Pablo Escobar’s Cocaine Hippos Terrorize Colombian Waterways

Up to 100 hippopotamuses, all descended from four animals illegally imported into Colombia by the cocaine smuggler Pablo Escobar in the late 1980s, are menacing Colombia’s marshlands and river systems.

Scientists told The Daily Telegraph that the country must now must cull the aggressive “cocaine hippos” that roam the Magdalena river basin, as they are breeding voraciously in the country’s wet and warm climate. In their natural African habitat, hippos have to contend with a long dry season.

Escobar, who was said to be worth a staggering $25 billion at his height, making him the seventh richest man in the world, was known for buying lavish gifts, and boasted about literally burning money on occasion to keep his family warm.

In 2020, a nephew found a plastic bag with $18m hidden in the wall of one of his old houses.

His zoo, complete with elephants and hippopotamuses was just one more indulgence.

When he was shot dead in 1993, the Colombian government took control of his estate, including the animals, most of which were either euthanized or sent to zoos and parks.

Four hippos, however, living in a remote pond, escaped the cull; now there are dozens of them living in the wild. The exact number is unknown but the Telegraph puts the number at between 80 and 100, which it says makes them the largest invasive species on the planet. Their numbers will swell to almost 1,500 by 2040 if they are not controlled.

“Nobody likes the idea of shooting a hippo, but we have to accept that no other strategy is going to work,” ecologist Nataly Castelblanco-Martínez told The Telegraph.

The hippos have become a local tourist attraction; paying visitors can tour Escobar’s former mansion and visit the lake where several dozen hippos now live.

But researchers say the hippos are competing with native wildlife and polluting local waterways with their toxic urine and feces.

Hippos are famously aggressive and kill more people annually than any other African mammal. Last year, a Colombian cattle farmer was bitten by a hippo and thrown into the air, breaking his leg, hip and several ribs.

One other mooted method of controlling the hippos, sterilization, has been unsuccessful—owing to the fact that male hippos have retractable testes.

David Echeverri Lopez, a government environmentalist, told The Telegraph that he is able to castrate roughly one hippo per year, whereas scientists estimate that the population grows by 10 percent annually.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/pablo-...rways?ref=home

They need to give them some quaaludes to bring the down.

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Originally Posted by misskit

One other mooted method of controlling the hippos, sterilization, has been unsuccessful—owing to the fact that male hippos have retractable testes.

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Hmm . . . why would this amazing feat make them 'un-sterilisable'?

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Originally Posted by misskit

toxic urine and feces

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Is Jaguar urine and feaces non-toxic?

Why not repatriate them to Africa?

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Originally Posted by TheRealKW

Is Jaguar urine and feaces non-toxic?

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You've seen the size of a hippo and the size of a jaguar . . . you decide.

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Originally Posted by bsnub

Why not repatriate them to Africa?

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Fat fuckers . . . better off do them off humanely and eat them.


An article from several years ago . . . these things pop up every few years:

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There's a Possible Upside to Eating Pablo Escobar's Hippos

The drug kingpin left behind more than just a trail of cocaine. He also left a small herd of hippos, which could feed a small army of hungry Colombians.

When Pablo Escobar got shot in the ear in 1993, he left more than just the legacy of a bizarro-world Robin Hood who trafficked billions of dollars of cocaine and spread his wealth among the poor of Medellín.
He also left hippos.
At Hacienda Nápoles, Escobar's lavish estate in Puerto Triunfo, Colombia, the kingpin built himself a series of distractions that included a private bullring, a herd of concrete dinosaurs, and a menagerie of giraffes, kangaroos, exotic birds, and hippopotamuses.
But Escobar's perhaps timely demise posed a problem for the government, which took over his assets following his death. The dinosaurs could stay, but someone had to pay for the live animals.
Most were transferred to local zoos, and many others starved to death. The hippos, however, became feral. What began as a small family of herbivores—one male and three females, all purchased from the San Diego Zoo in 1981—has become a herd of somewhere between 50 and 60 hippos, many of which still live in Hacienda Nápoles' man-made lakes.
But at least 12 others have broken free of the fences and gone as far as 155 miles away from the compound, where they demolish crops and sometimes stomp small cows.
It doesn't help that some Colombian children, who perhaps didn't grow up learning that hippos are known to be one of the most dangerous animals in their native Africa, think that they're harmless, or even cute. A recent report by El Colombiano noted that kids are swimming with the hippos and feeding the calves.

The skin, which can grow up to two inches thick and exudes a red slime that acts as a natural sunblock, probably doesn't make a very good chicharrón.

Rounding up the wild hippos and fencing them in is an option, but an expensive one at an estimated $500,000. The Humboldt Institute, an independent biodiversity organization in Colombia, simply suggests euthanasia—but that's likely to be met with protests, as it has in the past.
One scientist, however, thinks that the hippos would make a lovely barbecue. When one of the Hacienda's hippos was accidentally electrocuted during an experiment with electric fencing, the carcass became dinner. "What did the local people do? They took him, they chopped him up, they barbecued him and they ate him!" biologist Patricio von Hildebrand told the BBC. Apparently, it tasted like pork.
On the surface, killing hippos for food not an insane idea. Hippos—like their evolutionary cousins, whales—have a lot of meat on their bones. At the turn of the 20th century, there was even a plan to import hippos to the Louisiana swampland to solve a massive meat shortage. According to a 1962 article in The New Scientist, hippos have very little fat and a high yield of edible protein—roughly 1,200 pounds of meat from an average-sized hippo.
But about that porkiness: The terroir of your average African hippo is, of course, influenced by its grass-heavy diet, while those Colombian transplants are stuck with local roughage. (Coca leaves?) The grass leads to a flavor that many describe as unlike any other typical protein. Unless it's blasted with the high, wet heat of a pressure cooker, the meat is lean and tough. It's sometimes dried, salted, and added to a vegetable stew. The skin, which can grow up to two inches thick and exudes a red slime that acts as a natural sunblock, probably doesn't make a very good chicharrón.
Hippos are still eaten in their native West Africa, even though poaching and war have decimated the population. Poachers, many of whom are current or ex-militiamen, use rocket launchers, machine guns, and even dynamite to kill the hippos. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the sale of the meat is illegal, commanding high prices in village markets and turning a tidy profit for the poachers.
But hippos can be as deadly dead as they are alive. In 2011, 500 people in Zambia were infected with anthrax after eating tainted hippo meat. In 2004, four people in western Uganda died after eating a hippo that "died of a strange disease."
The problem is verifying the safety of a wild hippo for consumption, no matter where it lives. Just as New York state officials didn't have a plan in place to test and cook the hundreds of wild geese it exterminated in 2010—a number of people wanted the meat donated to a food bank to feed the homeless—the cost associated with green lighting wild meat might outweigh the benefits of feeding hungry locals.
Besides, Pablo probably wouldn't want you to eat his hippos anyway.

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https://www.vice.com/en/article/xy73...scobars-hippos

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Originally Posted by panama hat

and sometimes stomp small cows.

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:doglol:

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Originally Posted by panama hat

One scientist, however, thinks that the hippos would make a lovely barbecue. When one of the Hacienda's hippos was accidentally electrocuted during an experiment with electric fencing, the carcass became dinner. "What did the local people do? They took him, they chopped him up, they barbecued him and they ate him!" biologist Patricio von Hildebrand told the BBC. Apparently, it tasted like pork.

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:rofl:

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One other mooted method of controlling the hippos, sterilization, has been unsuccessful—owing to the fact that male hippos have retractable testes.

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Dart, neuter, release; sounds easy, though I expect there must be technical/practical reasons for this not being done.

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Originally Posted by jabir

Dart, neuter, release; sounds easy, though I expect there must be technical/practical reasons for this not being done.

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Ahem . . .

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Originally Posted by misskit

male hippos have retractable testes.

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Still begs two questions . . . is such a marvellous biological creation a hindrance and why do female hippos have testes, non-retractable - but still?

Retractable they may be, and that could but doesn't mean inaccessible.