Are Pablo Escobar's horny cocaine hippos legally people?
When Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed by police in 1993, the cops left his hippos behind. Escobar had a whole collection of exotic pets, all of whom were shipped off to other zoos. But the hippos remained. And they fucked. A lot. As Cory Doctorow wrote here in 2016:
In 2003, Colombians began to report encounters with the wild hippos that escaped from Pablo Escobar's private zoo after he was killed by police and his estate was left to rot.
More than a decade later, the four hippos that Escobar bought from a private zoo in California have multiplied to 35 animals, an invasive species that spreads disease, predates on local fauna (including manatees) and livestock, and have been sighted as far as 150km away from Escobar's former home. The animals can live up to 60 years and there are no natural predators for them in Colombia. Further complicating the effort to control their reproduction is that it's incredibly hard to castrate a hippo: first, because it annoys the hippo; and second, because hippo testicles retract into their bodies, making it nearly impossible to sex a hippo without a rather intimate inspection.
The current strategy is containment-based: local vets and officials are trying to build a fenced-in habitat for the hippos that has everything they need to tempt them to stay, and a combination of natural and constructed barriers to keep them from wandering.
In 2009, Colombian authorities came up with a plan to kill all the horny cocaine hippos. But, as Gizmodo reports:
Last July, Colombian attorney Luis Domingo Gómez Maldonado filed a lawsuit on the hippos' behalf to save them from being euthanized. Instead, the case recommends sterilization. Colombian officials announced a plan to use a chemical contraceptive developed by the U.S. Agriculture Department to sterilize "the main group" of the hippos, and the region's environmental agency Cornare began to implement the plan on Friday, darting 24 hippos. The suit, though, argues for the use of a different contraceptive drug, which it says is safer. And it also notes that the proposal to deal with the hippos could still leave the door open for some of them to be killed.
Months later, the U.S. animal advocacy organization Animal Legal Defense Fund filed a legal application to depose two Ohio-based wildlife experts who study nonsurgical sterilization to provide testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs—who, to be clear, are the hippos.
The Animal Legal Defense Fund has continued fighting for the rights of Pablo Escobar's horny cocaine hippos — finally won a case in the Southern District of Ohio, where a US judge legally recognized the hippos as persons:
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.
In other words, the ALDF lawyers applied for the hippos' rights to give their own testimony. And a US judge said "OK." As Christopher Berry, the ALDF attorney overseeing the US case, told Gizmodo:
The Colombian legal system can't compel someone in the U.S. to provide testimony or to produce documents, but we have this federal law that allows interested persons in Colombia to go to the U.S. and obtain that ability to obtain documents and testimony. Now the [U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio] has granted that application, recognizing that the hippos are interested persons.
Whatever ultimately happens to Pablo Escobar's horny cocaine hippos, this officially establishes a legal precedent for animals as people. And they will certainly be remembered for that, if nothing else.
Pablo Escobar's Cocaine Hippos Are Legally People, Court Rules [Dharna Noor / Gizmodo]
Animals Recognized as Legal Persons for the First Time in U.S. Court [Animal Legal Defense Fund]
Image: Public Domain via PxHere
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Thom Dunn, Khareem Sudlow
