BATON ROUGE — Spaces are still available for the Louisiana recreational alligator lottery. Applications for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries’ (LDWF) recreational alligator harvest lottery are open, with licenses on a first-come basis.
The inaugural recreational alligator hunt is scheduled to run from Oct. 1 – 31 in eight recreational harvest zones. The lottery will create opportunities for 5,000 hunters to harvest alligators, with each hunter receiving two tags. There is an allotted number of licenses per zone.
Applicants must be Louisiana residents at least 16 and older and meet hunter education requirements. There is a $50 application fee per zone that is nonrefundable, and you can apply for and be selected for more than one zone. Selected applicants must purchase a $25 resident alligator sports hunter license, and will receive two non-transferable hide tags for the zone they are awarded.
To apply, click on the Lottery Applications tab, update or create customer details similar to purchasing a license, and then submit an application for the zone you’re interested in hunting. There is a nonrefundable $50 application fee for each zone selected.
Customers may select and win a harvest opportunity for more than one zone, but there will be an application fee for each zone selected. Those interested may only win one opportunity per zone, so if you’ve already won an opportunity in the Zone A lottery, for example, you are not eligible to win a second opportunity, but you would be able to win additional opportunities in other zone lotteries that have availability.
Applications are available online only through the LDWF licensing website, which you can find here.
LDWF clarified that this is for the recently adopted recreational alligator lottery and not the commercial alligator lottery harvest application.
Louisiana’s alligator population
According to LDWF, the state’s wild alligator population has increased from less than 100,000 to more than three million in the past 50 years. There are also nearly one million alligators on farms in Louisiana.
“We have a population problem with the state having over three million alligators today. That’s a 2900% increase in the past 50 years,” Louisiana State Senator Robert Allain said when he introduced the recreational alligator hunting bill earlier this year.
“Last year, we had a fatal alligator attack where a 12-year-old lost his life,” Allain continued. “As the population grows, so does the alligator’s geographical footprint. More citizens are going to be come in contact with alligators, and a lot of these people are going to be unfamiliar with all the dangers associated with them.”
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