![]() “But if you were to ask people here if they want to get rid of them tomorrow, no way. “Everyone here is a bit afraid of them and we know they are a social problem,” says Noraldo Garzón, who runs the local shop in Estación Cocorna. Just 10 miles west of Las Angelitas, where the Cocorna river meets the Magdalena, residents have more affection for the giant mammals. Often we simply can’t go out at night to fish any more as it’s too dangerous and there is less to catch as the hippos scare them away,” he says. Metre-wide muddy trenches in the grassy riverbank less than a hundred metres from Zapata’s family home mark where the hippos regularly slide into the waters to cool off. They avoid fishing in the same area if the hippos are around and leave a light on outside at night to stop them tipping their boats over or making unwanted house visits.īut as the population grows its impact is increasingly difficult to manage. Now eight hippos live nearby, and the local community has had to learn ways to avoid deadly confrontations. The first two hippos that made their homes in Las Angelitas in 2016 were largely peaceful but a year later the pair had their first calf and quickly became territorial and aggressive. Please, if other countries can help, take them all.” “It would be a great relief,” Zapata says from the porch of his riverside wooden house by the river. The government of Antioquia state in north-west Colombia says it is negotiating with a park in India, where it plans to send 60 of the beasts, and a sanctuary in Mexico, where it wants to ship 10. Like Escobar’s cocaine, they hope Pablo’s pets can be shipped abroad. Now the regional government wants to try a new strategy. It continues to sterilise the hippos, but they are breeding faster than local experts can find, catch and castrate them. It tried culling the animals in 2009 but had to stop after a graphic photo caused national outrage. Since the hippos escaped after the capo’s death in 1993, the government has repeatedly failed to tame the booming population who have made the Magdalena River basin their new home. The hippo that sauntered into the river that day is one of scores that can be traced back to the drug lord, who imported four of the giant mammals from Africa to join the giraffes, camels, ostriches and other exotic animals in the menagerie at his lavish Hacienda Nápoles estate in the 1980s. But like previous chapters of Colombia’s 30-year saga with Pablo Escobar’s hippos, what started as a curious and exotic experiment eventually became a plague and source of division.
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