Last week, Colombia recorded its first road traffic incident involving a hippopotamus. A car collided with the animal at speed leaving it dead on the road.
The hippo was a descendent of the four animals that notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar imported from a zoo in the US to his luxurious Hacienda Nápoles estate in Colombia in the 1980s. The four hippos, which included three females and one male, were abandoned after Escobar’s death in 1993 due to the difficulty associated with moving them to a wildlife sanctuary. The hippos then escaped the untended estate and spread along the Magdalena River.
They have since bred and have multiplied to around 130 animals. But in the wild, the hippos are fast becoming a problem. Hippo attacks on people are on the rise and an illegal trafficking industry has developed around their capture and sale.
