In The New York Times in 1917, a year in which it was forecast that “the civilized world of women will wear more fur than ever before,” a reporter asked a pelt importer what his furs were made of. “Rats and snails and puppy dogs’ tails,” he joked. “It is called by dignified and pleasing names, but as for its ingredients—I think the nursery couplet explains them.” The favored pelt of the moment, the reporter wrote, was “nutria.”
Nutria are often mistaken for beavers—both have prehistoric-looking orange teeth—but nutria are typically one-third the size of beavers and one-third as adorable. Beavers have chubby cheeks and paddle tails, and there is a startled quality to the way they hold their little hands in front of them, like you’ve given them a sharp look just as they’re about to take the last cookie from a tray in the conference room. They are a symbol of productivity—“busy as a beaver”—and thus a noble mascot for capitalism. Nutria, on the other hand, have long, hairless tails and malice in their eyes. Disney’s Lady and the Tramp features a kind and helpful beaver named Mr. Busy; a nutria would surely be a villain.
Americans, particularly those living along the Gulf Coast, are familiar with nutria as a scourge, a giant, aquatic, ratlike rodent biblical in both its numbers and its environmental devastation. But nutria were actually brought to the United States from South America for their fur, in 1899, and for decades they held a cachet parallel to that of the beaver. Well into the twentieth century, Stetson offered “Nutria Quality” hats; per the Times in 1944, rabbit was often clipped and dyed to mimic nutria fur—these dupe pelts were called nutriette.
As the animals’ prestige grew, so did their numbers. Nutria escaped from (and were intentionally released from) fur farms and proliferated enthusiastically in the wild. By the eighties, when the fur market declined, the rodents were already established in several states, feeding on plants whose roots bind our wetlands together. Their original utility has been so thoroughly repressed that a hatmaker on TikTok recently described nutria fur as “a newer hat-making material.”
But the rodents are boring into the cowboy hat market just as they bore into our waterways. Garland-based Resistol sells a $550 cattleman made of a blend of nutria and rabbit fur. Collectors boast about owning vintage Nutria Quality Stetsons, and amateur and professional custom hatters alike are experimenting with nutria felts.
The family of Joella Gammage Torres has been crafting cowboy hats since nutria’s heyday—her grandfather Marvin Gammage began making hats in 1926, and she remembers her father, Manny Gammage, telling her he was able to procure nutria hat bodies into the sixties and seventies. Now a master hatter at Texas Hatters, in Lockhart, Gammage Torres is interested in using nutria more. She explained that it’s not always easy for hatters to get beaver felts in the U.S., where there is one dominant felter, Winchester Hat Corporation, in Winchester, Tennessee. By several accounts, the company has begun limiting new clients because of demand—demand surely compounded by a Beyoncé-and-Twisters-driven run on Western wear. (The business did not respond to calls.)
By contrast, it’s now quite easy to obtain nutria felt in the United States, thanks in part to a Berkeley, California, native named Willee Roberts. When he began making hats as a teenager, Roberts wasn’t satisfied by the amount of information he could get about where the fur he was using came from and its ecological impact. He is, after all, “a California boy,” he said. When he was working in a millinery in New Orleans, he learned about nutria first as a pest, then as a fur. “I saw an old hat that was made out of nutria, and I was like, ‘Why is no one doing this? What happened here?’ ” he recalled. In 2015, Roberts went to Bolivia to look for nutria-felt manufacturers, and now he sells imported felt hat bodies in the U.S. at Sunrise Hat Supplies and handmade nutria hats at Hampui Hats. He calls nutria coypu, which is what the critters are known as in South America. (It is the most palatable of the possible monikers, which include “swamp beaver.”) He is betting that nutria’s sustainability, coupled with the difficulty of procuring beaver felt, will continue to drive consumers to the rodents—beavers be dammed.
Roberts is trying not to rebrand nutria, but rather to highlight their invasiveness. Beavers, he said, are vital to river ecosystems—though dams built in populous areas can be a nuisance to us, the structures tend to benefit fish and vegetation. “Meanwhile,” Roberts continued, “we have this pest that they’re literally paying people to get rid of, because they’re trying to control the population.”
Nutria have also intrigued Tim Mahovich, of Pure Beaver Hat Supply, which sells imported hat bodies to hatmakers across the U.S. Since ordering his first batch of nutria from a manufacturer in Bolivia recently, he has been exploring how the bodies could be made sturdier; he isn’t sure they’d accommodate the “taco-curl sides” of some cowboy hats. But he said he’d like to see more nutria hats. “I’m wearing one on my head right now, actually,” he said over the phone.
A nutria-hat boom is likely still a few years away in Texas. Most of the hatmakers I asked work primarily with beaver or beaver-rabbit blends; one shop owner I spoke to was not aware that nutria was available. “We have tried nutria in the past, but it does not make as good of a hat as rabbit and beaver fur,” Kerrie Funmaker, of Nathaniel’s Custom Hats, in Georgetown, wrote in an email. “Nutria has a much coarser hair. This gives the hat a rougher wool-like feel that is not what we strive for in our hats.”
Joella Gammage Torres said that in her early forays with nutria felts, she found them similar to beaver, but she understands why someone might be skeptical. She recalled her father fishing a nutria out of a stock tank on their property and showing it to her. “It was terrifying to me,” she said. “People see a beaver, they think they’re kind of cute, right? ‘Yay, let’s make fur out of it.’ But they see a nutria and it just looks like a big rat.”
When Gammage Torres has presented nutria as an option to customers, the reaction “has not been super favorable,” she said. “Almost everybody knows that beaver is the absolute best. It’s a premium price, but they know that beaver is going to last them the longest. It looks the best; it feels the nicest.” She noted, however, that customers have brought in nutria hats from her grandfather’s era for cleaning, suggesting a durability akin to beaver’s.
The “beaver or bust” cowboys will exist as long as beavers do. But there’s another kind of cowboy—the guy who watched his girlfriend watch Glen Powell walk through the rain in Twisters in a white T-shirt and a straw Resistol hat and panicked. Maybe that guy knows a bit about hats; more likely, he’s never really considered what comprises a cowboy hat, and “fur” wouldn’t even be his first assumption. Beaver hats may be an American tradition, but so is not thinking too hard about what our stuff is made of, as long as it looks really, really cool.
