Nathaniel Rich at Harper’s Magazine:
The rules of the Louisiana Nutria Rodeo are simple: From the strike of midnight on a Friday morning in February, your kill crew has forty hours to shoot as many swamp rats as possible. You can hunt in any swamp or coastal marsh within state lines, provided you deliver the rodents’ corpses to the marina in Venice, the last settlement before the mouth of the Mississippi River, by Saturday at four o’clock in the afternoon, to be weighed to two decimal places in a plastic crate.
At five, the cook-off begins. At six-thirty, the rodeo’s director, Robbie Carter, presents oversize checks with cash prizes awarded to the winning teams in various rat-killing categories. Hunter Courville & Cajun Fever performs energetic zydeco and swamp-pop anthems. Then, and only then, does the rodeo’s main attraction commence: the Nutria Toss. The children’s division goes first.
more here.
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