Hippos float in the lagoon at Hacienda Napoles Park, once the private estate of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. Photo / AP
Hippos float in the lagoon at Hacienda Napoles Park, once the private estate of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. Photo / AP
Colombia is to cull hippos descended from a pet herd owned by the cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.
Twenty of the 166-strong herd will be sterilised and others will be transferred abroad, Susana Muhamad, the country’s environment minister, said.
Some would be euthanised, she added, without specifying how many.
The cull was announced after authorities struggled for years to control the herd’s population, with hippos being declared an invasive species last year.
Escobar, the former leader of the powerful Medellin drug cartel, imported four of the animals from Africa in the 1980s and kept them in a private zoo at his Hacienda Napoles residence.
After his death in a shootout with police in 1993, the animals were left to roam freely in the fertile and swampy region of Antioquia.
Surrounded by conditions conducive to their survival – such as rivers and marshes that offered up abundant food sources – the animals thrived and multiplied.
Pablo Escobar.
But while the animals have become a tourist attraction, their numbers have become a pressing concern for the authorities.
With adult males weighing up to three tonnes each and highly territorial, hippos are the world’s deadliest large land mammal, killing hundreds of people a year in Africa.
Fishing communities along Colombia’s main river, the Magdalena, have reported being attacked by the animals, and some invaded a schoolyard, although no one has been killed to date.
Hippos threaten other wildlife
Authorities say that if left unchecked, the hippos could number 1000 by 2035.
Scientists warn that the hippos’ faeces changes the composition of rivers, which could affect the habitats of manatees and capybaras.
Previous attempts to reduce their numbers through sterilisation and transferring them to zoos abroad have had minimal impact.
Animal activists say sterilisation causes suffering for the animals, and it poses great danger for the vets doing it.
While culling potentially offers the most effective means of controlling hippo numbers, Muhamad said the government will still be working on trying to export them.
“We are working on the protocol for the export of the animals.
“We are not going to export a single animal if there is no authorisation from the environmental authority of the other country,” she said.
She added that Colombian officials had contacted authorities in Mexico, India and the Philippines, and are evaluating sending 60 hippos to India.
As a last resort to control the population, the environment ministry is creating a protocol for euthanasia.
In plans detailed earlier this year by local experts, authorities focused on the hippos living in the rivers surrounding the Hacienda Napoles ranch rather than those inside, because they are in a controlled environment and were not judged to be a threat to the local ecosystem.
Authorities said they planned to lure those outside the sprawling estate into large, iron containers with food before transferring them by truck to the international airport in the city of Rionegro, more than 80 miles away.
From there, the animals could be flown abroad to sanctuaries and zoos capable of taking in and caring for the animals.
The relocations would help control the hippo population, and while the animals’ native habitat is Africa, it is more humane than the alternate proposal of exterminating them as an invasive species, said Lina Marcela de los Rios Morales, the director of animal protection and welfare at Antioquia’s environment ministry.
Ecuador, the Philippines and Botswana have expressed their willingness to take in the relocated Colombian hippos, according to the Antioquia governor’s office.
