John K. Flores: The lottery with teeth awaits the adventurous

Are you the adventurous type? Are you looking for something where the business end of the creature you’re pursuing has teeth that immediately let you know, “Beware, I can bite you?”
If that’s you, then why not take advantage of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries alligator lottery. According to a May 10 department press release, applications are now available and due by June 23.
Alligator lottery opportunities include 22 LDWF Wildlife Management Areas, 28 public lakes, and one Army Corp of Engineers property with hunting taking place Aug. 28-Nov. 2.
My wife and I have put in for the alligator lottery held on the Atchafalaya Delta Wildlife Management Area and subsequently drawn out in years past. More specifically, we fished for our gators on the Wax Lake side of the WMA. On both of our respective lottery hunts/fishing trips, we caught our three alligators on day one.
For 25 years prior to putting in for these lotteries, I fished alligators commercially for my father-in-law. Those were the glory days of the wild harvest. During the 1990s, there were years when alligator hides brought upwards of $60 per foot.
Being somewhat of a statistician, one year I asked my old pop-in-law if he minded me doing an analysis that determined the probability of the average length of the gators we’d catch. The information I thought might help him determine what he could expect that year in revenue.
He gave me several years of receipts to formulate the mean and standard deviations. My analysis revealed our gators would average 7 feet 8 inches in length.
Well, simple math revealed those 7-plus footers were going to be worth about $420 each. It was that kind of math that brought quite a smile to his face. Our job was to simply get out there and catch them.
Times have changed and the price per foot in 2023 for wild alligators was in the single digits, where a 4- to 5-footer fetched $4 per foot, and 6 feet earned you $6 per foot. It wasn’t until you hit 7 feet that you reached double digits at $12 per foot.
Things got a little better last year, when you caught the bigger alligators and were paid $18 per foot for 8-footers, $20 for 9- and 10-footers, and $25 for 11- and 12-footers. The problem is, you have to go back to the law of averages. If your average is 7 feet which comes to $84 per hide, there’s a small drawback to the LDWF Alligator Lottery.
Applicants who draw out for the public lotteries will have to purchase a $25 alligator hunter license and pay a set fee of $40 per issued tag. The total cost per lucky lottery winner for three tags and a license is $145, not including the $5 application fee and $3.50 online processing fee.
Essentially, the wild harvest of alligators has a lot of competition when it comes to prices. For one, the farm alligator market can grow gators from hatchlings to 5 feet long in just under two years with controlled conditions.
By controlled, it means the water temperature young gators are kept in can be maintained at 80 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. This allows them to grow faster.
By contrast, a wild hatched alligator has a period from late fall through early spring where cold water temperatures cause its metabolism to slow and therefore not eat so much. Hence, wild alligators grow at a much slower pace.
In short, don’t look for the public alligator lottery hunt to be a big money-making windfall. Instead, look at it as a true Louisiana adventure. Quite honestly, there’s not that many people who can say they’ve harvested an alligator in the wild.
The LDWF, for convenience, has provided applicants with an Alligator Harvest Lottery Choices map along with quota information to make their selection easier. The Atchafalaya Delta WMA is label number 1 on the map, which shows there will be 20 hunter opportunities in 2024.
Last year’s Atchafalaya Delta applicant success rate was 19%. Label number 51 is for the Attakapas Island WMA, which has 10 opportunities available for 2024. Attakapas WMA wasn’t included in last year’s lottery alligator program.
It is recommended that successful alligator lottery hunters decide prior to the season on what they plan to do with their catch. For more information on the alligator lottery interested applicants can go to LDWF Website or contact LAalligatorprogram@wlf.la.gov before starting their adventure.
John Flores is the Morgan City Review’s outdoor writer. He can be contacted at gowiththeflo@cox.net.