Free Republic

NEW ORLEANS - A Louisiana woman is suing a Wal-Mart store over what she claims was a much-too-close encounter of the furry kind. Rebecca White says in her lawsuit that employees at a Wal-Mart in Abbeville let a rat-tailed rodent known as a nutria run loose and scare her. She says that not only did employees know it was in their store, but gave it a pet name, Norman, and failed to warn shoppers. White says she was pushing a full shopping cart down an aisle in October when the nutria ran out from behind a rack. She says she...

GALLIANO - They're killed by the thousands every year, their carcasses buried in the marsh. Their furry pelts, once sheared, dyed, made into coats and hats and sold on the international market, are now worth so little that some say it's more economical to cast them aside to rot. Nutria were imported to Louisiana from South America in the 1930s to supply a booming American fur industry. But they soon escaped into the wetlands where their population and their appetite for marsh-saving grasses exploded. Decades ago, their numbers were controlled by the hunters and trappers who worked the marshlands of...

REEDSPORT, Ore. (AP) - The man accused of shooting a snorkeler in the head told investigators that he mistook the swimmer for a large, water-dwelling rodent...

SEATTLE - A water-loving rodent native to South America that has destroyed thousands of acres of wetlands in the southeast has been spotted near Lake Washington. Nutria are semi-aquatic, chocolate-colored rodents that can weigh more than 20 pounds and eat one-quarter of their weight a day in crops and plants of all varieties. Also called coypu, or swamp rats, they burrow through marshes and levies, and females can produce more than a dozen offspring a year. A trapper recently caught nine along the shores of Lake Washington. Two University of Washington students are studying the rodents to determine where they...

SKAGIT COUNTY - A rodent that can decimate crop land has just been discovered in Skagit County -- an area with an economy that depends on agriculture. It's called nutria and it is native to South America. They look like a beaver, but they are much more dangerous. The nutria is a rodent that lives in the water and feeds on the land. It stops nothing short of eating every kind of crop, plant, marsh or forest. Bottom line: they are an enemy to the environment and a nightmare to farmers. "They eat everything. They are hungry, they breed like...

Hurricane Katrina's path of destruction dealt at least a temporary setback to the nutria, the South American rodent species that is devouring wetlands along the Gulf of Mexico, according to experts. Scientists believe decades of wetlands loss in the Gulf region—due in part to the voracious appetites of the rodents—made Hurricane Katrina's destruction worse. "Some of the storm protection that nature provides from wetlands, especially in southeast Louisiana, that flood protection, it just wasn't there," said Justin Baker, a biologist with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries in New Iberia. Baker heads up a program to reduce the numbers...

Rat-Like Rodent May Be Coming to S.C. 1 hour, 41 minutes ago Strange News - AP COLUMBIA, S.C. - State wildlife officials are concerned that a large, rat-like rodent called nutria may soon be showing up in the Savannah and Pee Dee river basins. The furry bucktoothed rodent looks like a mix between a beaver and a rat and weighs up to 20 pounds. They have become a nuisance in other southern states because they eat marsh plants and dig through dams. Nutria reach sexual maturity within a year and quickly reproduce. They are enough of a problem in Louisiana...

The Nutria Are Here The scourge of Louisiana has found a happy home in Dallas' man-made lakes Nutria can survive in lakes where little else can, and they reproduce and look like rats—giant ones, anyway, with sharp orange buck teeth. BY CHERYL SMITH You know it's springtime in Dallas when the crepe myrtles begin to bloom, native wildflowers start their sprouting and the nutria waddle from their drainage pipes and sewers to frolic like kittens in the warm air. With their native land of Argentina too far away for swimming or travel by webbed foot, and a bounty on their...

Nutria — furry, swamp-dwelling rodents that look like 10-pound rats with webbed feet — are largely regarded as a nuisance in Louisiana's Cajun country. But they are wanted creatures nonetheless. Starting Wednesday, the state of Louisiana will pay a $4-a-tail bounty — officials prefer the term "incentive" — in hopes of wiping out 400,000 nutria this winter. The payment is part of an effort to save Louisiana's coast, which is disappearing at a rate of 35 square miles a year. Nutria, a non-native species that has overrun Gulf of Mexico wetlands since the value of their fur plummeted in the...