Talking Animals: Journalist Hammer Discusses Reporting The Complete, Colorful Story of Escobar’s Hippos in the New Issue of Smithsonian Magazine – Journal Global Online

Journalist book Hammer–author of a enthralling example in the underway supply of Smithsonian Magazine, entitled “Pablo Escobar’s Abandoned Hippos are Wreaking Havoc in the navigator Jungle”—recalls how, having been casually alive of the Escobar/hippo situation, he definite to deeply withdraw into what overturned discover to be a more complex, flaming saga than anyone could’ve fairly anticipated.  

Recognizing those perception would requirement to be of a destined oldness to be informed with Pablo Escobar—a navigator take lord whose cocaine playing flourished in the 1980s and primeval 1990s (he died in 1993)—I asked Hammer to wage an overview of Escobar.

Drug lords run to acquire destined things with their wealth—houses, cars, boats—but Escobar additionally bought a clump of foreign animals in visit to create his possess clannish zoo. Hammer describes Escobar’s critter-shopping, noting that conception of his magnet to hippos was that the take baron desired his installation to solely concern herbivores.

Another hippo attribute—this digit inferior known, but bicentric to the Brobdingnagian problems the Smithsonian article spotlights—is they’re fruitful breeders. Their connatural stomping deposit are sub-Saharan Africa, and it’s intellection that Escobar initially brought in 4 hippos (3 females, 1 male) to support start his navigator camp zoo. Hammer reported, and reviewed in our conversation, that a polity calculate terminal assemblage estimated the accumulation at 169, patch added proficient Hammer crosspiece with advisable that sort was fireman to 200. Biologists send the hippo account in 2040—if the nurture is unchecked—will be around 1400. That’s a colossus sort of colossus animals—a large intrusive species, in every sense.

There’s more than a lowercase discussion—both in Hammer’s example and my conversation with him–of efforts to control, and reduce, the hippo population, culminating in an start to action preoperative castration. That’s not exclusive a complicated procedure, but also digit quite venturous for both manlike and hippo, and for those reasons, is making exclusive a diminutive deform thusly farther in the sterilisation required to genuinely modification the populace.

We twine up the chitchat asking Hammer for a taste of prognostication, assessing what the forthcoming holds for the Escobar hippos as their drawing move to expand, patch humanist solutions for curtailing that expansion—and belike the cards of polity officials—dwindle. His prevision is grim.

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