Christmas Pre-Record ｜ Colombia's Cocaine Hippo Problem
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Summary
It's Christmas Eve, which means it's time for the first episode of the new year, and we're talking about hippopotamuses. Yes, you read that correctly, it's the Christmas season, and to celebrate, we're looking at one of the world's most fearsome animals: the hippo.
Transcript
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Merry Christmas Eve, folks. I thought we'd talk about cocaine hippos.
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Because nothing says Christmas Eve like cocaine hippos.
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Well, look, to you and me, that seems like a strange, you know, a way out position to have.
00:00:15.320
But if you lived in Colombia, where I'm sure they do celebrate Christmas,
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you'd be like, yeah, no, the hippos are a real problem.
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I actually put a cocaine hippo at the top of my Christmas list this year.
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I don't know what the scientific designation for it is.
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I'm sure it's on here somewhere, but it doesn't matter.
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You know what, that's also rather ironic, considering they can't swim.
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They're not really amphibious, they just stand in water.
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I thought they sort of milled about and they like to wallow in the water.
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So it kind of implies that they can swim and live in the water.
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Something that blew my mind is, I was watching a nature documentary,
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and apparently when they get attacked in the water,
00:01:04.760
they release their bowels and then use their tail like a propeller
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But they're one of the only two hippopotami left in the world.
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And that's probably for the best, because hippopotamuses are dangerous and psychotic.
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And they look quite cute and cuddly, but look at all the scars on this.
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I was just looking at it thinking, that's not something I want to mess with.
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Yeah, this lad has been through the wars, right?
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And hippopotamuses are the third largest land animal in the world,
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They can get up to about three tons, which is just gargantuan.
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And their range, their natural range is, of course, all across Africa.
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Although, historically, they used to be across Europe and Asia as well.
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So if you went back, like, 20,000 years to sort of the Middle East or wherever,
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you'd find hippopotamuses in the river there, which is interesting.
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But they weren't in, like, Northern Europe or anything.
00:02:14.300
I was going to say, the Scandinavian hippo is a strange concept.
00:02:18.900
No, no, but they are absolutely gargantuan beasts,
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And this massive skull, that picture would come up.
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As you can see, it's got gargantuan teeth in it.
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Have you seen people try and, like, recreate what a hippo could look like
00:02:47.480
Yeah, because they can't remodel the sort of soft tissue
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And this is why every dinosaur recreation you see is probably wrong.
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It's probably unlikely that, like, Tyrannosaurus Rex had teeth sticking out of his mouth.
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The chances are it just had a really thick, meaty hippo mouth rather than, like...
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Because normally, a Tyrannosaurus Rex recreation, like, it looks kind of like oblong-shaped jaw
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because it's a big, thick jaw, and then it's got teeth sticking out.
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Imagine there's big, fleshy lumps hiding the teeth, and that's probably more likely.
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And the thing is, modern recreations and paleo art of this do it
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and like to make the Tyrannosaurus Rex look more like a monitor lizard
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And the thing is, it looks kind of stupid and gummy.
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Imagine being chased by something that looks kind of gormless and kind of clueless.
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It looks harmless, that's the thing, because you can't see the teeth.
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But I was thinking about this, that if you sort of made a chicken about six or seven foot tall,
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the fact that it has no intelligence makes it sort of scarier in a weird way.
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Yeah, but the thing is, I think they do have a kind of intelligence, that's the thing.
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I mean, look at the corvus, the ravens and the crows.
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They've got the intelligence of a seven-year-old child.
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The ones where they use tools to solve puzzles to get the food out of the tube or whatever,
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that's genuinely worrying because what you realise, what you're dealing with,
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well, hang on a second, I've got a pet parrot and he's really affectionate.
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But I also feel that the bird has a kind of inhuman quality to it that's more reptilian.
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There's something about a non-human intelligence where it's just like...
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It's cruel and calculating in the way I view them.
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Well, they also have very small brains and, you know, bird brains, notorious as an insult,
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as well as the fact that they're not usually very wrinkly and...
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Anyway, the point being, these massive beasts are the most dangerous animals in Africa.
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So everyone's like, oh God, I'm really worried about lions and leopards and elephants.
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And so releasing a load of hippos into the wild in another country is a problem.
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And then, therefore, the population of hippos who don't really have any natural predators.
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I mean, technically, like a pride of lions might be able to bring down a hippo.
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But for most of the hippos' existence, it doesn't really have to worry about predators.
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And so the thing that keeps the hippo numbers under control is Africa's atrocious weather system.
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I love being able to tie these things together.
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So I don't really know that much about Pablo Escobar.
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And there are loads of documentaries and things like that.
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As you can see by the photo, he looks like he's probably a fun guy to go out for a beer with, right?
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So for anyone who doesn't know, any Zoomers watching,
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Pablo Escobar was considered to be the wealthiest criminal in history.
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Because he ran what in modern-day dollars was a $70 billion cocaine trade out of Colombia.
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With his gang, he had monopolized the entire cocaine...
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So all cocaine in America through the 70s and 80s.
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Forbes, for seven consecutive years, marked him as one of the richest people in the world.
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And in this zoo, he had more than 200 species of exotic animals, such as hippos, giraffes, elephants, zebras, and ostriches.
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All introduced to the country as a result of bribes to the government.
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He couldn't even have a zoo without corruption.
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You know, the story of him essentially declaring war on the Colombian government, killing hundreds and hundreds of police officers, government officials, and...
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I mean, essentially trying to set himself up as, like, a little, like, cocaine monarch in Colombia is genuinely fascinating.
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But a strange and entertaining life to read about, right?
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They want to crush an innocent entrepreneur, don't they?
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Yeah, they just want to keep the little guy down.
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And the Colombian government, not satisfied with killing just a prosperous entrepreneur, they were also hunting down his hippos.
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And Pepe got shot, as you can see, by the number of army men, soldiers, around the hippo as they shot him.
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Yeah, well, I mean, it's a goddamn hippo, so yeah.
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They were also searching for a bunch of other hippos, which were escaped.
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They'd been living in a tropical valley after escaping almost three years prior to 2009 from Escobar's property, which was seized by the government, by the way.
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So they killed him, took his stuff, and it's just like, look, man, that's a story for the eight.
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Obviously, we don't support Pablo Escobar here.
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But they were part of his collection, and the authorities ordered that the hippos be hunted down and killed because they were damaging crops and endangering people.
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They did spend, I think it was about two years, trying to capture them to geld the hippos.
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We're just going to, you know, neuter them so they're not breeding and taking over Colombia.
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The problem is that's a lot easier said than done.
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How do you catch, sedate, and then castrate a hippo?
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So the answer is not very easily, which is why it took them two years.
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And this is why the government was just like, look, just shoot them.
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You know, do we actually need to have all these hippos running around?
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But they were also searching for a couple of females and some calves that they had given birth to.
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Now, the problem with this is that people didn't like seeing this picture, right?
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Apparently, it's very fatty, though, as you can probably imagine.
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Yeah, but the point is, people, presumably bourgeois liberals.
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And so now, people were like, oh, the public was outraged at the pictures of 15 uniformed
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The most vocal protesters demanded that the Minister of the Environment resign.
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An outcry soon led a judge to prohibit further hippo killings.
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Just because they're killing his inner circle doesn't mean, you know, it's not justified.
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Colombia is a country that's near to the equator.
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However, unlike Africa, Colombia is drenched in water.
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It's got, you know, it's a tremendous number of bodies of water.
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This has become, if you wanted to battery farm hippos and increase a hippo population as
00:12:40.560
quickly as possible, you would do it in somewhere like Colombia, in fact.
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Because it has absolutely everything the hippos need.
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I imagine that, you know, when the continental plates of Africa and South America split,
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the hippos were like, well, surely the African one's going to be better, you know.
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They should have been on the South American one.
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So, a judge intervened and was like, you're not allowed to kill these hippos.
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And, at the time, Pepe was one of around what they estimated to be 60 wild hippos in
00:13:30.920
Um, but the thing is, because there's just nothing stopping the hippos from going anywhere,
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uh, hippos have been sighted, like, hundreds of miles away at the Laskovar ranch.
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Because there's literally no reason that the hippo can't just...
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Like, I mean, you know, there's not that much in Africa to hunt the hippo either.
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But there are at least, you know, massive crocodiles, like Nile crocodiles and saltwater crocodiles.
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But if you've got, like, caiman, which aren't very big, and they aren't very, you know,
00:14:03.240
aren't that dangerous, to a hippo, like, hippo's like, look, I kill saltwater crocodiles
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You know, you're, you're like, you're, you're tiny, thin jaws.
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You know how many Americans like going on hunting holidays?
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They can sort of, uh, become Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator and go through the jungle.
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If someone said they'd been to Columbia hunting hippos, I'd be like, I respect you.
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I mean, it's literally the most dangerous game.
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Uh, but the, the, the problem, of course, is that leftists are outraged.
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Um, and so they, they point out, Michael Knight, a South African ecologist, points out that,
00:14:49.340
look, this, this is genuinely hippo paradise, right?
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You couldn't craft a more wonderful place for the hippos to live.
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Now, Pepe the hippo got his own little documentary.
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Uh, even looks a bit like Pepe the frog there as well.
00:15:07.280
Um, but, uh, anyway, so this, it was a kind of first person documentary from Pepe the hippo.
00:15:24.640
But yeah, look, you said, you know, Nelson gives the ill-fated creature its own voice.
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I don't know why you'd do a first person documentary.
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But anyway, so, uh, this, this was a famous hippo.
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But anyway, researchers have been like, yeah, so just how many hippos are there in Colombia?
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And the answer is they don't know, but more than they thought.
00:16:02.780
So, uh, a few years ago, researchers, uh, were, like, curious about how fast the animals were reproducing.
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And they thought, oh, there's probably about 98 of them in the, uh, Magdalena River.
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Now, that's, that's quite a large number of hippos, really.
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Um, but, you know, okay, well, that's not that bad.
00:16:23.680
Uh, but they did a new study, counting the animals in person, using drones, other tracking methods.
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And they're like, yeah, there's over 200 of them, actually.
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And so, you've got this kind of exponential breeding curve.
00:16:36.400
So, I imagine he probably got them in the 80s, right?
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So, that's not that long for, for, for hippos to become 200.
00:16:53.800
Well, again, in other environments, it might not, they might not have bred quite so quickly.
00:16:59.340
But if you literally put them in hippo paradise, and say, right, here's literally all the resources
00:17:04.320
you'll ever need, and all the safety and comfort you'll ever want, then it turns out they can
00:17:10.260
So, they're going to have their very own version of the mouse utopia experiment, but with hippos,
00:17:17.100
And, ironically, that's exactly what's happening.
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And the thing is, there are no native animals in Colombia that are nearly as big as a hippo.
00:17:25.200
Like, I don't know, like, capybara or whatever they have.
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You know, they're big, obviously, you know, for an animal, but, like, they're not three tons.
00:17:33.060
And so, the hippos are just crowding out everything.
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And so, it becomes apparent that the hippos are going to become a threat to the local wildlife.
00:17:42.380
Yeah, and they're going to literally take over the country.
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All of the waterways in the country are going to become essentially unnavigable if the hippos
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And so, the government is actually going to have to start culling them.
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So, this is like Escobar's final spiteful action, is unleashing hippos on the population,
00:17:59.080
like a biblical plague upon the government that killed him.
00:18:05.020
Well, actually, it was the US government, but still.
00:18:08.660
I mean, he was at war with the Colombian government.
00:18:10.300
So, yeah, this is a kind of vengeance from beyond the grave.
00:18:13.100
But, yeah, no, they point out they're all descendants of the three females and one male,
00:18:18.460
And the people doing the study say that the state must act urgently because this is a real
00:18:24.860
Because, I mean, they are actually going to drive native species into extinction and probably
00:18:31.340
Because, of course, you know, Colombia, not exactly a developed nation.
00:18:34.480
There are lots of people who, like, you know, use their rivers in the traditional way that
00:18:38.700
ancestors always have, you know, on, like, reed mats or something, you know, pushing themselves
00:18:45.480
You know, a hippo can destroy a boat, like a large boat that, you know...
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You've seen videos from Africa where there are people in, like, a motorboat going quite
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quickly and you just see this thing under the surface.
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I'd be, you know, beside myself with fear if just this mass under the water starts coming
00:19:06.740
I think it's literally thousands of people a year in capsized boats that hippos destroy.
00:19:12.060
And so you imagine there's some guy on some, you know, reed boat just casually.
00:19:19.880
Could you imagine if they start, you know, they go into the Amazon and they go to these
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uncontacted tribes and then these creatures just come at them.
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They're going to think that there's some sort of demonic...
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Would they be wrong to think of them as, like, some sort of dragon or something?
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I mean, if you had a cultural tradition of slaying hippos, like their dragons, I think
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All of these Amazonian tribes, they'll stop being skinny and using these little tiny, like,
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Literally, you've never seen anything like this.
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There's nothing in your traditions, your history, or your culture that recognizes something
00:20:01.920
But also, just the size of the mouth, it's just, like, greed personified.
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This big, fat creature that wallows in the water all day and has a massive mouth.
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Like you said, you're just some tribes and you thought, oh, I'll go for a swim in the
00:20:16.940
And then just three-ton monster comes at you and kills one of your friends.
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So, anyway, the problem that they have is how to get them, of course.
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Because it's not easy to get a three-ton animal in the water.
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So, they were thinking, right, okay, well, because people hate it when we just kill them,
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even though this is going to become a real problem if we don't just kill them,
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we were thinking about capturing, anaesthetising, and transporting them to a facility to be
00:20:48.580
castrated, but this would cost half a million dollars per hippo.
00:20:56.820
What you do is you go to the source of all of the waterways and just drop poison melons
00:21:02.860
in and just wait for them to float down the waterways and eventually a hippo will eat one
00:21:10.240
I feel that might have a negative effect on the other wildlife that also eats watermelons.
00:21:14.660
But I feel like the hippos, you know, they're going to be dibsing these watermelons.
00:21:22.320
And you could potentially drop them near the hippos to maximise the effect.
00:21:27.080
Maybe the source of the waterways is a bit ambitious.
00:21:30.320
To be honest with you, I think just advertising to big game hunters around the world and saying,
00:21:40.240
So you can actually make money out of the hippos.
00:21:41.980
You'll have a little Colombian government employee following you around, like a squire,
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like a medieval squire, and they'll carve up the hippo for you if you hunt it.
00:21:50.780
Yeah, you shoot the hippo, we'll grab it, we'll carve it up, you'll have hippo burgers,
00:21:57.840
If you're killed by a hippo in the expedition, you know, sign here, it's not R.
00:22:11.220
And that's, again, that's only the ones that they've spotted.
00:22:13.220
Like, when you have really heavily and densely forested areas, it's very easy for animals to not be,
00:22:22.180
for you to not be aware of the animals in there.
00:22:24.060
Like, they did a thing in the Congo where they discovered there was something like 100,000 more gorillas than they expected,
00:22:28.780
because they simply can't tell where the gorillas are, because it's insanely dense vegetation.
00:22:34.760
And so they went around sort of counting per square mile the number of, like, they make little nests,
00:22:41.500
and so they count these nests, and they're like, oh, right, so there are actually way more gorillas than we realised.
00:22:45.500
But we just can't tell, because, of course, it's just vegetation, it's just a thick jungle for miles.
00:22:50.000
I find it interesting when they put, like, a camera in somewhere like Papua New Guinea,
00:22:55.420
which is one of the least explored land masses, and they'll just be like,
00:23:03.680
Like, we just find, I think recently they found a new species of carnivore out that way.
00:23:09.860
Yeah, they're finding, like, new species every year,
00:23:12.760
just because jungles are an impenetrable thing to discover stuff in.
00:23:17.260
But anyway, the point being, it would be unbelievably expensive for them to try and humanely stem the growth of this population.
00:23:27.180
So researchers are just like, look, just kill them, just kill them, just kill them.
00:23:38.100
And eventually we will have a hippo emperor of Colombia.
00:23:43.660
So they're literally just, look, it's the swiftest, most humane thing to do, just shoot them, make it a day out.
00:23:52.160
The cost of killing hippos must be weighed against losing native flora and fauna in Colombia,
00:23:56.120
the second most biodiverse country in the world.
00:23:58.340
Yeah, it won't be when the bloody hippos are finished.
00:24:00.260
Yeah, so basically this is Pablo Escobar's revenge on the state of Colombia,
00:24:05.340
which I just thought was really, really interesting and funny, but not funny, of course,
00:24:10.860
if you're someone whose livelihood is being ruined by Pablo Escobar's cocaine hippos.
00:24:19.540
And what you should be doing is using your new Lotus Eaters gift subscription,
00:24:23.360
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00:24:26.320
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00:24:30.080
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