How to handle Colombia’s narco-hippos

AMONG PABLO ESCOBAR’S few endearing qualities was his love of animals. In the 1980s the drug lord brought perhaps a half-dozen hippos to join the rhinos, giraffes, zebras and camels at his zoo at Hacienda Nápoles, his mansion east of Medellín. After he was killed in 1993, anti-narcotics agents moved the camels and zebras to other zoos (the giraffes predeceased him). They did not tangle with the big, aggressive rhinos and hippos, which went free.

The rhinos, which are less hardy, quickly died out. The hippos, though, are thriving, in part because big cats and hyenas, their predators in Africa, are absent from Colombia. At least 50 adult hippos wallow happily in the Magdalena river, 18km (11 miles) from Hacienda Nápoles. “We might be dealing with 200 hippos in 20 years,” says David Echeverri, a biologist at the Regional Corporation for the Negro and Nare Rivers (Cornare).