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# Pablo Escobar's Hippos Are Running Wild In Colombia

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by 

[Bijan Stephen](https://time.com/author/bijan-stephen/)


## Bijan Stephen


Jun 28, 2014 7:40 PM UTC

by 

[Bijan Stephen](https://time.com/author/bijan-stephen/)


## Bijan Stephen


Jun 28, 2014 7:40 PM UTC

[Pablo Escobar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo%5FEscobar) was one of the most menacing and wealthy criminals the world’s ever known: At the peak of his power in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Escobar’s cartel brought in around $60 million every day. With the money he earned—in 1989, _Forbes_ estimated his net worth at around $3 billion—Escobar created a luxurious estate, _Hacienda Nápoles_, on about 7.7 sq. miles of land 200 miles north of Bogotá, Colombia.

Nowadays, _Nápoles_ is a theme park; after Escobar’s death the government expropriated the land, which housed, among various other luxuries, a private zoo with exotic animals. Because the cost of maintenance was too steep for the Colombian government to reasonably manage, they decided to disperse the animals to zoos around the country. The illegally-smuggled hippopotamuses, however, remained.

Over the years those hippos have multiplied in the idyllic conditions the region provides, and they’ve been sighted as far as 155 miles away from _Nápoles_. [This is a problem](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27905743): Despite their blobby appearance, adult hippos are hugely dangerous. In fact, they’re the [most dangerous wild mammals in the world](http://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Most-Lethal-Animal-Mosquito-Week), killing around 500 people per year. For Colombia, it’s a time bomb. So what’s to be done?

There are a few possible solutions, enumerated by William Kremer [over at the BBC](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27905743): relocation, captivity, castration, and having the locals eat them. It’s a knotty problem, one that Kremer says “in some ways resembles the complex attitude Colombians had towards Pablo Escobar himself.”

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