Puerto Rico's Green Iguanas & the USDA

There's talk in Puerto Rico of rounding up invasive green iguanas en masse and exporting them as food. NPR's Marketplace had a short feature about the proposal a few days ago.

Obviously I think that this is a good idea. I traveled to the Florida Keys last year for the sole purpose of hunting and eating invasive green iguanas. I found that like most reptiles, they taste pretty much like chicken with a texture similar to crab. You can watch a short video about my experiment here.

Green iguanas are easy to butcher. The meat is all in the limbs and tail and there is no need to even bother with gutting the animal. If you parboil the limbs (which I did not do in this particular video) you can peel the skin right off, almost like a ripe avocado. Iguana meat can generally be used as a straight substitute for chicken in most recipes.

The problem that Puerto Rico will run into will have nothing to do with the food per se. The problem will be with the USDA.

They can sell all they want within Puerto Rico. But the minute they try to export it they will need to get approval from USDA for the shipment and USDA will probably shut them down. The reason for this is that USDA requires that pretty much anything but fish has to be killed in a USDA approved facility. If you kill it in the wild and then quickly transport it to an approved facility for butchering, that isn't good enough. Somehow this is magically safe with fish but not with lizards or mammals.

This was the problem that brought my friend Philippe Parola's brilliant nutria scheme to a grinding halt some years ago. It was completely impractical to trap and transport live nutria in meaningful numbers to an approved slaughtering facility. Never mind that the countries where the meat was to be exported to had no restrictions against selling meat that was slaughtered in the field.

It is possible to trap green iguanas live and bring them to a slaughter facility, but I don't believe that they can be trapped live in meaningful numbers. You'd get some but not enough to either supply much of a market or to make an ecologically significant dent in their numbers.

Trapping can be an important component, but the most practical thing is to shoot them in the head with a .22 LR or a pellet rifle. An instant death, as painless as possible, is in the hunter's best interest. A shot anywhere but the spine or brain will usually result in an iguana that runs into thick brush before it eventually dies without being recovered.

Is there really a safety risk involved with selling meat that was slaughtered in the field? Practical experience suggests not. In the United Kingdom and in much of Europe it is standard practice to sell wild meat after it is killed by hunters. Butcher shops carry wild boar, red deer, roe deer, and birds of various descriptions. These countries have serious food safety standards and do a good job of monitoring for e. coli and other food-borne illnesses. It just hasn't been a problem.

What we need is legislation that creates exemptions from these USDA regulations against slaughtering in the field. Field-slaughter restrictions aren't keeping anyone any safer. And aside from the food issue, I think that field slaughter is more humane to the animal. The stress of being imprisoned and caged while being transported long distances to an assembly-line killing facility is an experience that these animals shouldn't be forced to endure. Those of us who care about animal rights have already had to sort through this issue when we got behind lifting the ban on slaughtering horses in the US.

Perhaps Puerto Rico's special status as a US territory rather than a state will allow them to dodge the USDA's rules for international exports. I'm not an expert on those laws. But if they really are planning to start with sales to the rest of the United States, USDA will definitely be a major stumbling block.