This story from the New York Times, September 11, 2009, raises issues
relevant to the list!
Bill Silvert
Colombia Confronts Drug Lord's Legacy: Hippos
By SIMON ROMERO
DORADAL, Colombia - Even in Colombia, a country known for its paramilitary
death squads, this hunting party stood out: more than a dozen soldiers from
a Colombian Army battalion, two Porsche salesmen armed with long-range
rifles, their assistant, and a taxidermist.
They stalked Pepe through the backlands of Colombia for three days in June
before executing him in a clearing about 60 miles from here with shots to
his head and heart. But after a snapshot emerged of soldiers posing over his
carcass, the group suddenly found itself on the defensive.
As it turned out, Pepe - a hippopotamus who escaped from his birthplace near
the pleasure palace built here by the slain drug lord Pablo Escobar - had a
following of his own.
The meticulously organized operation to hunt Pepe down, carried out with the
help of environmentalists, has become the focus of an unusually fierce
debate over animal rights and the containment of invasive species in a
country still struggling to address a broad range of rights violations
during four decades of protracted war with guerrillas.
"In Colombia, there is no documented case of an attack against people or
that they damaged any crops," said Aníbal Vallejo, president of the Society
for the Protection of Animals in Medellín, referring to the hippos. "No
sufficient motive to sacrifice one of these animals has emerged in the 28
years since Pablo Escobar brought them to his hacienda."
Sixteen years after the infamous Mr. Escobar was gunned down on a Medellín
rooftop in a manhunt, Colombia is still wrestling with the mess he made.
Wildlife experts from Africa brought here to study Colombia's growing
numbers of hippos, a legacy of Mr. Escobar's excesses, have in recent days
bolstered the government's plan to prevent them - by force, if necessary -
from spreading into areas along the nation's principal river. But some
animal-rights activists are so opposed to the idea of killing them that they
have called for the firing of President Álvaro Uribe's environment minister.
Peter Morkel, a consultant for the Frankfurt Zoological Society in Tanzania,
compared the potential for the hippos to disrupt Colombian ecosystems to the
agitation caused by alien species elsewhere, like goats on the Galápagos
Islands, cats on Marion Island between Antarctica and South Africa, or
pythons in Florida.
"Colombia is absolute paradise for hippos, with its climate, vegetation and
no natural predators," Mr. Morkel said.
"But as much as I love hippos, they are an alien species and extremely
dangerous to people who disrupt them," he continued. "Since castration of
the males is very difficult, the only realistic option is to shoot those
found off the hacienda."
The uproar has its roots in 1981, when Mr. Escobar was busy assembling a
luxurious retreat here called Hacienda Nápoles that included a
Mediterranean-style mansion, swimming pools, a 1,000-seat bull ring and an
airstrip.
"He needed a tranquil place to unwind with his family," said Fernando
Montoya, 57, a sculptor from Medellín who built giant statues here of
Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinosaurs for Mr. Escobar.
Hired by private administrators of the seized estate, part of which is now a
theme park (imagine mixing "Jurassic Park" and "Scarface" into a theme), Mr.
Montoya rebuilt the same statues after looters tore them apart searching for
hidden booty.
But Mr. Escobar was not content with just fake dinosaurs and bullfights. In
what ecologists describe as possibly the continent's most ambitious effort
to assemble a collection of species foreign to South America, he imported
animals like zebras, giraffes, kangaroos, rhinoceroses and, of course,
hippopotamuses.
Some of the animals died or were transferred to zoos around the time Mr.
Escobar was killed. But the hippos largely stayed put, flourishing in the
artificial lakes dug at Mr. Escobar's behest.
Carlos Palacio, 54, head of animal husbandry at Nápoles, said Mr. Escobar
started in 1981 with four hippos. Now, he said, at least 28 live on the
estate. "With our current level of six births a year set to climb, we could
easily have more than 100 hippos on this hacienda in a decade," Mr. Palacio
said.
"Some experts see this herd as a treasure of the natural world in case
Africa's hippo population suffers a sharp decline," Mr. Palacio continued.
"Others view our growth as a kind of time bomb."
The number of hippos on the hacienda could have reached 31 had Pepe, the
slain hippo, not clashed about three years ago with the herd's dominant
hippo, then left with a mate for other pastures. Once established near
Puerto Berrío, the mate gave birth to a calf.
Faced with the possibility of a nascent colony away from Nápoles, Colombian
authorities decided to act. After all, hippos, despite their docile
appearance, are thought to kill more people in Africa than any other large
animal.
Unable to find a zoo that would accept the three hippos in Puerto Berrío,
officials in the department, or province, of Antioquia considered their
options.
Capturing them was expensive, costing as much as $40,000 for each hippo, in
a country where malnourishment among the poor remains a major problem, said
Luis Alfonso Escobar - not related to Pablo Escobar - head of Corantioquia,
a state environmental organization. Taking them to Africa was dangerous, in
addition to being expensive, because of the new diseases they might
introduce there.
So the officials opted for a hunt and hired a nonprofit conservation group,
the Neotropical Wildlife Foundation, to help manage the operation.
The foundation brought in two experienced hunters, Federico Pfeil-Schneider
and Christian Pfeil-Schneider, both of whom also represent the car
manufacturer Porsche in Colombia. To ensure the hunting party's safety, the
environmentalists also secured an escort of soldiers.
All went as planned until the hunt's details and the photo of the soldiers
appeared in the news media. Outrage ensued. Newspapers speculated on the
fate of Pepe's severed head. (Luis Alfonso Escobar, of Corantioquia,
rejected rumors that it went to the hunters.) A judge in Medellín issued a
ruling suspending the hunt for Pepe's mate and their offspring.
Meanwhile, other hippos may be on the loose. Mr. Palacio, the hippo
caretaker here, said at least one was lurking in the waters of a neighboring
ranch. Mr. Morkel, the veterinarian, said one or two others could have
wandered off, according to local reports.
On the grounds of Hacienda Nápoles, a sign warns visitors to the theme park.
"Stay in your vehicle after 6 p.m.," it reads. "Hippopotamuses on the road."
Jenny Carolina González contributed reporting from Bogotá.