I know the name "Pablo Escobar" sounds like something from a "Miami Vice" rerun, but Pablo was the prototypical South American drug kingpin in his day, which ended in 1993 when he was killed by the Colombian National Police. Before that, he amassed a fortune estimated at around $70 Billion with a B, and so naturally, he had enough loose change from the sale of drugs to entertain himself with a private menagerie of hippopotami.
The current head count is 70 hippos needing to be moved out, because who is about to stop the herd from procreating? Actually, they tried to stop them from reproducing. Methods employed included castrations, shooting them with contraceptive darts, and forcing them to watch Julia Roberts movies.
It's going to cost approximately $3.5 million to farm them out to other sanctuaries, with 10 of them destined for the Ostok Sanctuary in Mexico; the other 60 will find a home in India. There's no way to take them to Africa, where the herd originated; that would upset the local ecosystem.
Escobar originally imported one male and three females, and now look. They are spreading all over Colombia from their original home at Escobar’s former ranch of Hacienda Napoles, which is now some sort of theme park in the country where he is still regarded as sort of a Robin Hood for his habit of providing basic needs to the poor with a fortune derived from selling enough cocaine around the world to alter and/or end millions of lives.
Not to get all gross, but the Colombians need these beasts removed because, with no natural predators, they are running rampant on the countryside, and their waste is having deleterious effects on oxygen levels in the waters, reducing water quality and killing many fish in the Magdalena River basin.
Say it with me now: ewwwwwwwwww.
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