Orange light pierces through hazy purple clouds as the day’s final shadows loom over the 30-acre lot in Dade City where the hunters bring their slain prey. Their dead flesh is filleted and cured under a patio-sized canopy near a pasture; it smells like a mix of formaldehyde, brackish water and animal excrement. Swarms of flies buzz around the cutting table, which is outfitted with a clamp and an industrial metal ruler so that precise measurements can be made – every penny counts in this business.
Mike Fagan, owner of Fagan Alligator Products Inc., wrestles a 9-foot, pale green specimen from the pile of hides onto the butcher board while heaps of Morton Salt fall off the edge and onto the floor. Like a skilled surgeon examining an X-ray, he stretches the skin taut over a Plexiglas light table until the scaly epidermis illuminates and reveals huge tooth-marked scars gnawed across interlocking patches of flesh. After caressing almost every inch of the lifeless and headless husk of a carcass, he flicks a section of bony underbelly scale before shaking his head in disappointment.
“You see this, this is pretty much worthless,” Fagan says in a slow Southern drawl before removing his blue mesh hat. “It’s too hard and scarred. Maybe I’d get $6-a-foot for it.”
The hide is not high enough quality to be fashioned into one of Gucci’s hot pink alligator skin handbags - the standard trappers and processors now must live up to. The lifestyle of a professional alligator hunter is more demanding now than ever before, and Fagan should know – he was one of the first in Florida. From properly gutting the innards of mammoth catches to spearheading legislation for legalizing alligator trapping and processing, Fagan has so much experience with large reptiles that he makes Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin look like a baby-dangling amateur.
Fagan Alligator Products, Inc. was established by Fagan in Dade City over 25 years ago, exposing the now 60-year-old trapper every undesirable nook and cranny of the alligator wholesale business. His father taught him the basics of trapping, and he, in turn, relayed the lessons to his sons at an early age.
The latest problem facing Fagan and his colleagues is the volatile global economy, which began snowballing in the late 1990s. The industry almost went bust, coming to its nadir after the economical impacts of September 11, 2001.
“One of the biggest things that caused this thing to go down was the Pacific Rim economy,” Fagan says, in reference to the Asian and Australian alligator-hide markets.
“Ever how the Pacific Rim economy goes, it so goes the alligator. Sixty-five percent of everything that was made from exotic skin was sold in the Pacific Rim. Whenever their economy went deep south, we lost about 75 percent of that business. The alligator is a very small business, it’s not very big at all in the scheme of things but it’s an international business.”
The wholesale alligator hide and meat trade virtually vanished in the United States, except for Fagan’s business and a few other diehards around the country. Less than half the skins he receives are now considered top notch, worth an average of about $30-a-foot, depending on the current market value. This price is the threshold at which everyone – trapper, processor, tanner and manufacturer – is able to make a worthwhile profit in a disposable-income dependent industry. A typical day for Fagan includes fielding calls from Florida wildlife experts and brokering deals with furniture craftsmen looking to buy high-quality hides for custom alligator-skin chairs. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on alligator hunting, processing and the laws that regulate his business.
Up until a few years ago, most alligator hide products sold in Europe and elsewhere were tanned with a black or dark brown finish that masked the most noticeable battle scars. The shiny skins were primarily manufactured into wallets, belts, purses and loafers. According to Fagan, the global consumer preference for darker hides was a very good thing for an industry that relies on the hides of territorial animals with four-inch incisors.
“Those damn gators bite each other,” Fagan says. “They fight. They bite. They tear things up. They do all sorts of crap.”
The popularity of darkly tanned alligator skin dwindled when the designer fashion industry declared pastel-dyed alligator skin boots and handbags to be highly desirable accessories. European fashion wonks now set the quality standards for alligator hide grading scales rather than the trappers or processors who drag the giants out of the muck.
It’s a reverse scale, with a “one” being the top dollar category. The lighter colors and finishes make imperfections stand out much more than they did with the traditional darker finishes. A split skin or skin with a hole in it can only be used for products like watchbands, which don’t require long pieces of immaculately preserved gator hide.
“So along comes Europe. And here come Armani and Gucci, and all your big fashion houses. In they come on this thing: ‘Well, we can make a fortune now, and this is how we gonna do it.’ And they started demanding very, very, very high quality skins. And they could do that because there was nobody else out there buying them. So they reset the grading system for skins. The demand now was for high quality skins because it was no longer black and brown. It was pink, blue, yellow, green and pastel in a matte finish.”
1 :: 2 :: 3 >