The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - Christmas Pre-Record ｜ Colombia's Cocaine Hippo Problem

00:00:00.460 Merry Christmas Eve, folks. I thought we'd talk about cocaine hippos. 0.75

00:00:04.840 Because nothing says Christmas Eve like cocaine hippos.

00:00:08.080 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,

00:00:19.040 you'd be like, yeah, no, the hippos are a real problem.

00:00:21.520 I actually put a cocaine hippo at the top of my Christmas list this year.

00:00:24.400 So if I'm lucky, I'll find one in my stocking.

00:00:27.460 So this is the hippopotamus, right?

00:00:31.080 I don't know what the scientific designation for it is.

00:00:34.300 I'm sure it's on here somewhere, but it doesn't matter.

00:00:36.180 It's hippopotamus amphibious, I think it was.

00:00:39.720 You know what, that's also rather ironic, considering they can't swim.

00:00:44.180 They're not really amphibious, they just stand in water.

00:00:47.060 I thought they sort of milled about and they like to wallow in the water.

00:00:50.800 Oh yeah, they do, they spend all day in water.

00:00:52.720 But I'm not sure I'd call them amphibious.

00:00:55.120 So it kind of implies that they can swim and live in the water.

00:00:58.900 Something that blew my mind is, I was watching a nature documentary,

00:01:02.360 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

00:01:09.320 to spread it as far as possible.

00:01:11.400 That is a very horrible adaptation.

00:01:14.760 That is apparently true.

00:01:15.760 But they're one of the only two hippopotami left in the world.

00:01:22.000 The other one is the pygmy hippo.

00:01:23.740 And that's probably for the best, because hippopotamuses are dangerous and psychotic.

00:01:28.420 And they look quite cute and cuddly, but look at all the scars on this.

00:01:31.840 I was just looking at it thinking, that's not something I want to mess with.

00:01:35.180 Yeah, this lad has been through the wars, right?

00:01:39.200 And hippopotamuses are the third largest land animal in the world,

00:01:43.300 behind elephants and rhinoceroses.

00:01:45.100 They can get up to about three tons, which is just gargantuan.

00:01:49.720 And their range, their natural range is, of course, all across Africa.

00:01:53.040 Although, historically, they used to be across Europe and Asia as well.

00:01:57.560 So if you went back, like, 20,000 years to sort of the Middle East or wherever,

00:02:01.380 you'd find hippopotamuses in the river there, which is interesting.

00:02:04.800 So in the Ice Age, so were they hairy?

00:02:08.740 No, they're just in hot areas.

00:02:10.880 Oh, okay, that makes sense.

00:02:12.040 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,

00:02:22.840 and they have a massive skull.

00:02:24.580 And this massive skull, that picture would come up.

00:02:30.240 This massive skull, there was a...

00:02:32.620 There it is.

00:02:33.280 There we go.

00:02:34.220 As you can see, it's got gargantuan teeth in it.

00:02:37.320 Have you seen people try and, like, recreate what a hippo could look like

00:02:42.300 based on its skull?

00:02:43.360 Yeah, it looks like a dragon.

00:02:44.520 It looks horrifying.

00:02:45.800 Like, they make it look like a monster.

00:02:47.480 Yeah, because they can't remodel the sort of soft tissue

00:02:52.240 that hides all the teeth.

00:02:54.740 And this is why every dinosaur recreation you see is probably wrong.

00:02:59.220 It's probably unlikely that, like, Tyrannosaurus Rex had teeth sticking out of his mouth.

00:03:03.360 The chances are it just had a really thick, meaty hippo mouth rather than, like...

00:03:09.440 Because normally, a Tyrannosaurus Rex recreation, like, it looks kind of like oblong-shaped jaw

00:03:13.900 because it's a big, thick jaw, and then it's got teeth sticking out.

00:03:16.620 Well, no.

00:03:17.120 Imagine there's big, fleshy lumps hiding the teeth, and that's probably more likely.

00:03:21.640 And the thing is, modern recreations and paleo art of this do it

00:03:26.020 and like to make the Tyrannosaurus Rex look more like a monitor lizard

00:03:29.200 because they have their teeth covered. 1.00

00:03:31.480 And the thing is, it looks kind of stupid and gummy. 0.99

00:03:34.740 I could imagine it being kind of more scary. 1.00

00:03:37.680 Imagine being chased by something that looks kind of gormless and kind of clueless.

00:03:42.620 It looks harmless, that's the thing, because you can't see the teeth.

00:03:45.960 It looks far less dangerous.

00:03:47.200 But I was thinking about this, that if you sort of made a chicken about six or seven foot tall,

00:03:53.820 the fact that it has no intelligence makes it sort of scarier in a weird way.

00:03:58.520 Yeah, but the thing is, I think they do have a kind of intelligence, that's the thing.

00:04:02.680 It's not like...

00:04:03.760 I mean, look at the corvus, the ravens and the crows.

00:04:07.100 They're really smart.

00:04:08.500 They've got the intelligence of a seven-year-old child.

00:04:10.840 They can do puzzles and all sorts of things.

00:04:14.700 They can pass information down generations.

00:04:17.920 All sorts of really impressive things.

00:04:19.400 The ones where they use tools to solve puzzles to get the food out of the tube or whatever,

00:04:25.200 that's genuinely worrying because what you realise, what you're dealing with,

00:04:28.820 is non-human reasoning.

00:04:30.940 And that means...

00:04:32.260 I mean, if there's one thing...

00:04:34.500 Now, bird lovers will say,

00:04:35.740 well, hang on a second, I've got a pet parrot and he's really affectionate.

00:04:37.840 It's like, yeah, yeah, he is.

00:04:40.940 But I also feel that the bird has a kind of inhuman quality to it that's more reptilian.

00:04:48.120 And like...

00:04:48.660 That's fair, yeah.

00:04:49.500 There's something about a non-human intelligence where it's just like...

00:04:53.880 It's cruel and calculating in the way I view them.

00:04:57.360 Well, they also have very small brains and, you know, bird brains, notorious as an insult,

00:05:04.320 as well as the fact that they're not usually very wrinkly and...

00:05:07.960 Like a koala.

00:05:09.920 Anyway, the point being, these massive beasts are the most dangerous animals in Africa.

00:05:16.860 They kill more people than any other animal.

00:05:19.480 So everyone's like, oh God, I'm really worried about lions and leopards and elephants.

00:05:22.220 No, it's the hippo that is the problem.

00:05:26.140 And so releasing a load of hippos into the wild in another country is a problem.

00:05:31.240 Because in Africa, they have droughts. 0.99

00:05:33.960 And droughts mean mass die-offs.

00:05:36.500 And then, therefore, the population of hippos who don't really have any natural predators.

00:05:40.680 I mean, technically, like a pride of lions might be able to bring down a hippo.

00:05:45.760 Possibly.

00:05:46.240 But for most of the hippos' existence, it doesn't really have to worry about predators.

00:05:51.560 Because it's just too big.

00:05:52.960 And so the thing that keeps the hippo numbers under control is Africa's atrocious weather system. 0.81

00:06:00.140 So anyway, let's talk about Pablo Escobar.

00:06:04.980 I love being able to tie these things together.

00:06:08.400 So I don't really know that much about Pablo Escobar.

00:06:11.240 I had to have a read of his Wikipedia page.

00:06:13.300 And there are loads of documentaries and things like that.

00:06:16.060 But he seemed like a kind of cheery maniac.

00:06:19.440 As you can see by the photo, he looks like he's probably a fun guy to go out for a beer with, right?

00:06:25.720 Might not be beer, but...

00:06:27.140 Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:06:28.020 Might not be beer.

00:06:29.520 So for anyone who doesn't know, any Zoomers watching,

00:06:32.680 Pablo Escobar was considered to be the wealthiest criminal in history.

00:06:35.960 Because he ran what in modern-day dollars was a $70 billion cocaine trade out of Colombia.

00:06:45.260 He had monopolized...

00:06:45.900 With his gang, he had monopolized the entire cocaine...

00:06:51.280 International cocaine...

00:06:53.960 Industry.

00:06:55.220 Yeah, industry, I guess you'd call it.

00:06:57.080 To the United States.

00:06:59.260 So all cocaine in America through the 70s and 80s.

00:07:03.740 By the late 80s, anyway.

00:07:05.580 Yeah.

00:07:05.960 Sorry, the mid-80s.

00:07:07.580 Was coming through Pablo Escobar's networks.

00:07:11.980 So he was unbelievably rich.

00:07:15.060 Forbes, for seven consecutive years, marked him as one of the richest people in the world.

00:07:21.080 And he...

00:07:22.160 I mean, he was just mad.

00:07:23.420 Absolutely mad.

00:07:25.660 He created, though...

00:07:27.520 He made himself a giant luxury house.

00:07:30.580 And in this giant luxury house, he had a zoo.

00:07:33.240 And in this zoo, he had more than 200 species of exotic animals, such as hippos, giraffes, elephants, zebras, and ostriches.

00:07:40.440 All introduced to the country as a result of bribes to the government. 0.97

00:07:44.300 He couldn't even have a zoo without corruption.

00:07:48.860 Yeah, well, I mean, yeah.

00:07:51.380 I guess.

00:07:52.180 I mean, if that is your job, then...

00:07:55.860 You know, the story of him essentially declaring war on the Colombian government, killing hundreds and hundreds of police officers, government officials, and...

00:08:06.820 I mean, essentially trying to set himself up as, like, a little, like, cocaine monarch in Colombia is genuinely fascinating.

00:08:15.160 He is a terrible guy, just to be clear.

00:08:19.060 Terrible guy, libertarian hero. 0.99

00:08:22.760 No, he's genuinely an evil guy. 1.00

00:08:25.060 Killed hundreds of people.

00:08:27.640 But a strange and entertaining life to read about, right?

00:08:31.200 But anyway, so he died aged 44 in 1993.

00:08:36.620 Killed by the government.

00:08:38.440 Of course he was.

00:08:39.480 Yeah.

00:08:40.000 They want to crush an innocent entrepreneur, don't they?

00:08:43.540 Yeah, they just want to keep the little guy down.

00:08:46.260 Yet another victim of state violence.

00:08:48.940 Anyway, so he had a bunch of hippos.

00:08:52.220 And they escaped from his zoo.

00:08:54.940 And they got hunted down.

00:08:58.220 One of these hippos was called Pepe.

00:09:00.980 Which is weirdly mimetic.

00:09:03.060 And the Colombian government, not satisfied with killing just a prosperous entrepreneur, they were also hunting down his hippos.

00:09:12.100 And Pepe got shot, as you can see, by the number of army men, soldiers, around the hippo as they shot him.

00:09:20.640 He died a hero.

00:09:21.640 Look at how many men it took to take him down. 1.00

00:09:23.440 Yeah, well, I mean, it's a goddamn hippo, so yeah. 0.99

00:09:26.240 They were also searching for a bunch of other hippos, which were escaped. 0.99

00:09:32.100 Because Pablo had three females and one male.

00:09:35.560 I can see where this is going.

00:09:36.800 You can see where this is going.

00:09:38.800 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.

00:09:49.860 So they killed him, took his stuff, and it's just like, look, man, that's a story for the eight.

00:09:54.180 Anyway, I'm just joking.

00:09:56.320 Obviously, we don't support Pablo Escobar here.

00:09:59.040 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.

00:10:08.460 They did spend, I think it was about two years, trying to capture them to geld the hippos.

00:10:13.660 So, okay, we're not going to kill them.

00:10:15.880 We're just going to, you know, neuter them so they're not breeding and taking over Colombia. 0.98

00:10:21.640 The problem is that's a lot easier said than done.

00:10:25.380 Yeah, how do you catch a hippo?

00:10:27.040 Yeah, that's the question, right?

00:10:28.960 How do you catch, sedate, and then castrate a hippo?

00:10:32.620 So the answer is not very easily, which is why it took them two years. 0.99

00:10:36.400 And this is why the government was just like, look, just shoot them. 1.00

00:10:39.520 Just shoot them for God's sake. 1.00

00:10:41.460 You know, do we actually need to have all these hippos running around? 1.00

00:10:45.480 But they were also searching for a couple of females and some calves that they had given birth to.

00:10:54.060 Now, the problem with this is that people didn't like seeing this picture, right?

00:11:02.940 I mean, it's an invasive species.

00:11:05.540 And also, I've just looked it up.

00:11:07.280 Apparently, hippos are good eating.

00:11:09.540 Oh, I'm sure they're delicious.

00:11:11.260 Apparently, it's very fatty, though, as you can probably imagine.

00:11:13.760 I don't mind that.

00:11:14.620 No, it's fine.

00:11:15.320 Yeah, but the point is, people, presumably bourgeois liberals.

00:11:22.460 I knew that was coming.

00:11:25.420 We're like, oh, look at the poor hippo.

00:11:28.560 Look at these mean men with their guns.

00:11:31.180 They killed the hippo.

00:11:33.100 And so now, people were like, oh, the public was outraged at the pictures of 15 uniformed

00:11:38.760 men standing beside Pepe the hippo's body.

00:11:41.420 The most vocal protesters demanded that the Minister of the Environment resign.

00:11:45.640 Newspapers ran angry letters from readers.

00:11:48.120 An outcry soon led a judge to prohibit further hippo killings.

00:11:52.840 Escobar sympathises.

00:11:54.280 Just because they're killing his inner circle doesn't mean, you know, it's not justified.

00:11:59.020 So, you can see where this is going, right?

00:12:02.240 Colombia is a country that's near to the equator.

00:12:05.760 And so it's very, very warm all year round.

00:12:09.060 However, unlike Africa, Colombia is drenched in water.

00:12:14.620 Absolutely drenched.

00:12:15.660 It's really, really high rainfall.

00:12:18.240 And so, basically, this is like hippo utopia.

00:12:22.920 It's got, you know, it's a tremendous number of bodies of water.

00:12:27.620 It's gorgeous and warm.

00:12:29.100 It's lush and verdant.

00:12:30.700 There is food everywhere.

00:12:33.760 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.

00:12:44.500 Because it has absolutely everything the hippos need.

00:12:46.760 No natural predators.

00:12:48.180 It has no shortage of food.

00:12:49.820 No problems with the environment.

00:12:51.620 And lots and lots of space.

00:12:53.120 Because there are no other hippos around. 1.00

00:12:54.820 Are the hippos stupid? 1.00

00:12:55.720 What are they doing living in Africa? 1.00

00:12:57.120 Why didn't they move?

00:12:58.060 Well, that's a great question.

00:12:59.460 And, you know, they...

00:13:00.700 I imagine that, you know, when the continental plates of Africa and South America split,

00:13:05.340 the hippos were like, well, surely the African one's going to be better, you know. 1.00

00:13:08.820 But, no, the mistake was made.

00:13:10.260 They should have been on the South American one.

00:13:12.740 But, anyway, yeah.

00:13:13.760 So, a judge intervened and was like, you're not allowed to kill these hippos.

00:13:17.380 That's inhuman.

00:13:18.640 Look at it.

00:13:19.220 They're not human.

00:13:20.380 Well, yeah.

00:13:20.800 Hippos.

00:13:21.920 And, at the time, Pepe was one of around what they estimated to be 60 wild hippos in

00:13:27.640 the Hacienda, Nepalese ranch.

00:13:30.920 Um, but the thing is, because there's just nothing stopping the hippos from going anywhere,

00:13:38.100 uh, hippos have been sighted, like, hundreds of miles away at the Laskovar ranch.

00:13:44.100 And they're like, oh, like, down these rivers?

00:13:46.140 Because there's literally no reason that the hippo can't just...

00:13:48.920 Like, there's nothing to hunt the hippo.

00:13:51.080 Like, I mean, you know, there's not that much in Africa to hunt the hippo either.

00:13:54.380 But there are at least, you know, massive crocodiles, like Nile crocodiles and saltwater crocodiles.

00:13:59.340 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

00:14:07.500 with my face.

00:14:08.680 You know, you're, you're like, you're, you're tiny, thin jaws.

00:14:11.620 You're not going to do anything.

00:14:12.820 I think I have a solution here.

00:14:15.120 Americans.

00:14:16.120 You know how many Americans like going on hunting holidays?

00:14:19.900 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:14:20.440 They can sort of, uh, become Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator and go through the jungle.

00:14:25.620 Yeah, hunting hippos.

00:14:26.800 That's, that's quite a story to tell.

00:14:28.480 If someone said they'd been to Columbia hunting hippos, I'd be like, I respect you.

00:14:31.840 I mean, it's literally the most dangerous game.

00:14:33.960 Exactly.

00:14:34.640 It's, you know, anyway.

00:14:36.400 Uh, but the, the, the problem, of course, is that leftists are outraged.

00:14:42.780 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?

00:14:51.960 You couldn't craft a more wonderful place for the hippos to live.

00:14:55.500 And so, this has been a real problem.

00:14:58.620 Now, Pepe the hippo got his own little documentary.

00:15:01.680 He was quite famous.

00:15:03.520 Uh, even looks a bit like Pepe the frog there as well.

00:15:06.180 That's weird.

00:15:06.780 A little bit.

00:15:07.280 Um, but, uh, anyway, so this, it was a kind of first person documentary from Pepe the hippo.

00:15:14.420 What, it was from the hippo's perspective?

00:15:16.580 Yeah.

00:15:18.340 Yeah.

00:15:19.380 Uh, weird.

00:15:20.580 I don't really know why.

00:15:22.320 I haven't watched it.

00:15:23.360 I have to be honest.

00:15:24.640 But yeah, look, you said, you know, Nelson gives the ill-fated creature its own voice.

00:15:29.260 I don't know why you'd do a first person documentary.

00:15:31.140 That's a bit weird.

00:15:32.740 I hate it when people give voices to animals.

00:15:35.300 It feels really...

00:15:36.580 Well, like in the Bible.

00:15:38.000 Yeah.

00:15:38.300 Well, I meant more in film, but...

00:15:41.620 I think it's weird in the Bible, too. 0.87

00:15:43.520 Oh, this donkey started talking.

00:15:44.720 Did it, though? 0.97

00:15:46.100 Anyway.

00:15:46.980 Um...

00:15:47.620 But anyway, so, uh, this, this was a famous hippo.

00:15:52.500 Now, it's a famous and beloved hippo.

00:15:55.080 But anyway, researchers have been like, yeah, so just how many hippos are there in Colombia?

00:15:58.820 And the answer is they don't know, but more than they thought.

00:16:01.880 Uh-oh.

00:16:02.780 So, uh, a few years ago, researchers, uh, were, like, curious about how fast the animals were reproducing.

00:16:08.900 And they thought, oh, there's probably about 98 of them in the, uh, Magdalena River.

00:16:14.420 And it's tributaries in 2020.

00:16:17.160 Now, that's, that's quite a large number of hippos, really.

00:16:20.080 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.

00:16:28.320 And they're like, yeah, there's over 200 of them, actually.

00:16:31.520 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?

00:16:39.000 Yeah, probably.

00:16:40.200 He got killed...

00:16:41.620 1993.

00:16:42.660 1993, okay.

00:16:44.300 So, that's not that long for, for, for hippos to become 200.

00:16:51.320 That's quite a lot of hippos.

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

00:17:08.920 breed really rapidly.

00:17:10.260 So, they're going to have their very own version of the mouse utopia experiment, but with hippos,

00:17:14.740 where...

00:17:15.540 Hippos in Colombia, yeah.

00:17:17.100 And, ironically, that's exactly what's happening.

00:17:21.040 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.

00:17:27.720 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.

00:17:36.720 And so, it becomes apparent that the hippos are going to become a threat to the local wildlife.

00:17:41.380 I'm not surprised.

00:17:42.380 Yeah, and they're going to literally take over the country.

00:17:46.080 All of the waterways in the country are going to become essentially unnavigable if the hippos

00:17:49.860 have their way.

00:17:50.960 And so, the government is actually going to have to start culling them.

00:17:53.380 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.

00:18:04.400 Yeah, because...

00:18:05.020 Well, actually, it was the US government, but still.

00:18:07.000 Sure, but the point...

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,

00:18:17.140 legally imported.

00:18:18.460 And the people doing the study say that the state must act urgently because this is a real

00:18:24.200 issue.

00:18:24.860 Because, I mean, they are actually going to drive native species into extinction and probably

00:18:29.660 kill a lot of people.

00:18:31.340 Because, of course, you know, Colombia, not exactly a developed nation. 0.99

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

00:18:42.540 down the river to fish or whatever it is.

00:18:44.740 Like, if you...

00:18:45.480 You know, a hippo can destroy a boat, like a large boat that, you know...

00:18:48.800 You've seen videos from Africa where there are people in, like, a motorboat going quite

00:18:53.420 quickly and you just see this thing under the surface.

00:18:56.660 It's like, that's horrifying.

00:18:58.140 Yeah.

00:18:58.240 I'd be, you know, beside myself with fear if just this mass under the water starts coming

00:19:05.820 towards my boat.

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.

00:19:17.160 It's like, I've never seen a hippo.

00:19:19.880 Could you imagine if they start, you know, they go into the Amazon and they go to these

00:19:23.780 uncontacted tribes and then these creatures just come at them.

00:19:27.260 They're going to think that there's some sort of demonic...

00:19:29.580 Would they be wrong to think of them as, like, some sort of dragon or something?

00:19:33.380 No.

00:19:33.700 I mean, like, look at it.

00:19:35.560 I mean, if you had a cultural tradition of slaying hippos, like their dragons, I think

00:19:41.240 it would help.

00:19:43.000 All of these Amazonian tribes, they'll stop being skinny and using these little tiny, like, 1.00

00:19:47.260 blow darts. 0.91

00:19:47.980 They'll just be an army of chads. 0.99

00:19:50.460 But they...

00:19:51.260 Literally, you've never seen anything like this.

00:19:53.600 There's nothing in your traditions, your history, or your culture that recognizes something

00:19:57.520 like this. 0.91

00:19:57.860 This is genuinely a monster.

00:20:00.400 This three-ton monster comes out...

00:20:01.920 But also, just the size of the mouth, it's just, like, greed personified. 0.71

00:20:05.380 This big, fat creature that wallows in the water all day and has a massive mouth.

00:20:11.000 And it's hyper-aggressive.

00:20:12.920 And you're just...

00:20:13.640 Like you said, you're just some tribes and you thought, oh, I'll go for a swim in the 0.99

00:20:16.120 river or something.

00:20:16.940 And then just three-ton monster comes at you and kills one of your friends.

00:20:21.800 Like, terrifying.

00:20:23.960 So, anyway, the problem that they have is how to get them, of course.

00:20:28.240 Because it's not easy to get a three-ton animal in the water.

00:20:32.260 Like, what are you doing?

00:20:33.080 How are you going to do it?

00:20:33.780 I don't even know what the plan is, right? 0.99

00:20:35.560 So, they were thinking, right, okay, well, because people hate it when we just kill them, 0.99

00:20:39.880 even though this is going to become a real problem if we don't just kill them, 0.99

00:20:42.660 we were thinking about capturing, anaesthetising, and transporting them to a facility to be 0.99

00:20:48.580 castrated, but this would cost half a million dollars per hippo.

00:20:53.600 What a waste of money.

00:20:54.700 I have an idea that's much cheaper.

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

00:21:09.680 and die. 0.95

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,

00:21:35.600 look, you can shoot and eat a hippo.

00:21:38.240 We'll carve it up into hippo burgers. 0.99

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, 0.97

00:21:47.040 like a medieval squire, and they'll carve up the hippo for you if you hunt it. 0.82

00:21:50.780 Yeah, you shoot the hippo, we'll grab it, we'll carve it up, you'll have hippo burgers, 0.77

00:21:54.260 it'll be amazing. 0.98

00:21:55.800 I'd do that, yeah.

00:21:56.700 I'm actually well up for that.

00:21:57.840 If you're killed by a hippo in the expedition, you know, sign here, it's not R. 0.99

00:22:04.220 That makes perfect sense, yeah.

00:22:06.000 But anyway, yeah.

00:22:07.180 So basically, 200 plus hippos.

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,

00:22:58.580 what is that?

00:22:59.640 It's like, what is that thing?

00:23:00.800 We don't know what that is.

00:23:01.840 And that's still happening now.

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. 1.00

00:23:27.180 So researchers are just like, look, just kill them, just kill them, just kill them. 1.00

00:23:30.460 They're going to get out of control. 1.00

00:23:32.440 They're going to trample crops. 0.97

00:23:34.040 They're going to cause famine.

00:23:35.840 They're going to eradicate native species.

00:23:38.100 And eventually we will have a hippo emperor of Colombia.

00:23:41.160 And if we don't do something about them now. 0.99

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. 0.99

00:23:49.420 It'll be fun. 0.96

00:23:50.280 There's literally nothing else you can do.

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. 0.95

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.

00:24:15.560 Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

00:24:19.540 And what you should be doing is using your new Lotus Eaters gift subscription,

00:24:23.360 that new feature we've got on the site, to watch all of our premium content

00:24:26.320 where you've got lots of downtime over the holidays.

00:24:28.260 I hope you're having a nice time.

00:24:30.080 Also check out our Twitter where we post links to everything that we're putting out.

00:24:33.480 Thank you very much for watching.

00:24:35.080 Have a nice holiday and goodbye.

00:24:45.560 Have a nice holiday and goodbye.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - December 24, 2024

Christmas Pre-Record ｜ Colombia's Cocaine Hippo Problem

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