Back in 2003, Colombians began to report encounters with the wild hippos that escaped from cocaine drug lord Pablo Escobar‘s private zoo after he was killed by police and his estate was left to rot.
But this isn’t some cocaine fueled hallucination, but a stranger than fiction reality about one of the lasting legacies of Escobar upon modern Colombia.
More than a decade later, the four hippos that Escobar bought from a private zoo in California have multiplied in to 35 animals, an invasive species that spreads disease, predates on local fauna (including manatees) and livestock, and have been sighted as far as 70 some odd miles away from Escobar’s former home.
The animals can live up to 60 years and there are no natural predators for them in Colombia. Further complicating the effort to control their reproduction is that it’s incredibly hard to castrate a hippo: first, because it annoys the hippo; and second, because hippo testicles retract into their bodies, making it nearly impossible to sex a hippo without a rather intimate inspection…
The current strategy is containment-based: local vets and officials are trying to build a fenced-in habitat for the hippos that has everything they need to tempt them to stay, and a combination of natural and constructed barriers to keep them from wandering…because importing their natural African predators would be a mess that could not be undone…
