FARMING ALLIGATORS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3796, 14 September 1883, Page 4

FARMING ALLIGATORS.

The alligator fisher finds his mo.st remunerative business in tlio capture of nowly-luilched or rather ntill juvenile reptiles. Great is the excitement when he discovers a nice little nursery party of about; fifty scaly babies, from six inches to a foot in length, all basking in some shallow, sunny pool. Though sharp-toothed from their birth, they can be handled without danger, if only ho can only elude the vigilance of their keen-eyed old mother, -who is basking on the shore, or else buried in the mud, with only her nostrils and eyes in sight. All the saurian .species alike have the eyes and nostrils so raised above any other part of the head that they can lie buried in the mud, observing their neighbora, without any tear of detection or exposing any vital part to the danger of a shot. Baby alligators of about twelve inches in length, when captured and brought to market, are bought by dealers at prices ranging from two to four dollars a dozen. The retail price is much higher, as it is very difficult to rear the creatures in captivity. In the case of larger individual specimens, the fishers receive an additional sum of from fifty cents to a dollar for each foot above a certain length. It has recently occurred to the great American mind that since- these reptiles arc now a recognised article of trade with a definite market value, it may pay to rear these as well as any other species of stock ; and, moreover, that the muddy shores of many a stagnant peol in the Southern States, which hitherto has been accounted worse than useless, breeding only fevers and pestilential miasmas beneath the blazing sun, may now bo turned to account, and indeed become valuable property. —Miss F. Gordon Gumming, in " Ciissoll's Family Magazine."