Pete
The Colombian government has launched a program to sterilize hippos descending from those illegally brought into the country by former drug lord Pablo Escobar in the 1980s.
Escobar, the leader of the Medellín Cartel often dubbed “The King of Cocaine,” was the richest criminal ever, accumulating $30 billion (equivalent to $70 billion today) by the time of his death in 1993.
To celebrate his wealth, he built and owned an estate called Hacienda Nápoles. It came with things like luxury cars, a private airport, a brothel, a Formula 1 race track, and a zoo: filled with not just hippos, but elephants, exotic birds, giraffes, ostriches and more.
Since Escobar’s death, they’ve been having coked up sex and there are now an estimated 169 of them. Escobar only owned four.
The government is looking to sterilize the hippos because they have no natural predators and are posing a risk to the environment. Their plan is to sterilize 40 of them each year, relocate some of them to other countries, and potentially euthanize some of them.
They’ve sterilized three so far.
It’s hard to sterilize hippos, because for one thing they’re enormous and scary as hell. It also rains a lot down in Colombia, and if you have to worry about slipping while staring into the eyes of a three ton monster, yeah that can’t help.
It’s also hard to trick them with bait because there’s a lot of grass and that’s something they eat.
Experts say there could be over a thousand of these hippos by 2035 if no action is taken.
It costs almost ten grand to sterilize just one of them.
