Pablo Escobar’s hippos: Why drug lords shouldn’t play God | Lucy Cooke | Big Think

Pablo Escobar’s hippos: Why drug lords shouldn’t play God

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Lucy Cooke—an acclaimed zoologist, author, and TV presenter—tells the story of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar's exotic animal menagerie, which included four hippos illegally imported from Africa. Four hippos became eight, and eight became sixteen, and now this non-native creature is running wild in South America. Cooke explains why this is a moment in evolution — these hippos will evolve into a creature quite different to African hippos. She refers to them as Hippopotamus Escobarus. What will they look like thousands of years from now? Lucy Cooke's latest book is The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife.

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LUCY COOKE:

Lucy Cooke is a National Geographic Explorer with a Masters in zoology from Oxford University (where she was taught by Richard Dawkins). She loves travel and adventure and has a soft spot for some of the planet's strangest and most misunderstood animals.

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TRANSCRIPT:

LUCY COOKE: So, a few years ago I went to go and investigate rumors of hippos, rogue hippos running riot in rural Colombia.

Now hippos don't naturally live in South America, they are from sub-Saharan Africa; but these hippos had been transported to Colombia by Pablo Escobar.

So Pablo Escobar, like many powerful men, fancied himself as a bit of a Noah's Ark, a kind of twisted Noah, in fact, and he wanted to build his own menagerie at Hacienda Napoles, which was his ranch where he controlled his drug empire in between Bogotá and Medellín in the Andes in Colombia.

And legend has it that he gathered together this menagerie by stealing a Russian cargo plane, flying it (or having it flown) to Africa where he loaded it up with loads of illegal wildlife, and then had to get it back to Colombia before the tranquilized animals woke up.

And amongst this cargo of creatures was one male hippo that was nicknamed el Viejo, and three females. And he transplanted these enormous beasts into a pond at his Hacienda, and they loved it. It turns out that Colombia is a hippo paradise, because actually all hippos really want is some nice shallow water to wallow around in and plenty of grass to eat, and Colombia has plenty of that. It also has no other hippos, so no other competition, and no natural predators.

So the hippos flourished in their new paradise and very quickly the four became eight, became 12, became 16. And what happens with hippos is you have a male who has a harem, so every time one of el Viejo's sons reached sexual maturity he would boot him out of the pond, and that young male hippo would then head off in search of hippo love elsewhere.

Now of course in Africa this is completely normal and hippos head off from their family group and young males will go in search of hippo love and start their own family. But of course in Colombia there are no hippos out there.

So these males, these young males are being spirited away from Hacienda Napoles in one of the many, many rivers in that part of Colombia, which acts like sort of hippo superhighways, so they're sort of pinging them out into the countryside and then they arrive and they can't find a mate. They're quite cantankerous beasts at the best of times, but these are sort of frustrated horny male hippos desperately looking for love where there is none.

I went to Colombia to investigate this story and visited one of these rogue males that had installed himself in a pond next to a kindergarten. I met the kids from the school who told me that they no longer liked to bathe in that particular pond—too right! And one of them told me about how his grandmother had been chased by the love-lorn beast for quite some time earlier in the week. So they're kind of running amok basically. So what do you do with this situation? You've got rapidly multiplying hippos—and the extraordinary thing about what's happening in Colombia is it's changing their behavior, because in Africa you have this very fierce dry season, which puts the brakes on hippo reproduction.

So I think they reach sexual maturity, I can't remember it's like five or seven years let's say, but in Colombia they were reaching sexual maturity significantly earlier and having babies every year instead of every two years. So they were multiplying at this much faster rate because they didn't have the same constraints on them that they do in Africa, so you've got a bit of a problem; you've got a massi...

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