quality:corruption, structural:expansion, structural:reformatting, linguistic:translation
Farming and the fur trade

Local extinction in their native range due to overharvesting led to the development of nutria fur farms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first farms were in Argentina and then later in Europe, North America, and Asia. These farms have generally not been successful long-term investments, and farmed nutria often are released or escape as operations become unprofitable. The first attempt at nutria farming was in France in the early 1880s, but it was not much of a success. The first efficient and extensive nutria farms were located in South America in the 1920s. The South American farms were very successful, and led to the growth of similar farms in North America and Europe. Nutrias from these farms often escaped, or were deliberately released into the wild to provide a game animal or to remove aquatic vegetation.

Nutria were introduced to the Louisiana ecosystem in the 1930s, when they escaped from fur farms that had imported them from South America. Nutria were released into the wild by at least one Louisiana nutria farmer in 1933 and these releases were followed by E. A. McIlhenny who released his entire stock in 1945 on Avery Island. In 1940, some of the nutria escaped during a hurricane and quickly populated coastal marshes, inland swamps, and other wetland areas. From Louisiana, nutria have spread across the Southern United States, wreaking havoc on marshlands.

Following a decline in demand for nutria fur, nutria have since become pests in many areas, destroying aquatic vegetation, marshes, and irrigation systems, and chewing through man-made items such as tires and wooden house panelling in Louisiana, eroding river banks, and displacing native animals. Damage in Louisiana has been sufficiently severe since the 1950s to warrant legislative attention; in 1958, the first bounty was placed on nutria, though this effort was not funded. By the early 2000s, the Coastwide Nutria Control Program was established, which began paying bounties for nutria killed in 2002. In the Chesapeake Bay region in Maryland, where they were introduced in the 1940s, nutria are believed to have destroyed 2,800 to 3,200 hectares (7,000 to 8,000 acres) of marshland in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. In response, by 2003, a multimillion-dollar eradication program was underway.

In the United Kingdom, nutria were introduced to East Anglia, for fur, in 1929; many escaped and damaged the drainage works, and a concerted programme by MAFF eradicated them by 1989. However, in 2012, a "giant rat" was killed in County Durham, with authorities suspecting the animal was, in fact, a nutria.