After drug cartel king Pablo Escobar was killed in a 1993 shootout, his estate and the exotic animals in his private menagerie were sent to zoos.
All except his four hippos, which, like a movie script, escaped and happily settled in the rivers of Colombia.
In October 2021, Colombian officials started a campaign to sterilize the now-thriving hippo population, which now numbers around 80. The hippos will be darted with a drug that sterilizes both male and female hippos.
Environmentalists say the hippos can devastate local fauna, since each one eats 88 pounds of grasses per day and leave prodigious amounts of dung. In Kenya, herds of hippos can leave so much dung that it suffocates the fish in rivers.
