Castrating Pablo Escobar's hippos

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2022

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When drug kingpin Pablo Escobar died in 1993 having built a billion dollar cocaine empire, he left behind a zoo. While his rhinos, giraffes, elephants and kangaroos were re-housed, the hippos were left in Escobar’s abandoned ranch in the Colombian countryside. In 2007 they started turning up 100 kilometres away, frightening fishermen. Vet Carlos Valderrama was called in to tackle the problem. He describes to Josephine McDermott his experience of the first ever castration of a hippo in the wild. (Photo: Carlos Valderrama castrating the hippo. Credit: Carlos Valderrama)

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the sound of crowd signs.
0:02.4	We shoot a laser beam at this atom.
0:05.1	Is that a big canister of oxygen in the background?
0:07.7	Oh, there's a wasp in there.
0:09.3	Yeah, perhaps possibly the most disgusting thing I've heard this way.
0:13.5	But it's one of the nicest fun facts you're going to hear today.
0:16.4	So here I'm actually holding a doughnut.
0:18.4	What are you going to do with that?
0:19.2	Find out more at the end of this podcast.
0:26.8	Thank you for downloading the witness history podcast
0:29.5	from the BBC World Service, with me, Josephine McDermott.
0:34.4	Today I'm bringing you the story of the pet hippos left behind in Colombia
0:38.9	when Pablo Escobar, one of the richest criminals in history, was killed.
0:44.0	I've been speaking to vet Carlos Valderrama,
0:46.9	who was the first person to castrate one of the problem hippos.
0:51.6	It's 2007, and the authorities in Colombia are receiving strange reports from the public.
0:58.0	The environmental ministry received a message from a local community
1:03.7	that an old creature was just coming out from the legs and from the rivers at nighttime.
1:08.9	And it was very odd.
1:10.0	The description was a very massive animal, big teeth, yellow eyes, and small ears.
1:16.8	People were actually very scared and trying just to find out what animal it was.
1:23.3	Pablo Escobar was shot dead by police in December 1993.
	...

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