Moving Pablo Escobar's 'cocaine hippos' to Mexico and India will cost Colombia an estimated $3.5 million
Fernando Vergara/AP Photo
- Colombia's plan to transport 70 "cocaine hippos" to Mexico and India will cost an estimated $3.5m.
- It will be expensive because of how hard and costly it is to anesthetize hippos.
- Some 130 hippos live in and around the late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's former ranch.
Moving 70 so-called "cocaine hippos" from near Pablo Escobar's former ranch in Colombia to sanctuaries abroad is set to cost the country millions of dollars.
In fact, the whole operation should cost around $3.5 million, according to Ernesto Zazueta, owner of the Ostok Sanctuary in northern Mexico where 10 of the hippos will be sent, Agence France-Presse reported.
Another 60 hippos are set to be transferred to a yet-to-be-named facility in India in the coming months, according to AFP.
The current plan is to lure the animals with bait into pens where they will remain confined before being transported in special crates on planes to their new homes, Zazueta said, per AFP.
But this is not an easy task, and it doesn't come cheap.
Hippos tend to be extremely difficult to catch and dangerous to confront, according to a 2020 study by the University of California, San Diego.
And the animals would need to be professionally anesthetized.
"Everything with hippos is risky, as well as complex, costly, and time-consuming," said David Echeverri López, who works for Cornare, the Colombia government agency handling the hippo relocation, in an interview with Insider's Crystal Raypole earlier this month.
Professionally anesthetizing hippos is tricky because of the thickness of their skin and the density of their subcutaneous tissue, according to a 2012 study in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
It's also costly, because the drugs required to anesthetize such large animals are expensive.
López told Insider that knocking out 70 hippos with these drugs could cause some financial difficulties for Colombian authorities.
Around 130 hippos are now living in and around Hacienda Nápoles, Pablo Escobar's former ranch. The animals are descended from the four that were illegally imported by Escobar and then left there after the drug lord was fatally shot in 1993.
Since then, the group has rapidly reproduced, with some experts predicting that there could be thousands of them in the area within the next couple of decades if nothing is done.
Last year, Colombia declared the animals – which are referred to as "cocaine hippos" because of Escobar's role in the cocaine trade and the Medellín drug cartel – an invasive species, one that could displace some native animals.
In the past, the country has sterilized some of the hippos, but it hasn't done much to stunt population growth.
Colombia is hoping this more extreme measure will have more of an impact.