PABLO HIPPO SNIPPO
Dead drug lord’s horny horde castrated
Pablo Escobar’s horny hippos are running rampant in Colombia, but now scientists are literally — and very carefully — cutting them off.
Local veterinarians are performing the first-ever castrations of hippos in the wild to keep the overly fertile descendants of the drug lord’s escaped pets from taking over the country’s lakes and rivers.
It’s a formidable task, given that the aggressive, 3-ton beasts are hardly agreeable patients.
Each operation takes 12 hours and requires a crane to maneuver the massive mammals, WebConserva veterinarian Carlos Valderrama — no relation to the soccer star — told DW.com.
“When we transported the hippo we were castrating, it moved just a little while anaesthetized,” Valderrama said. “And the back wheels of the truck lifted up.”
In 1993, one male and three female hippos es- caped from Escobar’s 7,000-acre jungle hacienda, between Medellín and Bogotá, after the cocaine kingpin was shot dead in a federal police raid.
Escobar’s pet zebras, elephants, ostriches, camels and giraffes all found homes in zoos around the world.
But his quartet of hippos — reportedly the kingpin’s favorites — had better plans.
Now, when they’re not charging at fishermen or terrorizing a village, the hefty, semiaquatic herbivores have spent the past four decades happily making more of themselves.
There are now anywhere from 80 to 150 feral, bellicose hippos in the country, estimates that vary depending on which scientists are counting and then running for their lives.
Past efforts at culling the population — including the government-ordered shooting death of an allegedly violent hippopotamus named Pepe in 2009 — have failed after widespread animal-rights protests.
And with no real natural predators, hippo numbers are growing exponentially.
“A jaguar is our biggest predator. It’s huge, it’s beautiful,” Valderrama said.
“But it’s 100 kilos. It is not going to be able to do anything against a grown hippo.”
The hippos are so content, they even appear to be reaching sexual maturity and breeding at a younger age, thereby producing still more of themselves, CORNARE, Colombia’s government agency for environmental management, told DW.com.
“Within a couple of decades,” University of California San Diego ecologist Jonathan Shurin told National Geographic earlier this year, “there could be thousands of them.”