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Mongabay
Mongabay
The way John Aristides Saldarriaga tells it, he was out for a routine day’s fishing with friends on a lake about a mile from the fabled ranch of the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. It was Halloween, Oct. 31, 2021, and the lake near Doradal in the department of Antioquia was a known haunt of the feral hippos (Hippopotamus amphibius) that had spawned from the four hippos that Escobar had shipped over from Africa “You don’t disturb me, I won’t disturb you,” was Saldarriaga’s philosophy to fishing in the midst of the hippos, as he tells it to me. A hippo calf swimming in a pond with the da…