Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar introduced two female and one male hippopotamus into Colombia in the 1980s. Now, after four decades, Escobar’s so-called hippopotamuses have reproduced, and there are about 160 free animals in the Magdalena River basin, creating social and ecological problems in Colombia.
The country has debated whether to sterilize or kill them, while the hippos continue to cause havoc and accidents with humans. A new solution of moving at least 70 hippos to India and Mexico has been proposed, and they hope to reach agreements with Ecuador, the Philippines, and Botswana, which also want to receive some of them.
The news has raised questions about who would pay for the transport of one-ton animals and how to avoid transferring the breeding problem to those countries. An Argentine production company would document the transfer, and the crates in which the hippos must be enclosed for their travels would be financed by the production of the program Cargas Imposibles.
The air transport of the hippos is expected to be the most expensive, although before that process is the capture of the animals, which will be carried out by baiting them at night with carrots. Experts doubt that relocating the animals will solve the root cause of the reproduction problem and consider that this option is a regional measure that would not solve the problem, which has spread to other departments. In 2021, a study was published that claimed that by 2034, the hippopotamus population in Colombia could exceed 1,400 specimens.