Trappers of the Barataria

Nutria Traditions

Jon and Jocelyn Donlon

Edward "Fuzzy" Hertz

Nutria Dealer

Nutria dealer Fuzzy Hertz sits down for an interview with folklorist Jocelyn Donlon

Fifty-odd years ago, Edward "Fuzzy" Hertz opened "Fuzzy's Bar" in Lafitte, which he still runs today and where we interviewed him. Fuzzy Hertz was born and raised in the Gretna/Lafitte area of Jefferson Parish. While he says that his mother was "real real" French," his father, who was a fur trapper and pelt dealer in Lafitte, was of German heritage. Fuzzy says that his father learned how to trap "to survive. . . . The rest of the people was doing it, so he got right in with 'em. Everybody's so friendly that a stranger would come in and they'd help him out, learning the trade."

Fuzzy Hertz was born and raised in the Gretna/Lafitte area. Until 1999, Fuzzy worked for over fifty years as a pelt dealer, taking over his father's business. He bought nutrias, among other fur-bearing animals, and then he skinned, cleaned, dried, and resold the pelts to brokers, who would ship them overseas for processing. Fuzzy believes that no American market exists because "it would cost so much money to process" nutria pelts, which are larger than many other pelts. Tanning the pelts is also expensive. "Years ago," Fuzzy says, "I had one tanned, and it cost me $30 for that one." This pelt was considered defective because it had a blonde streak through it.

Today, most brokers that bought Fuzzy's pelts have died, and the "young people didn't want to take over," unlike Fuzzy, who took over his dad's dealing business. Typically, Fuzzy sold pelts to the Steinberg Brothers and Mayer Brothers of New Orleans. "My Daddy was always telling me it's a `skin game.' The trapper would catch the animal, skin it, and the buyer would skin him, and the next buyer would skin him, and he'd get skint all the way down the line."

Louisiana's trapping season starts in October, after "first cold spell, and after fishing," and it ends in March. Fuzzy's busiest years were during the 1970s. One year, they bought 46,000 pelts at $.25 pelt. "By the time we sold the meat we was doing a nickel or dime on the nutria." The industry, according to Fuzzy, started slowing down in the early 80s, declined every year. Fuzzy doesn't blame animal rights groups; rather, he blames "poverty.people didn't want to buy fur." His business closed in 1999 when his shed burned, with 75 beavers in the drying room. He hadn't actually bought any pelts that year; Leo Kerner, another local fur dealer, was shipping pelts to Fuzzy, who was working them for him.

When the Hertz family first started buying nutria, they dealt only with the meat, which they bought at .03/lb. Fuzzy says that, fifty years ago, "nobody saved skins." He credits Woody Dufresne, of Norco, for "starting people saving fur and trying to get sales for em."

When dealing in nutria meat, Fuzzy says, "We would skin 'em, wash the fur, dry 'em, and then turn 'em inside out-put the meat on the outside-on these little boards, we call 'em boards, like a mold. We'd dry the meat. We had drying rooms up in the big shed, and then we'd take 'em off these boards, and put 'em in sacks and then go sell 'em to different ones. [The meat] was dry, and stinky, too. Real smelly."

The meat was sold primarily to alligator and mink farms. "Different people would come and they would buy thousands of pounds at a time. We had a trailer truck used to come from Wisconsin for [food for] the minks. We'd take the skin off [of the nutria], gut it, take all the intestines out, put it in a cooler, ice it up real good, and the trailer-truck would come like twice a week, take thousands and thousands of pounds of meat and go all the way to Wisconsin. They had the mink farms."

The Hertz family worked with nutria long before they began to eat the meat. They started eating it, however, because "the meat was so pretty; it's prettier than chicken.real, real nice. Very potent." They cooked the meat in a variety of ways: stewed, fried, barbequed, smothered with onions, and even in spaghetti. Mr. Hertz is a living example of cultural traditions in the Lafitte region. He no longer deals in nutria pelts, but can speak about them, as well as about the fishing traditions. He owns a shrimp boat, and continues to make hauls.