CoolGreenScience has a post with stories of Hippopotami: Including what happened to drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's pet Hippos, which have since gone feral.
Owning exotic pets is not in itself noteworthy, but this story took a weird twist after Escobar was killed in a raid. Authorities gathered up the exotic beasts and placed them in zoos, but the hippos proved too unruly to capture. So they left the hippos in their pond, where they bred and prospered. And then moved into the nearby Magdalena River.
the hippos have attacked people and cattle, but when the locals tries to cull them, there was an "outcry". By whom? Probably the same animal lovers who lamented capturing a child killing crokadile here in the Philippines, or killing tigers who kill poor villagers in India.
In Africa, hippos are not looked on as cuddly creatures: They were feared, and they can run quickly to attack people and animals. Indeed, more people in Africa are killed by Hippos than by lions. No, I never treated a hippo bitten person, but one of my collegues did... and the locals became upset when a hippo moved into one of the local irrigation lakes: it meant they hesitated to go there to swim or fish.
The article also goes into the econological problems (Hippo manure causing overgrowth of toxic green algae).
and the same webpage has an article on the Magdalena Riverin Colombia. Lamenting that it now is blocked by hydro electric dams. Hey, rich people want natural rivers: poor people would prefer electricity to their homes, but never mind. But the cluelessness doesn't stop there:
Just like my grandfather, I am a great lover of rivers, and my work has allowed me the good fortune to visit the last places of a Colombia frozen in time. Whether forgotten due to their remoteness or protected by decades of armed conflict or by chance, there are still rivers to save, some of them with extraordinary value.
italics mine.
Yup, maybe the Colombian civil war resulted in a quarter milliion dead, but hey, at least it kept some of the rivers clean. (/sarcasm)
Total casualties: 218,094[36][37]
Total civilians killed: 177,307[36]
People abducted: 27,023[36]
Victims of enforced disappearances: 25,007[36]
Victims of anti-personnel mines: 10,189[36]
Total people displaced: 4,744,046–5,712,506[36][38]
Total number of children displaced: 2.3 million children.[39]
Number of refugees: 340,000[40]
The number of children killed: 45,000[39]
Missing children: 8,000 minors[39]
I am all for ecology and sustainable living, but this type of thinking that values nature over people is one reason that the ecology movement has a bad reputation as being just a new version of Eugenics.
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