Meet the Swamp People

Swamp People: The gator hunters

The swamps and bayou of Southern Louisiana are home to many different types of wildlife. Some beautiful, some are not and some are extremely dangerous.

Alligators are one of the animals that make their home here and at one time had been hunted almost to extinction by hunters who prized them for their meat and skin. Finally Louisiana added alligators to the endangered species and stopped the hunting of them. Eventually the state began to allow alligators to be hunted again because of their ability to reproduce rapidly and set a thirty days hunting period at the end of Summer with a limited amount of tags being issued.

It takes a special kind of person to live in the swamp and bayous of Louisiana and even a more special kind to hunt alligators. Traveling the water ways in small boats and grabbing onto a line to pull a gator that weighs several hundred pounds and may be as big as 12 feet in length to the surface not only requires the individual to be strong, they also need to have nerves of steel. The gator has to be shot before being loaded into the boat, and the only real vulnerable place on the alligator is a spot on the back of its head about the size of a quarter.

Liz Cavalier considers herself as being just “one of the boys”. She started hunting alligators when she little and went hunting with her father. Liz is considered to be an excellent shot by Troy Landry who hired her to hunt alligators with him and his son Jacob.

Glenn and Mitchell Guist are brothers who were born and raised in the swamp land area known as Conway Bayou. These two brothers live off the land and are known by a combination of their first names “glennmitchell” by their close neighbors. They hunt whatever kind of game they can find along with whatever kind of fish they can catch.

R.J. Molinere and his son Jay Paul are pretty much a new team to the alligator hunting swamp people. R.J. is a Native American of the Houma tribe. In one particular episode of Swamp People, R.J. and Jay Paul were plagued with the problem of poachers stealing their catch from some of their alligator lines they had run.

Terral Evans is what is known as a gator tagger. Unlike the other Swamp People who hunt alligators for their meat and skin, Terral works for the Mississippi Fish and Wildlife. His job is to find and relocate alligators that have become a problem. His way of hunting is more dangerous because he hunts alligators at night, grabbing them with his hands and dragging them into his boat.

Troy and Jacob Landry are another father and son alligator hunting team. Around Pierre Parie as well as other parishes in Louisiana Troy is considered as the “King of the Swamp”. He is a third generation Cajun and proud of his family heritage. His biggest catch was an alligator he named “Big Head” and hunted for several years before finally catching him. “Big Head” was twelve feet eleven inches long.

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