Pablo Escobar’s hippos: A growing problem

Not sure if a Science/Technology article or History. Either way, good read.

Situated halfway between the city of Medellin and Bogota, the Colombian capital, Hacienda Napoles was the vast ranch owned by the drugs baron Pablo Escobar. In the early 1980s, after Escobar had become rich but before he had started the campaign of assassinations and bombings that was to almost tear Colombia apart, he built himself a zoo.

He smuggled in elephants, giraffes and other exotic animals, among them four hippos - three females and one male. And with a typically grand gesture, he allowed the public to wander freely around the zoo. Buses filled with schoolchildren passed under a replica of the propeller plane that carried Escobar's first US-bound shipments of cocaine.

For Carlos Valderrama, however doing nothing is not an option. "We have seen that hippos are very territorial and very aggressive," he says. "They are not a tame animal. The risk for local populations to just leave them to browse around will be huge."

The ideal solution would be to relocate them, he says. But it's not easy to move a hippo, and even if the government were to kit out teams of experienced vets with trucks and helicopters, there's nowhere to put the animals. They can't be returned to Africa because there is a risk that they carry diseases. That leaves captivity. A handful of hippo calves have been transferred to zoos in Colombia, but there are currently no takers for the adults.

Beyond that, options are limited.

The solution may be just to neuter these animals and let them roam until their numbers drop.

The BBC News article