# Colombia approves cull of up to 80 Escobar-era hippos as fight over invasive herd deepens
Officials say previous efforts failed to control the animals, which threaten villagers and native species.
Colombian officials have authorized a new culling plan for dozens of wild hippos descended from animals brought into the country in the 1980s by Pablo Escobar. Environment Minister Irene Vélez said up to 80 hippos would be affected, and she framed the decision as a necessary step to protect ecosystems after earlier control efforts failed. The government has not said when hunting would begin, but the move marks a harder line in a debate that has lasted for years.
The hippos are the descendants of four animals Escobar imported to his private estate at Hacienda Nápoles, and Colombia remains the only country outside Africa with a wild hippo population. AP reported that a study from Colombia’s National University estimated about 170 hippos were roaming freely in the country in 2022, and that some had moved more than 100 kilometers north of the ranch. That spread is part of the reason officials now see the herd as a public-management problem rather than just a curiosity tied to Escobar’s old property.
Vélez said previous methods were expensive and unsuccessful, including neutering some animals or moving them to zoos. Those failures matter because they show the government has already tried a softer approach. The hippos are large, dangerous and difficult to capture, so any strategy that depends on repeated intervention is costly and slow. In her view, continuing with that approach would leave authorities unable to control the population at all. She said the cull is meant to preserve ecosystems, not simply to remove an emblematic species from a single tourist site.
The ecological concern is not abstract. Colombian environmental authorities say the hippos threaten villagers who encounter them on farms and in rivers and that they compete for food and space with local species such as river manatees. That puts the animal in a category closer to invasive wildlife management than to ordinary conservation, even though public sentiment is complicated. The hippos have become a tourist attraction in the region, where visitors can take spotting tours and buy hippo-themed souvenirs. They are also one of the main attractions at the Nápoles ranch, which was confiscated by the government and turned into a theme park with swimming pools, water slides and a zoo.
That tension is why the cull remains controversial. Animal welfare activists have long opposed killing the hippos, arguing that they are healthy creatures paying the price for government negligence. Senator and animal rights activist Andrea Padilla called the decision cruel and said killing the animals sets a poor example in a country with a history of internal conflict. Her objection captures a familiar policy clash: whether a harmful invasive population should be controlled by lethal means once nonlethal methods have not worked. The government is clearly betting that the longer it waits, the harder the problem becomes.
The deeper significance of the decision is that it treats the hippos as a lasting legacy of Escobar’s private zoo and not as a temporary conservation anomaly. That legacy has grown for decades because the animals reproduced in the wild, spread well beyond the estate and became hard to contain. By approving a cull of up to 80 hippos, officials are acknowledging that the question is no longer whether the herd will be managed, but how aggressively. What happens next will determine whether Colombia continues to rely on costly containment measures or shifts to a more permanent population reduction strategy.
