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Topics: World News, Drugs, Animals
Callum Jones
Topics: World News, Drugs, Animals
Pablo Escobar's 'horny hippos' are facing 'eradication' over fears for public safety.
While the notorious drug lord may have died over 30 years ago now, his legacy very much still remains to this day.
After Escobar died in a rooftop gunfight in Medellin in 1993, his hippos were left to their own devices at his estate, named Hacienda Napoles.
The private menagerie built by the cocaine baron also featured an airstrip, swimming pools and a 1,000-seat bullfighting ring.
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Escobar also had other animals at the Colombian location, including zebras and giraffes.
While they have since died or been taken away by authorities, an African hippo who goes by the name of Pepe remained.
The hippo escaped Escobar estate in 2006 and was later sighted about 65 miles away with another hippo, a female, and their calf.
Experts concluded them to be the only hippos in Colombia.
Speaking in 2009, the environment minister Carlos Costa said: "It is only a question of time before those animals hurt someone.
"After more than two years of trying to capture them, the decision [to kill them] was a sound one."
While Pepe suffered the same fate as his owner in 2009, an estimated 169 of his descendants remain in Colombia to this day.
In fact, the largest hippo population outside Africa could be even higher, according to experts.
As a result, Colombia’s environment ministry is now considering a widespread sterilisation programme and caging the animals in sanctuaries.
Experts are warning the hippos are a threat to communities, as well as native ecosystems.
Carlos Valderrama, head of the WebConserva foundation, told The Times: “We don’t want to slaughter hundreds of animals – nobody wants to see a killing of that scale, and for animal welfare reasons it’s not the most advisable thing to do.
“They put us in a difficult position in which we have to choose between the wellbeing of our ecosystems, of thousands of native animals, for some hippos that should not even be here.
“From an ecological point of view, the responsible thing to do is to eradicate these animals.”
David Echeverri Lopez, the man who leads the Biodiversity Management Office of Cornare which is tasked with tackling the hippo problem in Colombia, added: “We have a major problem that exceeds the administrative capacities to deal with it. There’s quite a high level of complexity involved.”