The river near the Australian city of Darwin is full of hundreds of crocodiles that will kill you if you jump in. On the bright side, the region also has crocodile farms that produce useful leather for prestigious brands such as Hermes and Louis Vuitton.
The crocodile population was once decimated by uncontrolled hunting, but now has rebounded:
Before government protection in the 1970s, an estimated 98 percent of the wild saltwater crocodile population had disappeared in the Northern Territory, driven by leather demand and culling.
Now, according to government figures, over 100,000 “salties”, which can grow over six meters long and weigh more than 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds), hunt along the coasts, rivers and wetlands of the continent’s far north.
“It’s been a raging success story,” Grahame Webb said….”To conserve predators, you’ve got to rebuild their population; if you’re successful at doing that, they then start eating people again, and everyone wants to get rid of them.”
Charlie Manolis, a crocodile expert from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said that by the 1980s, it was clear the community needed to see real value in the creatures to tolerate them as neighbors…
Wild egg harvesting is part of a “ranching” program in the Northern Territory that links the leather industry and livelihoods directly to the animals…Under the scheme, landholders—many of them Indigenous Australians—can receive payments for wild eggs collected from their properties, which are then supplied to ranches.
The lucrative leather trade relies on farms primarily stocked with eggs and animals plucked from the wild, with 70,000 eggs and 1,400 crocodiles allowed to be taken each year. “There are quite a lot of people who are employed through crocodiles,” Webb said, highlighting both tourism and farming industries. The crocodile farming industry has been estimated to be worth over … $66 million…a year to the Territory…The resulting leather is highly prized by luxury brands such as Hermes and Louis Vuitton.
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