Pablo Escobar's Invasive Hippos Deemed Human Under Columbian Court

if you didn't know, Pablo Escobar had a vast menagerie of animals in a zoo on his private ranch. When he got popped, his zoo was redistributed by the Columbian government, and every animal got sent away except for the hippos that were too difficult to move. Hippos are the most dangerous large land mammal in the world, killing the most humans out of any large land mammal every year. Transporting and handling 5-ton armored vehicles with jaws is extremely difficult. Hence, the Columbian government just left the four hippos hoping they would die out and leave everyone alone, secluded on Escobar's ranch. You see, the hippos didn't do that. They became the most enormous, most dangerous invasive creatures the world has ever seen. They started fucking, and the four originals turned into a herd of up to 120 animals. These cocaine hippos have flourished in their new environment, with no natural predators and no draughts that kept their populations in check like in Africa. These hippos are breeding like rabbits under these new conditions. The Columbian government has no idea what to do with them. They have determined they will need to cull the herd and start sterilizing some of the Hippos. The real problem is Hippos are endangered, and much of the Columbian population is against hunting or whenever the Columbian military guns them down. I mean, selling tags to kill these hippos to foreign big game hunters seems like a no-brainer to me. Are you telling me some jackass with oil money wouldn't drop a bag to blast a couple of these with a 50 cal?

 Many of the Columbians do not want to kill the hippos as they are adorable to some people who haven't dealt with millions of years of Hippos killing their family and ancestors. The answer has been to try to sterilize them with birth control darts. 

The Columbian government wants to kill them all, but the Animal Defense Fund has landed a landmark case to prevent this from happening. It might be one of the first cases of animals being considered humans under law.

The thing is, according to some legal jargon, to prevent Columbia from overriding a bunch of conservationists in Ohio who want to keep sterilizing the hippos with darts, they have gotten the Hippos considered humans under law.

ALDF.org-WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, the Animal Legal Defense Fund announced the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio has recognized animals as legal persons for the first time in the United States.

In pursuit of deposing two wildlife experts with expertise in nonsurgical sterilization who reside in Ohio, the Animal Legal Defense Fund filed an application on behalf of the plaintiffs in a Colombian lawsuit against the country’s government regarding a plan to kill roughly 100 hippos who are descendants of animals imported by Pablo Escobar.

The plaintiffs are the “community of hippopotamuses living in the Magdalena River.” In Colombia, animals have standing to bring lawsuits to protect their interests. In granting the application pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1782 to conduct discovery for use in foreign proceedings, the court recognized the hippos as legal persons with respect to that statute.

This U.S. statute allows anyone who is an “interested person” in a foreign litigation to request permission from a federal court to take depositions in the U.S. in support of their foreign case. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that someone who is a party to the foreign case “no doubt” qualifies as an “interested person” under this statute. The Animal Legal Defense Fund reasoned that since the hippos are plaintiffs in the Colombian litigation, they qualify as “interested persons” under this statute.

“Animals have the right to be free from cruelty and exploitation, and the failure of U.S. courts to recognize their rights impedes the ability to enforce existing legislative protections,” says Animal Legal Defense Fund Executive Director Stephen Wells. “The court’s order authorizing the hippos to exercise their legal right to obtain information in the United States is a critical milestone in the broader animal status fight to recognize that animals have enforceable rights.”

The whole thing is regarding which sterilization chemical is being used and whether the Columbian government uses it as just poison. 

While the lawsuit is ongoing, the regional environmental agency involved in addressing the hippo population announced it had started to provide a fraction of the animals with the contraceptive drug GonaCon on October 15, 2021. It is unknown if the Colombian government’s use of the drug will be safe and effective, and it is also unknown how many hippos the government still intends to kill. The hippos’ lawsuit seeks an order to provide a contraceptive called PZP (porcine zona pellucida), given its historical success in hippos held in zoos and its recommendation by an International Advisory Committee assembled by Animal Balance, an international organization that focuses on sterilization of animals.

So basically, for one of the first times in history, human rights have been given to animals, interestingly enough descendants of Pablo Escobar's pet Hippos. Dominoe effect: Incans chew leaf to prevent altitude sickness, German chemist distills leaf to white powder to snort, the whole world likes white powder, a guy who can sell and distribute white powder gets rich, the guy buys hippos, hippos fuck a ton, hippos now have human rights.