Colombia is hungry to solve its hippo problem

The hippopotamus is a threatened species in its native Africa, but is flourishing in one country far, far from home. That’s not a good thing.

Hi there, I’m Jeff and thanks for joining me for Plain English Lesson number 243. JR is the producer, as always, and you can find all the resources for this lesson at PlainEnglish.com/243.

Colombia’s drug kingpin Pablo Escobar brought four hippos from Africa to populate his private zoo in the department of Antioquia. Today, they have become 80 hippos, and they’re starting to worry the local population. The English expression we’ll talk about later in the lesson is “give rise to.” We have a song of the week, of course, and a video lesson at PlainEnglish.com/243.

Colombians are hungry for an answer to their hippo problem

Pablo Escobar is the most famous drug kingpin in Colombia’s history. As a leader of Latin America’s biggest drug cartel in the 1980s and 1990s, he defined what it meant to be a drug lord. He smuggled millions of dollars of cocaine to foreign markets, paid off local politicians, and showered the local community with cash to buy their support or acquiescence. He did whatever he wanted.

One of the things he wanted was to maintain a private zoo. In the early 1980s, he built his own zoo near his Hacienda Nápoles and flew in about 200 rare animals from around the world, including ostriches, elephants, zebras, giraffes, camels, and hippos. After his death in 1993, the zoo was closed by Colombian authorities and the animals were relocated to official zoos around the country. All animals, that is, except the hippos. They were too big and too expensive to move.

A hippopotamus is a big animal. Adult hippos weigh three tons—about 1,500 kilograms—and they are aggressive and unpredictable animals. They are semiaquatic, meaning they spend a large portion of their time in the water. They thrive in slow-moving rivers and lakes in areas with high humidity—which perfectly describes that part of Colombia. It’s often said in Africa that hippos kill more humans than any other animal.

They eat mostly grass, so they don’t look for people and other animals to eat—but they get aggressive if you threaten their territory. Hippos have huge jaws and mouths, with spear-like canines. A BBC article I read about the topic had a huge picture of the inside of a hippo’s mouth. If I hadn’t known it was a hippo, I would have thought it was the mouth of a whale. Because of their size, they have few natural predators in Africa—and none in Colombia.

This is a problem. The farmers and fishermen of Colombia are not used to co-existing with this beast of an animal. One person crashed into a hippo at night on his motorbike. The hippos are wandering up people’s driveways, killing their livestock, and threatening children. There’s a sign outside one school warning of hippo attacks.

The hippos are also changing the chemistry of the rivers and lakes. To understand what I mean, look at a picture of a hippo. This is an animal that eats a lot. It generally eats on solid ground, and then goes to cool off and relax in the rivers and lakes. He eats a lot, and he produces a lot of waste. And that waste is giving rise to harmful bacteria and algae in Antioquia’s lakes and rivers, threatening native plants and animals.

Not everyone is taking the threat seriously. Despite being a dangerous animal, a hippo has a friendly look. And when they’re in wide-open spaces, they don’t tend to be aggressive. There have been no attacks so far in Colombia. Some people have temporarily taken hippo calves as pets. They are not endangered in Africa, but they are considered a threatened species there. Hippos tend to engender public sympathy.

Still, most people recognize that a fast-growing hippo population is not a good thing for Colombia’s countryside. There are no great options for dealing with the problem. I have one option in the back of my mind, but let’s run through some of the ideas people have had.

First, they could capture the animals and transport them somewhere safe. This seems like the easiest option, but it’s not so easy. First, the animal is so heavy that you can’t easily coax it into a pen for safe transport. Second, they need somewhere to go—they can’t go back to Africa because they might carry diseases that could wipe out the whole population in Africa.

Another option is to herd them into a single area and then close that area off with hippo-proof fencing. The trouble here is that they tend to be spread out. The travel together in small herds, but there’s a single male hippo—they call him El Viejo, or The Old Man—that’s so aggressive that he’s scattered other herds far away. They don’t want any part of El Viejo. So now that they’re scattered across a large area, they can’t all be herded into one enclosure.

Chemical sterilization has been used in other fast-growing species. This is when you shoot a male animal with a dart and inject him with a chemical that sterilizes him—so that he cannot impregnate a female hippo. This is still not the option that comes to my mind, but it’s getting closer. Problem with this is that hippos are sensitive to chemicals. They have a thick skin that guards against invasive chemicals and bacteria—that’s their defense against chemicals. They have a weaker immune system and so they could die from the chemicals used to sterilize them. We wouldn’t want that.

So if chemical sterilization is out, then surgical sterilization is also an option. Again, not the option I was thinking about. With surgical sterilization, scientists would capture a female hippo, sedate her, and perform surgery to remove the parts critical to reproduction. It takes three hours just to cut through the thick skin and the layer of fat and muscle protecting those critical parts, so this is an expensive operation. Another operation is to capture the male hippos and castrate them. I guarantee you this is not the option I was thinking of, but this is something that has been done.

All of the previous options are expensive and Colombia doesn’t want to spend its limited budget for environmental protection on caring for non-native animals brought to them by a drug lord.

So that leaves the most logical option, which is to hunt the animals until they die out—with all due respect to the hippos, they belong in Africa. They should be preserved and nurtured there, not in South America. They are only in Colombia due to the illegal actions of a drug kingpin. It was wrong to bring them there and the current generation now has to make the difficult decision about what to do. The hippos are threatening not only people, but also the native animal population.

Alas, this option is complicated, too. Hippos are friendly-looking animals that are threatened in their native Africa. People like them and have strong emotional reactions to them; they look cuddly cute, like a safari version of a teddy bear. Colombia is not willing to risk the worldwide public relations backlash that would surely come from euthanizing the animals. So the problem remains unresolved. Scientists think there could be thousands of them there in ten years.

Here’s what I would like to know. How do you find people willing to perform surgical sterilization on a hippo? What does that LinkedIn job advertisement look like? There can’t be too many people in the world who have that skill set.