On December 2, 1993, the most arrogant drug lord in history, Pablo Escobar, was killed by the police, the black boss who controlled almost 80% of the world's cocaine trade at the peak finally hung up, unexpectedly from his death to 2021, in the decades from his death to 2021, one of his "posthumous events" and irritating Colombian government officials headaches, the source of the headache is a group of "arrogant" hippos, they are the descendants of 4 hippos that were illegally introduced into Colombia in the late 1980s. These 4 hippos were the guests of the black boss's private zoo at the time, but after the black boss was killed, the Colombian government confiscated all the real estate, including the zoo, and transported most of the animals in the park, except for these 4 hippos, due to their large size and high transportation costs, were left to fend for themselves in the mud pond.
These four hippos are hard to meet in the local enemy, and enjoy the endless pastures near the Escobar manor, so they began to make babies wildly, known as "cocaine hippopotamus" by the local people, in a news last year, the number of hippos has reached about 80, for the local can bear the limit, it is estimated that in another ten years, the number will be thousands...
Hippos | in the lake on the private estate of former drug lord Escobar Source: The Associated Press
These ruthless rice machines not only destroy farmland, but also the grass on the football field, but also threaten the safety of nearby residents, and last May, a 45-year-old man was seriously injured by a hippopotamus attack. The feces they excrete alter the water quality of local lakes, leading to outbreaks of harmful algae blooms and the breeding of red tide bacteria.
So the Colombian government made up its mind to kill a seriously disturbing hippopotamus in 2009, but these hippos have been regarded as unofficial mascots, people have built a theme park on the original site of Escobar's original property, driving the development of tourism, so the government's behavior has been strongly condemned, American environmentalists even "cross-border law enforcement", rushed to the Colombian authorities to unite with local environmental forces to immediately stop killing hippos, the government had to stop the killing plan, and instead sought a method of forced sterilization.
In 2019, researchers neutered a female hippopotamus in the wild, but it took 3 hours to cut the dense skin, fat and muscle layers of the hippopotamus, and the hippopotamus returning to the wild was monitored after the operation, so this method could only be abandoned. You may ask, why not sterilize male hippos first? This is because the key parts of the male hippopotamus can be retracted into the body and hidden, and the position is purely dependent on the mood of the hippopotamus, and the operation is more difficult.
Last year, researchers tried another chemical sterilization technique that was successfully tested in pigs, but the technique was still time-consuming, laborious and costly, and only 11 hippos completed traditional sterilization that year.
At present, the Colombian government is using darts to inject hippos with contraceptives to control hippos to continue breeding, and they have fired darts loaded with contraceptives at dozens of hippos, which is said to be "much cheaper" than sterilization, but because these hippos may require "three injections" of contraceptives to really produce contraception, they are still tracking hormone levels in hippopotamus excrement. On the one hand, the benefits brought by hippopotamus unintentional willow cutting to local residents, on the other hand, the ecological problems brought by hippopotamus, I think the Colombian government will have a headache for a while in the future...