Cocaine hippos are a thing. Not the thing you imagine. That is if your imagination turns to bizarre newfangled ways to transport the Colombian marching powder across state borders. The cocaine hippos I speak of are, in fact, the remnants of Pablo Escobar’s menagerie.
The cocaine hippos that got away. At his hacienda, which now operates as a kind of Graceland for aficionados of Narcos and all things Escobar (a Powderland if you like), El Patron kept more than 250 species of wild animals.
Like a Roman emperor of yore, he brought the creatures over from Africa — lion, zebra, giraffe and three hippo. This was not so that he could run gladiatorial hunger games with his capos to weed out weakness in a fun, bloodbath kind of way — but so he could admire them in their unnatural habitat, along with the large resin dinosaurs among which wildebeest roamed. Because who wouldn’t choose this particular setting for their high-level drug deals?
Then in 1993 when the war on drugs finally caught up with him and the above-mentioned narcos killed Escobar and posed with his body like a trophy, most of the creatures where repatriated to their original domiciles or zoos about the world.
Except for the hippos. Because there where three of them and they were really cute. Now the hacienda also sports sculptures of pink hippos in tutus, because — you know, Fantasia. And the hippos themselves have multiplied in what may become perpetuity if they're not stopped. Without any natural predators and a climate that's pleasant all year round, so no troublesome annual droughts and forced migration, the cocaine hippos are living la vida loca.
Their population numbers have risen to between 80 and 120 hippos and they have long since moved off the hacienda and into the wider hinterland — like a plague of cocaine hippos. The collective noun for hippos is a bloat. And that seems right.
Environmentalists within Colombia are worried the hippos are ruining it for the animals and pampas grasses that originally dwelled there — what with the potent hippo poop and wild procreative activities. They're also getting a little aggressive with the locals. Nothing too serious yet, but if their numbers grow exponentially as they have been doing then they may start hitting them up for protection money and territory.
And that is where the cocaine hippos turn. One minute charming ballerinas light on their toes, the next, explosive killers. Colombian vets are now experts in hippo vasectomies, not an entirely danger-free procedure. And lately they've introduced a new hormone vaccine that curbs the enthusiasm of the bloat.
An organised cull is off the cards because when the Colombian government last eliminated a cocaine hippo, they made the poor PR move of posing with the body, very much in the valedictory pose they had adopted with Escobar.
This upset some people — both the locals who are benefiting from cocaine hippo nature tours, and a US-based animal rights group who got a court in the US to declare the cocaine hippos legal people — with rights and everything. Which, to put things in perspective, is a lot more than Pablo got.
