It’s public knowledge in the area that wildlife traffickers trade in hippos, but the police deny it they say they haven’t received any reports of such incidents. The prevailing rumor is that Saldarriaga had been trying to capture the hippo calf to sell. Hippo trafficking allegationsįor many people in Doradal, Saldarriaga’s hometown, the fishing story is just that: a tall tale. “But it was looking at me as if it was saying, ‘I forgive you this time, but if you come back, I’ll kill you.’” The hippo calf tends to hide under the bed in the room of the trafficker’s daughter. “If it had wanted, it could have crushed me and … goodbye life,” Saldarriaga says today of the abrupt end to the hippo’s attack. Saldarriaga’s friends rushed him to the nearest health center, from where he was transferred to a larger hospital about 170 kilometers (106 miles) away. Then it chomped down on his arm and flung him into the air. The 2-ton animal chased him down until he fell. On that day, however, one particular hippo - a mother with a young calf - must have felt sufficiently disturbed that, as Saldarriaga puts it, she ambushed him as he was coming out of the lake. A hippo calf swimming in a pond with the daughter of a wildlife trafficker in Doradal, Colombia. “You don’t disturb me, I won’t disturb you,” was Saldarriaga’s philosophy to fishing in the midst of the hippos, as he tells it to me. 31, 2021, and the lake near Doradal in the department of Antioquia was a known haunt of the feral hippos ( Hippopotamus amphibius) that had spawned from the four hippos that Escobar had shipped over from Africa The way John Aristides Saldarriaga tells it, he was out for a routine day’s fishing with friends on a lake about a mile from the fabled ranch of the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Mongabay Latam investigated how the illegal sale of hippo calves works from the inside.The town of Doradal near Escobar’s fabled ranch is a center of the hippo-trafficking trade, which targets calves and sells them to wealthy ranch owners as a status symbol.The roughly 70 hippos in the wild in Colombia today all originate from four animals brought over by the late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.An attack on a man in rural Colombia last October has highlighted the little-known trafficking of Colombia’s notorious, and non-native, hippos. These low numbers, though, have renewed calls for the hippo to be officially placed on the list of the world's most endangered animals. This is especially true in Africa, where poaching is common.ĭespite habitat loss, the species as a whole has remained relatively stable in recent years, with the World Wildlife Fund estimating a wild population of 115,000 to 130,000. She has had a number of viral moments, and has even had a children's book written about her.įiona has also predicted the winner of the Super Bowl every year since her birth.įiona has additionally helped to generate knowledge about hippo conservation, given that the animal is listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The group's most famous resident, though, is the baby's older sister, Fiona, who became the first hippo born at the zoo in 75 years in 2017.įiona's growth and development was documented across social media by the zoo, and she quickly became one of the most famous zoo animals in the U.S.
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