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Christy Redd remembers seeing a video by PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and frankly being pretty grossed out. It showed an alligator being skinned alive, presumably for a tannery, and Redd watched the beast twist and writhe in agony. "I was so upset," she says.

At 35 years old, Redd is the co-owner of America's largest alligator leather tannery. Based in the small Atlanta suburb of Griffin, Ga., American Tanning & Leather treats and sells the canvas that produces some of the finest luxury handbags, shoes and other products featured in high-end stores across the globe. You can find them in Prada, Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton, priced as high as $50,000.

According to Redd, a typical bag requires the skins of about three gators, and in a year, her firm will use the skins of some 25,000 alligators, a point of some serious contention among animal rights groups. Yet the "Alligator Queen," as some know her, makes the case that the alligator leather industry is actually one of the reasons the gator population is thriving, incentivizing landowners' protection of the animal's habitat — and environmental experts agree.

Animal rights groups don't. Most farms treat alligators cruelly, says Danielle Katz, a campaign manager at PETA. She paints a harrowing picture of animals being kept in crowded cages brimming with feces and urine, then being killed by a bludgeon or chisel to the head — and sometimes being skinned while still alive for up to 45 minutes.

With so many vegan options, there is no reason to buy and wear the skin of an animal, Katz says. "Alligators should not have to suffer for our vanity."

But Redd says that people who hear about the skinning of gators and have an emotional response, like the one she had watching the PETA video, "don't have the same response at the supermarket in the chicken nugget section."

Redd also says that the conditions Katz describes would ruin her business, saying that if alligators aren't given abundant space and a quick death, the quality of their skin suffers.

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Chris Plott, Christy's father, holds up alligator skins in the 1960s. Courtesy of Christy Redd/Ozy.com hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Christy Redd/Ozy.com

Chris Plott, Christy's father, holds up alligator skins in the 1960s.

Courtesy of Christy Redd/Ozy.com

The family firm is no stranger to controversy, though. Redd's great-grandfather started buying and selling fur in 1923. Her grandfather and father continued the business: buying otters, minks, foxes and the like from trappers, flipping the animals inside out and then stretching the skins out to dry.

When Redd's father, Chris, bought 12,000 gator skins in the first auction after legalization of the trade in 1978, he didn't know what he was doing. "It was either the dumbest or luckiest decision I ever made," he told her.

For 10 years, the alligator leather business lost money, supported only by the thriving fur trade. When fur became taboo, Redd and company had to make gator leather profitable, and fast.

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One of the $35,000 luxury bags made with genuine American alligator leather produced by Christy Redd's company. James Hickey/Courtesy of Christy Redd hide caption

itoggle caption James Hickey/Courtesy of Christy Redd

One of the $35,000 luxury bags made with genuine American alligator leather produced by Christy Redd's company.

James Hickey/Courtesy of Christy Redd

The co-owner, who wears a custom-made-in-Istanbul python coat, started full-time with the tannery when she was 22, fresh out of the University of Georgia. She's talked her way into a profitable spot in a thriving luxury goods market, which has tripled in less than 20 years to $300 billion in 2013.

To match demand, American Tanning & Leather cut out the middle man in 2006 and started buying skins straight from alligator hunters in Louisiana. Since then, output has doubled from 10,000-plus to approximately 25,000 skins, though the company declines to release exact revenue figures.

The key to its growth strategy has been finding customers who want lesser-quality skins — which is the majority of those produced in the wild. Last year, AmTan and its Italian partner, Whiteline, opened a warehouse in Milan aimed at selling to small-scale craftsmen who buy and improve lesser-quality skins. Already they've sold 3,000 skins.

Redd says she isn't worried about animal rights groups slowing her business, and biologist Lance Campbell of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries hopes she is right. The alligator leather industry provides substantial incentive to private landowners, $150 to $200 per gator, to maintain the habitat. Out of an alligator population of approximately 2 million, an average of 35,000 are legally hunted, which has no effect on the overall population but provides millions of dollars to landowners, he says.

"I hope alligator leather doesn't go the same way as fur," says Redd, confident it won't. PETA and other animal rights groups, meanwhile, will keep the pressure on.

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animal rights

Fashion

Georgia

PETA

Wooden carousels with carved and painted animals seem like a relic of the past. But Carousel Works in Mansfield, Ohio, is still making them to order.

"Our biggest trade secret is we've got this big barrel of elbow grease. You've gotta come in here and work every day," says co-owner Art Ritchie.

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As The Atlantic recently reported, few companies still take time to make old-fashioned carousels with hand-carved animals. So when Ritchie says they make these carousels from scratch, it is no exaggeration.

"We make our own castings and do our own machine work. We've got a woodworking shop that blocks the figures together, and then we've got a carving department. Then we've got a group that does all the sanding and the priming and preparing them for painting. And then we've got a whole group of painters that do all the artwork," Ritchie explains.

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The National Zoo's carousel is among dozens that Carousel Works has installed around the U.S., each made to fit in with its surroundings. James Clark/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption James Clark/NPR

The National Zoo's carousel is among dozens that Carousel Works has installed around the U.S., each made to fit in with its surroundings.

James Clark/NPR

The finished product is no mere merry-go-round.

"Ours are finished pieces of furniture. They're sculpture," Ritchie says.

The company has been restoring carousels in Mansfield since the late 1980s. And it has created 30 new carousels that have been installed around the U.S., each made to fit in with its surroundings. For example, the company created the carousel at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Instead of horses to ride, it's full of animals that visitors would have just seen in real life at the park: zebras, cheetahs, pandas, Komodo dragons.

"We just talked to a group that saves pit bulls. We're talking about building a carousel that's all dogs. Now, what else can you put on there? We were fooling around with it. Can we do a big dog bone with a rug on the top so one of the dogs could ride, too?" Ritchie says. "That's the fun part about it. If you're not laughing and giggling while you're designing these things, you're in the wrong place."

And it's not just dogs. The Bronx Zoo is home to the Bug Carousel. "The only thing we didn't put on there was a cockroach because ... everyone would walk up and say, 'I got a bigger one than that in my kitchen,' " Ritchie says.

He says kids love the bugs — especially if their parents don't. "Ten-year-old boys — any animal that grosses their mother out has gotta be the one they gotta ride."

carousels

National Zoo

Mark Zuckerberg is a man of many accomplishments. A computer programming whiz who famously co-founded "The Facebook" in his Harvard University dorm. An entrepreneur. A philanthropist. A person who warranted a wax sculpture. And now, he's a conversant Mandarin Chinese speaker.

As he explained in a question-and-answer session conducted entirely in Mandarin, so many of his Chinese-American wife's family members speak only Mandarin that he decided to learn. He has studied it since 2010 and this week felt confident enough in his skills to take questions in Mandarin Chinese at a forum at a Beijing university often called "the MIT of China," Tsinghua University.

The audience gasped and broke into applause when Zuckerberg took the microphone and greeted them in Mandarin, saying "Da jia hao!" (Hello, everyone.)

If you haven't seen it, check it out:

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Zuckerberg went on to explain — in Mandarin — that his wife's grandma loved it when he was able to ask in Chinese for her blessing to marry his wife, Priscilla Chan. And that he loves a challenge. Mandarin is a good one — it is considered one of the most difficult languages for an English speaker to learn.

And we should mention that while Zuckerberg is impressive in his ability to answer questions and speak in full sentences, he is actually not a good Chinese speaker. That's because the language is tonal. For example, "ma" could mean horse, hemp, mom or scold, depending on which tone you use. Zuckerberg's tones are all off, but since he can speak in sentences, the context made him intelligible.

Zuckerberg, in fact, opened his Tsinghua talk with how his Mandarin is lousy. And he joked in Washington, D.C., last year that he told his wife he was a terrible listener in Chinese. She replied, "Your listening is bad in English, too."

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Mark Zuckerberg

Snake venom, vitamin C, Nano Silver and herbs have all been pitched online as a treatment or cure for Ebola. None has the backing of the FDA.

"Unfortunately during public health threats such as Ebola, fraudulent products that claim to prevent, treat, cure disease often appear on the market almost overnight," says Gary Coody, the FDA's national health fraud coordinator. In particular, the FDA wants consumers to beware Ebola "cures" peddled online.

“ It's like storm-chasing roofers, who go and try to defraud people after a big storm. Some of them may be making an honest mistake; other companies are trying to rip people off.

- Nathan Cortez, law professor, Southern Methodist University

The problem isn't just that such products are worthless. "Consumers who are misled by false claims may delay seeking the medical care they need, such as proper diagnosis and supportive care," Coody says. Or they may have a false sense that the product will protect them from the virus.

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The FDA has sent warning letters to three companies it says are making fraudulent claims about Ebola cures. The letters threaten property seizure and even criminal prosecution if the firms don't respond appropriately.

The strategy amounts to "public shaming," says Nathan Cortez, who teaches law at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "It's one mechanism that the FDA uses to lean on companies in a very public way. It's also meant as a warning to other firms, he says, "to say we know companies are trying to defraud the public with fake Ebola tests and treatments and we're on the case."

Two of the firms that got the FDA warning letters didn't respond to my emailed messages. But Ralph Fucetola of the New Jersey-based company Natural Solutions Foundation says he heard the FDA's message loud and clear. Natural Solutions received the warning for its claims that a product known as Nano Silver can effectively kill Ebola.

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"We understand that there is no approved treatment for Ebola," Fucetola says. "Since we are in the middle of negotiating with the government with regard to how we can best describe what we believe is a very important health breakthrough, we are not using the legal term of art 'treatment of disease.' "

Even if the company doesn't explicitly say that Nano Silver "treats" Ebola, it has claimed on its website, Twitter and Facebook that Ebola has a cure — a statement not borne out by the evidence so far, according to the FDA, CDC and other health officials.

While there are experimental drugs and vaccines being tested in the current Ebola outbreak, nothing yet has been proved to work.

Online, other companies tout clove oil, oregano and homeopathic treatments to prevent the virus. There's even a tutorial that was up on YouTube for a do-it-yourself vaccine.

Some businesses, Cortez says, take advantage of fear.

"It's like storm-chasing roofers, who go and try to defraud people after a big storm," he says. "Some of them may be making an honest mistake; other companies are trying to rip people off."

Mistake or not, the FDA says Ebola cures advertised on the Internet are misleading and dangerous. The agency encourages consumers who have seen such claims to report them.

health fraud

ebola

FDA