Cocaine Hippos are a Thing!?!
- Peter Gaughan
- Jan 31, 2021
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 21, 2022
Pablo Escobar was an infamous drug lord in Colombia that dominated Colombian politics, revitalized a national soccer team, and ruled over the global cocaine cartel with a harsh, punitive fist. Even today in Colombia his legacy remains controversial, complex, and argued over.
But this isn't a story about The King of Cocaine, instead it a story about the world's wealthiest criminal's beloved pets; his hippopotamuses.
Escobar is famous for a having all kinds of exotic animals at his estate. His most loved were, reportedly, his hippos. While is unclear how many hippos exactly he had, at the time he was shot in 1993, over a dozen were found at his Hacienda Nápoles.
Dubbed the "cocaine hippos", unlike the other exotic animals in Escobar's zoo which were transported around the world to zoos and refuges, the hippos were left to fend for themselves. Since 1993 they have taken over multiple waterways in Colombia and their population has expanded to over a hundred.
These hippos are native to Africa and have been classified by some as an invasive species. Their size, appetites, territorialism, and aggressiveness can all have significant affects on the environment. For example, just by swimming and resting in rivers and lakes, they can change the flow of waterways.
So the Colombian government has tried various plans to try and remove the hippos. In 2009 a hippo was killed but public outcry stopped any further attempts kill off the rest of the population. Recently the government has considered castration and/or transportation as solutions, but hippos are super freaking aggressive and massively huge animals so neither option is all that affordable or feasible.
Others have also argued that the hippos are a good thing. South America has lost dozens of large herbivores in the last few centuries, so the rewilding of hippos might be a good thing to fill the void they left. Hippos funnel nutrients from the land to the water and maintain grasslands by eating them. These simple actions could potentially have very positive effects on biodiversity. It is simply too early to know for sure.
Still, its impressive that these animals, the majority of whom where bread in the captivity, haven't just survived in the wild but thrived. Conservationist and award winning researcher and activist, Arian Wallach, said it best when she said, "the fact that there are wild hippopotamuses in South America [is] a wonderful story of survival, of agency, of pioneering."
So yeah... cocaine hippos are a thing.
Tonight's selection pairs well with peppery and spicy Quinta Las Carbas Carmenére.
Photo: By Daniel Munoz for Reuters
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