160 hippos, descendants of animals taken to drug lord Pablo Escobar’s private zoo in the 1980s, are to be shot. A court in Colombia has ordered that “measures be taken to exterminate” the animals due to the threat they pose to the local community and ecosystem.
An administrative court in the central Colombian department of Cundinamarca ruled on Friday that the Environment Ministry should issue a regulation on the issue within three months. The judges mentioned controlled shooting and sterilization of hippos as possible solutions.
Pablo Escobar, who died in a police operation in December 1993, had been collecting exotic animals on his property for years, including giraffes, tigers, antelopes and hippos, of which he imported only four from Africa. After his death, however, the animals multiplied in the wild, according to authorities’ predictions. by 2035 there could be more than a thousand of them.
Last year, the Environment Ministry announced a plan to sterilize part of the invasive species’ population, including the possibility of euthanizing some individuals. However, as AFP notes, the sterilization process is progressing slowly and no animals have been euthanized yet.
Plans to relocate dozens of hippos to Mexico, India and the Philippines have also failed so far.
The Cundinamarca court agreed with the complaint filed by a representative of the local community, who stressed that hippos pose a threat to people and the environment. As they are invasive species, they displace native species, and the situation is aggravated by their large size and territorial behavior, RCN radio reported.
Hippos can be very aggressive when they feel threatened, and several cases of attacks on humans have been reported in Colombia.
The case of the “Escobar hippos” has sparked heated debate in Colombia. In addition to the threats to the population and the ecosystem, there are also claims that their presence helps the local economy by stimulating tourism, the RCN recalled.
