On December 2, 1993, in the Colombian city of Medellin, Colombia, a U.S.-assisted Einsatzgruppen team stormed into a middle-class neighborhood, and a fierce gun battle ensued. Pablo Escobar, who had just celebrated his 44th birthday, ran along the roof with his bodyguards, only to be cornered and killed on the spot.
Escobar, Colombia's big drug lord who controls 80 percent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States, makes $420 million a week, has $30 billion in assets at its peak, and was named the seventh-richest man in the world by Forbes in 1989. Escobar, who wanted to become president of Colombia, launched a frenzied campaign of terror that killed 3 presidential candidates, a justice minister, dozens of judges, more than 1,000 police officers and thousands of people, and blew up a passenger plane, killing more than 100 people.
After the infamous Escobar was killed, he left behind a luxurious estate covering 28 square kilometers in the city of Medellín, named after the Italian city of Naples. The Naples estate has a football field, an artificial lake, a bullring, a tennis court and an airstrip, as well as dinosaur statues, as well as a zoo with giraffes, zebras, camels, flamingos, kangaroos and other animals, and the protagonist I want to talk about today, the "three wives" 4 hippopotamus.
After Escobar's death, other animals were properly housed in other zoos, but hippos have formed a population that is very difficult to catch and difficult to transport, and has to allow them to develop in the Magdalena River Valley, which soon became invasive species, and now it is estimated to have multiplied to 80 to 100 heads, and the area of activity has also spread to a range of 160 kilometers, which is considered to be the largest breeding community of hippopotamus outside Africa, and the local population calls them "cocaine hippopotamus".
The Colombian government has had to find a way to control the cocaine hippopotamus population, because if left unchecked, it could pose a great threat to the local ecological environment and other species, as well as to human livelihoods and safety — hippos eat crops and interact positively with humans, and last year a 45-year-old man was seriously injured by a hippopotamus attacked too close.
The Colombian government's initial approach was to culling them, but local farmers are increasingly fond of them because they bring them tourists and increase their income; animal protectors and environmentalists are strongly opposed, organizing protests against any killing of hippos.
The Colombian government eventually decided to take a more humane approach, sterilizing the hippos permanently, denying them the opportunity to reproduce, and when they are dead, the threat of invasive species is eliminated.
This is indeed a more humane but not rude nor hippocampal approach, but it is difficult and dangerous to implement. Because hippos are huge, weighing more than a ton, most of the time lurking in the river and only come ashore after dark, the operation must be performed at night. And their reproductive organs are in the body, and veterinarians must risk invasive surgery to castrate.
The biggest difficulty was to anesthetize them, because hippos had skin up to 5 centimeters thick, had to use special darts and expensive drugs, and had to be imported from the United States and required a whole team to work together, costing up to $7,000 per castrated hippopotamus. So far, only 11 hippos have been sterilized, and the rest are still singing and dancing, living a happy and hi-pi life, and they are about to lose control. It is a great irony that humans can't castrate hippos fast enough to keep up with their rate of reproduction.
However, the happy life of cocaine hippos left by drug lords may soon come to an end, and in January this year, some scientists published a study in the journal Bioprotection, believing that these hippos continue to spread, and their excrement will have a negative impact on the oxygen in the river water, which in turn will affect fish and eventually affect humans, and hippos may also transmit viruses and diseases to humans, so they call for the culling of these hippos.
Colombia, also deeply aware of the enormous threat posed by the hippopotamus invasion, recently sought support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and received 55 doses of darts containing the contraceptive pill GonaCon donated by them. This drug is effective for both male and female animals, just shoot at the hippopotamus, they can no longer be mom and dad, too fierce!
This drug has been developed for more than 10 years, and its principle is to prevent mammals from producing reproductive hormones by inhibiting the GnRH hormone, so as to achieve the purpose of infertility. GonaCon has previously been tested on a variety of large animals, including deer and wild horses in the United States, kangaroos in Australia, and bison in Hong Kong, all with good results. But for larger hippos, the expert team suggests that each hippopotamus may need three shots to "strengthen" it.
Colombia's veterinary team, which has now fired darts at 24 hippos, is monitoring hormone levels in hippopotamus feces, evaluating the efficacy of the drug and what to do next.
It is not a little hard to imagine that the big drug lord introduced 4 hippos, and it can grow to nearly 100 in more than 20 years, and it is an adult species weighing more than one ton. I don't know if hippo meat is good or not, if it is delicious, many people may have a bold idea.