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Topics: World News, News, Animals, Drugs
Joe Harker
Topics: World News, News, Animals, Drugs
One of Pablo Escobar's 'cocaine hippos' has just died in car crash, Colombian authorities have confirmed.
Right about now, you're probably wondering what a cocaine hippo is and it might be handy to point out that unlike the infamous 'cocaine bear', it's not a hippopotamus on the warpath after doing a load of drugs.
A cocaine hippo is the term for one of the animals descended from the pet hippos that the notorious drug lord, Pablo Escobar, bought as pets at the height of his power.
Escobar used some of his drug money to build a personal zoo, and decided that he wanted some hippos to be part of the collection, shipping four of them in during the 1980s.
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After he died in 1993, nobody really did anything about the hippos as they would be really expensive to take care of and transport, so they were abandoned.
However, the hippos soon proved this decision to be a catastrophic mistake as they multiplied and now the herd of Escobar's cocaine hippos is over 120 strong.
By 2040, the number of cocaine hippos is predicted to grow to about 1,500, and that's causing a massive headache as Hippos are not native to Colombia, and they're really making a mess of the place.
With no natural predators, there's no way for the local ecosystem to control the hippo population growth. The hippos an invasive species, aggressively attacking other animals around them, and leaving toxic droppings.
They've been roaming north of the Colombian capital of Bogota around the Magdalena River, and they've wandered into local villages to attack people too.
With it difficult to sterilise the cocaine hippos - without risking about a 50/50 chance of killing them - the idea of just wiping them out had been floated, but ended up getting turned down.
Instead, the Colombian government is paying millions to round up the herd of cocaine hippos and send them to other countries.
Plans to move at least 70 of them abroad have started, but for one unlucky hippo, a ticket out of Colombia didn't come soon enough.
One of the cocaine hippos was in the middle of a road on a Colombian motorway when it was hit and killed by an SUV.
According to local police, nobody in the vehicle was harmed in the collision with the hippo, which was said to have died instantly during the collision.
"This is one of the dangers that the presence of this species represents." Local biologist David Echeverri López told AP.
"Many of them cross the highway where many vehicles pass, it is also a danger to people. Hippos are unpredictable, at any moment they can attack a person."