You may already know that the nutria infestation in Louisiana could easily spread across the country if climate change continues. But how did these pesky rodents get here in the first place?
Many place the blame on E.A. McIlhenny, the former company president of McIlhenny Company, makers of Tabasco Sauce. Some, like the hunting blog Terrierman.com, have even gone so far as to call the nutria the “Tabasco Sauce rat”:
Unfortunately, it appears these rumors are not true — at least not entirely.
The truth is that a hurricane did not rip through the fur farm, and the nutria were not “accidentally” released into the wild. It turns out that McIlhenny did it deliberately as an effort to bolster the wild fur trade. In his defense, he was not the only one to contemplate this bright idea:
Ultimately, whether or not a specific man long dead is to blame for an outbreak of invasive species is of little consequence to environmentalists today. What’s more important are the lessons we can learn from the past.
Any time we mess with the natural ecology of a particular ecosystem, whether that’s by releasing new species or by changing the conditions that existing species live in (like say, dramatically warming up the climate, for example), we are gambling with consequences that we can’t predict.
Next time we have a bright idea to make nature “better,” perhaps we should remember our history and reconsider.
