By Mark Tanos
Colombia plans to kill up to 80 hippos descended from Pablo Escobar’s private collection after they became an invasive animal population, officials said.
The late drug lord smuggled four hippos into the country during the 1980s to stock a zoo at his sprawling Hacienda Nápoles estate in the Magdalena River valley, CBS News reported. After Escobar’s death in 1993, the animals roamed free and multiplied. Colombia remains the only nation outside Africa home to wild hippos.
Environmental officials said the herd now exceeds 160, according to UPI. The animals could swell to 500 by the end of the decade without aggressive intervention, official data indicated. Government-cited research recommended eliminating no fewer than 33 animals annually to meaningfully shrink the population. The so-called “cocaine hippos” have turned up over 60 miles north of the original ranch in recent times, CBS News reported. (RELATED: Notorious Drug Lord’s Lover Led Mexican Authorities Straight To Him)
Environment Minister Irene Vélez Torres signed a directive Monday establishing protocols for both euthanasia and relocation, UPI reported. “This ministry has carried out enormous diplomatic efforts, and at this moment no country wants to take responsibility,” Vélez told Blu Radio, according to the outlet.
Each procedure could reportedly cost as much as $14,000 and requires sedating, confining and burying the animal on-site.
Colombian Senator Andrea Padilla, an animal rights advocate, condemned the decision as an unnecessary measure against healthy animals on X. “Slaughters, massacres, will never be acceptable solutions; much less so when they are orchestrated by the government,” Padilla wrote in Spanish.
Soldiers shot and killed a male hippo in 2009 and posed for a photo with the carcass, Al Jazeera reported. Public fury over the image effectively froze government action on the animals for years.
Genetic problems from decades of inbreeding have also made returning the hippos to Africa impractical, UPI reported. Vélez acknowledged that mutations have already surfaced in the population.
