As part of ongoing efforts to tackle a population of invasive hippos first introduced into the country by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, a Colombian court has issued an order specifying that the animals can and should be hunted.

As reported by ABC News, the Administrative Court of Cundinamarca told Colombia’s Ministry of Environment that it has three months to put into place “a regulation that contemplates measures for the eradication of the species”, expressing that those measures should include "controlled hunting and sterilization”.

How did we get here?

Hippos aren’t native to Colombia; they wound up there in the 1980s when infamous Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar decided to splash some of his cocaine cash on creating a zoo on his estate, which included a variety of exotic animals, including four hippos.

When Escobar was killed in 1993, most of the estate’s animals were sent off to zoos or died – but the hippos managed to evade capture. At the time, it wasn’t thought that this would be much of a problem; authorities assumed they would most likely die given that this wasn’t their natural habitat.

Instead, they thrived – and now there are an estimated 170 of them. If left to their own devices, one study has predicted that the population could end up as big as 1,418 by 2039.

This, the courts have said, poses a threat to the “ecological balance” of the area.

Previous research has determined that one of the main problems is the hippos’ poop, which acts as a potent fertilizer in nearby lakes and rivers. The consequence is that the bacteria and algae within experience a population boom, which can result in both harmful algal blooms and a lack of oxygen and nutrients for other organisms that rely on the waters.

Others have suggested that they could harbor diseases and parasites that could affect other wildlife, including humans – although the main concern for the latter is more that hippos are notoriously aggressive.

As a result, there have been several attempts by Colombian authorities to deal with the invasive animals. This isn’t the first time they’ve tried to hunt them down; in 2009, officials in Antioquia put out a kill order for three hippos that had allegedly become a safety hazard, managing to euthanize one of them. 

But while it may have been a success for the authorities, it wasn’t without controversy, and led to a chain of events that saw two lawsuits filed on behalf of the hippos to argue for sterilization instead of hunting, one of which ended up with the US legally recognizing the hippos as people in the process. 

Whether that might affect this latest plan getting off the ground – well, we’ll just have to wait and see.