Colombia faces $3.5M price to switch Pablo Escobar’s ‘cocaine hippos’

The Colombian authorities is poised to spend $3.5 million to switch about half of Pablo Escobar’s invasive “cocaine hippos” out of their nation.

Colombian officers mentioned they’re coping with about 150 hippos, all descendants of 1 male and three females the late drug lord smuggled into the nation within the Nineteen Eighties.

With no pure predators, the oversexed, three-ton herbivores have unfold past Escobar’s 7,000-acre Hacienda Napoles property, nestled between Medellin and Bogota alongside the Magdalena River.

Authorities have now arrange plans to seize 70 of the hippopotamuses, sending 10 off to the Ostok Sanctuary in Mexico, and the opposite 60 to the Greens Zoological Rescue & Rehabilitation Kingdom in Gujarat, India.

“The entire operation ought to price round $3.5 million,” Ernesto Zazueta, proprietor of the Ostok Sanctuary mentioned in a press release.

Anibel Gaviria, the governor of the Colombian area the place the hippos reside, mentioned the plan is to make use of bait to lure the animals into pens, the place they are going to be confined in particular crates.

The animals could be flown from the Rionegro airport to Mexico and India, the place the sanctuaries and zoos could be able to caring for them.

Regardless of the whopping price to switch them, authorities officers mentioned they wished to ship the hippos out in a humane method somewhat than killing them after a cull was referred to as for final yr.

The hippos have been formally declared an invasive species in 2022 after Colombia’s setting ministry warned that the animals that their great amount of urine and feces may pollute rivers and threaten the nation’s native manatees and capybaras.

The hippos are additionally recognized to sometimes stroll into cities and clog up visitors, in accordance with native reviews.

In 2021, the Colombian authorities began sterilizing the horny, horny hippos in a bid to maintain their numbers down, however these animals that weren’t handled with chemical compounds to make them infertile continued producing calves at an alarming charge.

The hippopotamus has a gestation interval of eight months and so they give delivery to at least one calf each two years, according to the National Geographic.

As Colombia works to maintain down the hippo inhabitants, different international locations, together with Ecuador, the Philippines and Botswana, have additionally expressed curiosity in taking within the nuisance hippos.