US judge: California can’t ban alligator sales

California cannot ban the importation and sale of crocodile and alligator products, a federal judge has ruled, in a victory for the state of Louisiana, which challenged the ban along with businesses in multiple states.

Federal law controls trade in those products and preempts California from barring trade in them, Chief U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller in Sacramento, California, wrote in a ruling dated Tuesday.

Mueller had already blocked enforcement of the law while lawsuits challenging it played out in her court. Plaintiffs included businesses based in California, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, Montana and Wyoming.

The California ban had covered products made from alligators and two species of crocodile — Nile and Saltwater. All can be sold legally under international treaty and U.S. federal law.

Mueller rejected arguments that California was only seeking to regulate activity within the state. “California is not regulating crocodile takings with its borders,” she wrote. “Nothing in the record suggests crocodiles reside in California, migrate into California or have been introduced into California.”

According to the court record, the Nile crocodile is listed as threatened and some species of saltwater crocodile are threatened or endangered.

The American alligator is no longer threatened or endangered — there are now an estimated 2.9 million in Louisiana in the wild or on farms — but it’s treated as threatened because alligator products can be difficult to tell apart from products made from endangered crocodiles.

Louisiana argued in filing the suit that the economy surrounding alligators has played a key role in bringing back the American alligator population and is an important factor in protecting wetlands and other species.

Louisiana said that because most of the state’s coastal habitat is privately owned, the state does not have direct control over how it is managed. But the alligator industry provides economic incentives for landowners to take steps to protect marshlands that serve as habitat for the alligators.

Conservationists noted those similarities in arguing to keep the California ban, saying that products from threatened and nonthreatened species are so nearly identical that traffickers can easily disguise illegal products.