contiguous United States.

It also provides protection

from storm surge and hurricane surge.

You have to realize that every mile

of coastal wetlands reduces the tidal surge of about a foot.

There's a lot of issues causing wetlands

to deteriorate and vanish.

We have some slides of land

because the Mississippi River is leveed up.

We had an excessive amount of dredging

that occurred back in the '50s

and early oil and gas exploration.

Nutrias are one cause that exacerbates

the environmental processes that take place.

A lot of these areas that are impacted

by nutria and eventually convert to open water,

they become lost and they are lost forever.

A lot of the coastal communities

are being required to move further north and further inland.

So the more wetlands that you lose,

it makes a bunch of the interior towns

and cities a lot more vulnerable to hurricanes.

- Would everybody open their missalettes

to the front cover and recite with me the prayer

for hurricane season.

Oh, God, master of this passing world,

hear the humble voices of your children.

The Sea of Galilee obeyed your order

and returned to its former quietude.

You are still the master of land and sea.

We live in the shadow of a danger

over which we have no control.

The Gulf, like a provoked and angry giant,

can awake from its seeming lethargy,

overstep its conventional boundaries,

invade our land and spread chaos and disaster.

During this hurricane season, we turn to you,

oh, loving Father.

Spare us from past tragedies

whose wounds seem to refuse to heal

with the passing of time.

We will walk in the footsteps

of your divine son to reach the heavenly Jerusalem

where a stormless eternity awaits us, Amen.

- It was a blessing growing up close to the water.

And the smell of the River and the lake combining together,

it was just awesome.

I grew up right here in the Lower 9th Ward,

right next to this levee, right up the street here.

And as a kid,

we would jump the levee wall and go crabbing.

We had no idea what those walls were for.

We always had hurricanes here.

With the coastal erosion,

the effect of the hurricanes are getting stronger

and the nutria is eating up the coastline and the canals,

so we don't know what's going on underneath,

'cause those little creatures that get everywhere, man.

It's just a perfect habitat for them to grow and multiply.

They causing a hazard for our protection of New Orleans.

We're coming up real close

to where my family home was before the hurricane.

Lots of big memories on Jourdan Avenue.

That little bump here?

Potholes in New Orleans.

It's probably the nutria.

And right here, this empty lot was my family home

right in front of that pole.

The whole family would have drowned in here.

Definitely would have drowned right here.

- There's one thing that Hurricane Katrina taught us

is that having defective canals

is not a good thing for human habitation.

I'm hired by the city to come out here

and remove the nutria from the canals

before they create too much destruction.

They dig these burrows and the burrows are very extensive.

And when they're close enough together,

they hear each other digging,

they decide to connect the burrows,

so you get this subterranean labyrinth

and it just starts to cave the canals in.

So in this two mile stretch of urban canal,

there's probably at least 300 nutria.

So I know that I can work these canal banks forever.

Nutria have always been in my life, you know,

since I was real young.

Growing up, my mom and dad worked really,

really hard and there were four boys and so, you know,

there wasn't a lot of money to go around.

Then if I wanted to buy something,

I got out there and hustled and caught a bunch of nutria

and sold them for a buck-fifty a piece

until I had enough money to buy whatever I was after.

When they moved out of the swamps

and into these urban environments,

they've become very rat-like

and they're constantly looking for food and mating.

They've become accustomed to people.

And so they're just not intimidated

by the human presence anymore.

It's a big ole rat.

I get a lot of calls to pull nutria

out of toilets because a lot of these drainage pipes

that you see in these canals,

they lead to a sewer and the sewer leads to a toilet.

And so that means that there's gonna

be more human versus nutria conflict.

I saw a lady earlier dump a bunch of fish carcasses

off the bridge and the nutria will be eating those tonight.

And that's especially bad because those things dig out

the foundation of the bridge and when a truck

of any size comes over it, it crushes the foundation.

And I try to devise a win-win situation

but nutria being an invasive species,

you can't have win-win.

The invasive species has to be deleted.

In the bayou life,

your food is right there in the front of your house.

We live off the land.

We Native Americans and part of the Houma tribe.

Growing up as a kid,

we used to get out of school in three months

and go out trapping, my dad and my uncle,

my grandpa and then I started it.

I can't see myself just killing the nutria,

just for his tail and throwing the hide away.

They got good pelts and make a good coat

and people used it in the past,

why not use it again?

$5 for the tail and a dollar for the heart,

that's $6 a nutria.

- So what it looks like, Bim,

more nutrias this year?

- And more cold weather this year,

so that helps out a lot.

- Yeah.

Colder weather.

- Oh, I know.

- You know, it's gonna be better to sell the furs,

you know that.

- I tell you what, that's more money in my pocket.

And you know, the more we catch, the better it is.

- My daddy used to buy from Bimbo's daddy and now,

Bimbo's daddy's gone, my daddy's gone.

And fur dealers in the state of Louisiana

are just fading away, you know.

You just got a handful left.

In the olden days, these nutria,

it was valued at a lot of money.

Because they used to go out trapping for, like,

four or five months at a time

and the fur buyer would go out there

and he would bring coffee and bring them salt meat,

potatoes and then he would trade them food

and then they would sell the furs

Yeah, now, we got, we got us a big one here.

It's gonna be a good quality.

So this one is gonna make a beautiful coat or hat.

They're very nice.

A coat is very nice.

My father used to go out trapping.

They used to do muskrat.

And then one day they heard a funny noise

and they didn't know what it was.

And then they caught a nutria and then they said,

"Well, it's a furry animal.

"If we could make a dollar on it, let's make a dollar."

And they tried to make a market,

'cause it was cheaper than a muskrat.

You needed to catch 20 muskrats

where you could catch 10 nutrias and make a coat.

It was all good,

'cause it brought a lot of money to the State of Louisiana.

And then the muskrats disappeared.

The nutrias took over and everybody thought

it was something good.

But they really didn't realize

that the nutria was gonna put a whipping

on the State of Louisiana.

In the '70s, we was bringing in like two to three million.

And then in the '80s, these animal activists,

they came in to start giving us trouble.

If you don't buy them, they won't kill them.

Don't buy fur.

- They started to protest

and you had to be careful whenever you shipped skins.

They'd break into the warehouse.

And everybody was scared to buy furs

because they would sprayed them with spray paint.

It put a whipping on these trappers.

So a lot of them went to the oil field

and the market just collapsed.

Nobody was trapping them,

so the nutrias just started building up, building up,

building up and they just ate up everything

and we lost so much land.

- Stopping the nutria is a mission impossible.

The good Lord couldn't get rid of them.

They're still here.

Yeah, we're trying to protect it,

what our ancestors had here.

You doing the same thing I done.

You doing the same thing your grandpa did.

And we gotta keep on doing it,

because our family worked hard and it's still here.

Let's roll.

- Tommy eats everything that don't bite him back.

- If I mix rabbit and nutria,

you don't even gonna know which one you're eating.

So you might like the nutria if you really try.

- I never did trust you with your cooking.

- My cooking's good.

Everybody else around the neighborhood eats it.

You could feed them all up there.

I don't want no part of it.

- I just can't get past the name, nutria rat.

- Close your eyes and you won't know

you're eating a nutria rat.

- Everybody down here, they're ancestors were fishermen.

You inherited it from me, It's' just like me,

I inherited it from my daddy and my daddy

inherited it from his daddy.

And it comes down the line.

- This is a dying breed, though.

It's, like, going down, you know...

- Yeah, it's going, yeah.

So now who are you gonna teach to fish?

- I don't have no boys,

but me and my girls will do it.

They want to go to college, so...

They're not interested.

- They're not interested.

That's about it.

- We stay here 'cause he doesn't want to leave,

but most people that were here

moved up the road because they're afraid

of losing everything again when a storm comes.

- We need somebody to watch the boats, and well,

you know, he's the only one that stay here,

so, we'll let him stay.

- And he don't want to move up the road.

He doesn't drive, so he can't come with a car.

The only thing he got is the boat.

I understand about you're trying to,

you know, keep your family safe.

There's the strip of land we're on is thin

and it's getting thinner all the time.

- Did you enjoy my cooking tonight?

Yeah.

- I'm a master chef and I play music on the side.

Tomorrow, I'll be cooking nutria

and my new ballroom I've just opened up at three o'clock.

You ever had nutria?

Delicious.

- The truth, everything.

I'm like, Damn.

Pshew.

- Hello, nutria.

Well, that's a nice big one right here.

Hello, rat for dinner.

A little good luck charm?

- Prior to the Nutria Control Program, we had a pilot study

to try and promote nutria for human consumption.

We made sausage with it.

We made Slim Jims.

We made nutria hot tamales.

We had nutria gumbo.

Things that people were used to eating in South Louisiana.

- Cooking is improv, just like jazz.

Whether I play a high note or a low note or play soft

or I play louder, people come gather.

And we're not gonna tell them it's nutria.

Say, "Come on, try my chicken."

So we'll tell them the next day so they don't regurgitate.

- Here in South Louisiana,

the food business is very competitive.

There's a lot of good things out there to eat.

- The state has tried to have different

sort of well-known celebrity chefs prepare nutria.

I just try to support those efforts

the best way I can because I think it's important

and just to freak the staff out.

And if you approach it with an open mind,

you'll find it doesn't have a really bad swampy taste.

- To me, they taste like a rabbit, not like chicken.

- And with rabbit, the stigma is that they're too cute.

That's not a problem with nutria.

- Throw it on the grill, no cover.

I'm gonna leave that on there about a hour.

I'm gonna drink a few beers, talk a little jive

and when we come back in about a hour and a half, soup.

- I think a lot of the problem

in the promotion of the meat

was the aesthetics of the animal.

People just couldn't get over eating something

that looked like a large rat.

- I'm not gonna eat it,

but I'm thinking about trying it in my mind.

- Yeah.

- Nutria flavor is sort of like the zucchini

of the animal world.

You can kind of make it work with a lot of

different kinds of flavors.

- I like nutria 'cause it's a very clean animal,

'cause they eat just roots.

And if you don't know the difference

between a nutria and a steak,

and when you're gonna take a bit on each one,

you're gonna throw your steak out

and you're gonna keep the nutria.

- Yeah. - That's how good it is.

- They're vegetarians.

Uh, they don't eat nothing dead,

just strictly fruits.

- And that is clean meat.

Oh, it's very, very pretty meat.

- There's really nothing wrong with it.

Because it's so lean,

maybe it'd be a nice alternative to chicken breast.

Mighty nice.

Nutria are eating the natural resources of the coastline,

you know.

It's definitely like tasting Louisiana.

Delicious.

And that's wild too.

- And they've been talking about shrimp and crab

and oysters going away, you know.

So maybe one day when there's not much else to eat,

people will see the beauty of the nutria.

- It is delicious.

- Mmm.

- Oh, I can't stomach, I can't stomach it.

- I'm very fond of the ones that have a dark stripe

down the bank.

- Mm-hmm, yes.

- Because it's, it's a nice contrast.

Some of them have a, a more of a, like,

this has more of a contrast in the back than this one does.

- What you gonna do with these pelts?

- Well, you know, we're gonna do a lot of things.

I've got a sort of a whole little collective

of designers and some of our designers

are gonna make all fur vests out of them.

Some of them make hats and trapper hats

or modified trapper hats that are kind of

a little bit more chic.

- Yeah.

- Not so much back down the bayou,

but a little more 5th Avenue.

And we actually even have one designer

who makes these fabulous legwarmers out of them.

People go crazy when they see these leg warmers.

I know, it's awesome.

- And then other designers, myself included...

Well, traditionally the stigma of fur

is people don't feel comfortable with the idea

of killing animals to adorn themselves.

But the thing with nutria is that that they're being killed

anyway and they're throwing these beautiful furs away.

And it just seemed like a colossal waste.

It seemed criminal.

So I like to think of Righteous Fur

as a giant recycling project.

- When I was growing up,

I played with my mom's fur coat

and really always wanted one.

When I became of age in the '70s and '80s,

it was sort of frowned upon.

So there's been a break in the craft.

No one was there to train us.

We had to sort of figure it out on our own.

Now we're ready to bring the fur trade back.

- I make ties.

I mean, people think those are like the coolest thing.

- Oh, my God, they were a Mardi Gras hit.

We had people just calling us.

- Oh, yeah.

- Oh, that's nice.

It looks really good with your coloring,

with your hair.

- Yeah, mm-hmm.

- I think nutria originally came as the poor man's fur.

It was not the high end fur, but it took off.

Wearing it back then was more of a status thing.

Husbands would give it to their wives

because they wanted everyone to know

they could afford to buy their wife a fur coat.

Oh, wow.

Nutria is the ultimate sustainable fur.

With fake fur,

which is made out of all these plastics

and stuff that are certainly bad for the environment,

people started looking at, well,

maybe it's not fur itself that is so bad

but the way it's raised.

And obviously, nutria is an invasive species,

so it's actually the most sustainable fur of all.

- We are selling online and in stores,

but we have to get it out to the public.

So we're planning a fashion show

in a couple of months where we get to show these things off

to people and see what their reaction is.

It's kind of like testing the market.

- Look.

- Oh, yeah, that's nice.

This is meant to go salsa dancing.

When I'm out at market selling the jewelry,

people are really excited about what we're doing.

Oh, that looks pretty.

But the big challenge is finding people

that want to put their money where their mouth is.

There's a bit of a stigma attached

because even though it's destroying the wetlands,

nutria have been here long enough now

that they've become part of the fabric of their lives.

- I have a lot of friends over at the country club

and they're not too happy that these nutrias

are destroying their golf course.

I see what they do and how they do it

and they do millions and millions of dollar of damage.

- It's frustrating because we do as a staff

take so much time and effort

into maintaining this piece of property

and our lake banks are starting to fall off.

And you used to be able to be able to drive a golf cart

around this tree right here.

Yeah, there's three or four pretty good sized nutrias.

And the homeowners,

you got some of them that hate them

because of the damage they're doing.

And you have some of them that enjoy them

and try to take care of them.

- This all started accidentally

when there was a mother out here

with about four or five little ones.

I had thrown out some stuff and they liked it.

You know, the little ones were eating it.

So I tried getting a little closer

and a little closer and sure enough,

those little babies, you know,

they were crawling all over me to get the carrot.

- One of the ironies of trapping on golf courses

is poor people hail me as a hero because I protect them,

but rich people, they hail me as a villain.

And they tend to view the nutria as a cute little pet,

a little golf course ornament,

so they don't really want you to trap the nutria

even though they're creating tremendous damage.

Yeah, I've been accused

of being soft to the little guy, you know.

And, you know, the nutrias,

they can't really protect themselves.

The kids love to see them.

And by showing them some kindness to that animal,

they may begin to show kindness to maybe another person.

- You know, a lot of people believe that live trapping

is a little bit more humane and ethical,

so using the cage traps on the golf course

is definitely good PR work.

It's more difficult to live trap,

but whenever you have the wealthy

that can really create a lot of problems for you,

you want to have that perception

that you're taking care of the animals as best as possible.

But the reality is,

people still tamper with the traps,

steal the traps and do whatever they can

to make sure that I'm not successful.

Huh, they pulled the trap out.

So it's a little game of cat and mouse.

You know, I am an animal lover

but I walk a really fine line.

The animals work with me.

When I'm live trapping, I use my hunting dog,

George W. Bush.

He'll tell me if there's an active nutria live in the trap.

Oh, that's a good sized breeding male, 30 pounds,

four, five-years-old.

Yeah, this guy has fathered a lot of baby nutria.

They start breeding about six-months-old

and they breed anything and everything that sits still.

You know, out in the swamps the nutria

don't have any admirers.

But you get into a city environments

with a high population like this

and you're gonna have a group of people that like them.

But nutria are an invasive species.

They push out the native species.

So the nutria need to be discreetly removed

just to stop the destruction.

- During the winter when it gets too cold

and the crabs don't bite, I deal with nutrias.

But soon as the water got to 75 degrees,

the crabs started coming out from under the mud

and now that we're starting to catch them.

This time of the year right now,

we're fishing crabs.

Next month, I'll be doing alligators.

I'm always doing something.

I will never stop.

That's how we make our money.

We cycle from one to the next, you know,

and that's the way it's been all my life.

When I was 13-years-old and I quit school to be a fisherman.

My education is the sea.

My grandfather, my father before me

and I've been following in their footsteps.

Just like my son.

He's following mine.

Even the disappearing of my land,

my son's gonna keep on fishing.

So we enjoy that kind of life.

And we don't worry about nobody else.

We do what we gotta do for ourselves

and that's it, you know.

The next man, he gotta do the same thing for himself.

Because we're still here

but we don't know what Mother Nature might bring

and wipe it all out.

Delacroix was a tight community

and that's the way we grew up.

The family used to stick together on one piece of land.

It was beautiful.

Everybody took care of everybody.

We had everything here at one time before the hurricane.

Katrina came with a big tidal surge

and wiped this place off the map.

Wiped everything in Saint Bernard off the map just about.

- Everybody thinks, Oh, a fisherman's life.

They make plenty of money.

But they don't realize what goes with it.

You make your living off the water,

because that's your living.

It's a great life.

- But it's also the enemy, too.

It just seems like yesterday that we had all of this.

- I had a five-bedroom house.

It's gone.

- It's been a few years,

but it seems like yesterday at times.

Some, well, you'll see something or hear something

and it's like it's still here.

So it's a mixed bag of emotions

that you deal with every day.

Are we gonna still be here

or are we gonna be gone

for the next storm?

Yep.

We survive but it's not easy.

- When the Cajuns first got here,

they must've looked around here and said,

lord have mercy, look what we got to work with over here,

swamp.

A little bit of land, a little bit of more swamp.

They did it.

They did what they had to do to get the water off

and get us a little hard ground, not all marsh.

Cajuns, we're a special breed of people.

There we go.

- Most of us are very independent.

We do our own thing.

We work hard.

We like to party.

And we can damn sure cook.

Everybody can cook.

What's up, man?

Give me some here.

And we have to try to protect the heritage

of South Louisiana.

I mean, we gonna survive no matter what.

- We serve a fun-loving God.

He loves to see his people have fun in a good,

wholesome way.

Because we know there's gonna be tough times.

In our tradition, we enjoy partying

because some things that have impacted our community

is beyond our control.

Coastal erosion, oil spills,

hurricanes causing our life to be decimated

in a way that we may never recover.

Almighty God blesses you all.

The Father, Son and the whoo-hoo!

And so when God blesses you, it's gonna be a party.

Enjoy it.

- I get on the dance floor with the right song

and act crazy, drink my Bud Lights

and then me and my boss do some dancing.

And then I dance with some young hot tamales

at the same time.

A 39-year-old girl, whoo.

I'm gonna have to teach you how to dance.

That dancing is when you hold somebody

in your arms and wiggle.

You know, that's dancing, you know.

The vibrations.

One woman told my wife one night,

"How you let him do all that?"

She said, "It's all about enjoying life."

That's what this is all about.

And for young people,

they don't know what the enjoyment of life is today.

So that's what I'm living for.

- The Louisiana Swamp Exhibit

set out to exhibit those animals which people actually see,

what they eat in our restaurants

or they encounter on our roadways.

So nutria or Myocaster coypus

we felt would be essential while being introduced.

It's been here a long time

and people are very familiar with it.

Nutria have been here long enough now

to have become part of the Cajun culture.

We name sports teams after them.

- Even though the nutria are here

in Louisiana and they're destroying our coastline,

we have accepted the fact that they're not going anywhere,

so why not embrace them.

- People in South Louisiana

often find young nutria and keep them as pets.

And they do very well, sometimes for years.

- Little Bit has no idea she's a nutria.

She's more in lines of thinking she's a dog.

As far as anything a normal nutria would do or know,

she doesn't know what that is.

I wouldn't say nutria make a good pet.

They require a lot of maintenance

and they don't socialize with people they don't know.

She's bonded to me.

Anyone else, she gets aggressive towards them.

- So I've sustained a number of serious lacerations

and injuries and gotten multiple stitches handling nutria.

They can be very, very aggressive.

As a matter of fact,

more people are run out of these marshes

by nutria defending territory

than almost any other animal here.

- I still hunt and trap nutria for a part of my income.

The family, they think it's funny,

because I kill thousands of nutria every year

and yet I have one as a pet.

- Y'all ready?

- Yeah.

Tell us when.

- Go.

Each skinner has their own different kind of technique,

when to push, when to pull, where to cut.

- Ugh.

- A lot of hand-eye coordination.

You're doing good, you're doing good.

- I been State champion I guess maybe 10 times.

But it got to where people could skin a nutria

in about 25 seconds.

- One of the great things about this pageant

is that you get a nice little fur coat

to go with the beautiful crown.

Nutria fur is one of those surprising ones.

You don't expect it to come off as elegant

as it actually does when you see it on someone.

- And you would never expect a rat to be elegant,

yet here we are,

and half of us wear it every single day.

Nutria been here long enough

at this point that it's cropping up everywhere.

And nutria is really starting to be seen

and make a bit of a splash on the runways.

People love to come to fashion shows.

I mean, they like to see sexy models.

That was one of my favorite reviews of our very first show.

"This makes environmental issues sexy."

And I thought, man, we're doing our job.

The younger generation, they are definitely,

like, pro-sustainable fur, so that attracts them.

But they're also attracted to the fact

that I'm wearing a swamp rat, dude, and I look badass.

- Some people are turned off by nutria

because in their minds it's a rat.

But this is exactly what attracts our biggest market,

because they like that edginess

and it has that wild look to it.

- There's some interest in the fashion industry

even in New York and other areas to use nutria

because it has been called

an environmentally kosher fur to wear.

If somebody buys a coat,

they're actually protecting coastal wetlands.

And I think some of that effort is actually working.

In the late '70s,

there was estimates that there was 25 million nutria.

Right now,

after the Nutria Control Program and other efforts,

that population we estimate presently

as being several million.

The nutria problem is not only in Louisiana.

It's found on the East Coast.

A large portion of the Southeastern part

of the United States, portions of the West Coast.

But it's also a problem worldwide.

But it can be found in the coastal marshes of France,

there's a problem with nutria.

In South Korea, Vietnam on the river deltas.

So there's many other countries

that experience problems with nutria,

and they do look to Louisiana for pointers

on how to better control that animal.

We don't feel that we're gonna get every last one.

But if it could reduce the populations,

we will be a lot better off.

So the war is not over.

- I'm fine with being the last one in my family

doing this, 'cause it's getting harder and harder

to make a living at it.

You're brought up doing one thing all your life,

you ain't looking to do something else.

But even if my daughters wanted to do this,

I wouldn't encourage it.

I would encourage them to go to college

and get an education.

I like to raise my kids not down here

because I was tired of dealing with all the flooding

of my parents, so I said,

I'm not gonna live down here and deal

with the same things they deal with.

You know, I don't want to lose everything

every time we get a hurricane.

So I decided to leave and move my family 12 miles north.

They built a levee for us up here,

but it doesn't guarantee our safety.

And there may come a day that I have to leave here too.

I want to stay in Louisiana but you never know.

Tommy got his own kids

and they didn't want to deal with

what I go through, you know.

He does what he wants.

That's his life.

So I'm the last Gonzales on the Island.

Delacroix Island is gonna disappear.

It's just a matter of time.

Really light.

- We're gonna have to leave here one day.

I ain't gonna be able to build nothing here no more

because they ain't gonna have nothing left here.

I got that trailer 17 feet up in the air.

I figure another hurricane, that ain't gonna be there.

I ain't building no more.

That'll be my third one that I'll lose here.

But I'm gonna come back with an RV.

I'm not attached to physical things.

I'm only attached to this place where my roots is at.

We have got something in common, me and the nutria.

He's a survivor like me.

You know, he wants to survive.

But, like everything,

one day or another it's got to go.

Here's my buddy.

We got, we got it in common.

Mother Nature try and get rid of us, but couldn't do it.

We still here.

We ain't leaving.

They say they ain't leaving and I ain't leaving.

So we're gonna live here till we go,

me and my buddy.

Because he supported my family.

I tell you what,

he paid my bills and supported my three kids.

Can't deny him.

He was a good friend.

Me and my wife are gonna keep on dancing

and have a good life.

I lose my new house,

then it'd be me and the nutrias and my wife,

that'd be okay,

as long as we're still alive and we can enjoy

the little bit of life we have left.