I never knew that about Camels in Australia! And here I am all happy because we have a stray maine coon cat I'm feeding on the sly.

Camels and Hippos and Emus suddenly make Chewy (I call him that he looks like Chewbacca) real boring.

And apparently there are also feral llama and alpacas wandering around, too.

For a while there were some feral peacocks here at the farm. They scared the hell out of the horses - their warning calls vary between sounding like a semi-truck horn to sound like a woman being tortured and raped. Some moron who bought a four acre "estate" to our east wanted peacocks to decorate his lawn and just let them free.

Animal control wouldn't deal with them and tried to convince us to call the wildlife rescue volunteer group to catch them. Released domestic fowl were not in their charter, plus I was pissed that the county had decided to not give the group any grants, but still wanted to slough off their work on them.

So one of our boarder's husband volunteered to hunt the birds. He never made it close enough for a safe shot but he harassed them enough that the peacocks moved away and they never came back.

They are not cute and cuddly.

"They run a lot faster than you'd think"

There are lots of fellow Hippos there that seem quite happy

According to the veterinarian in the article, despite being enormous, they are extremely susceptible to sedatives and it could kill them. Two, they are ENORMOUS (to the tune of 6,000lbs for males) and a pissed off Hippo away from the water while being transported could be very dangerous, not to mention extremely expensive to move all the way back to Africa. Third, they can't move them back to Africa because they have no idea what diseases they might introduce to the African population of hippos (which are a threatened species) now that they have been in South America for so long.

That's just the technical problems. The political problem is that they killed one aggressive male hippo and there was such public outcry that they called off the hunt for his female and calf. They don't want to have a world image of being "hippo killers" because apparently a lot of people think they are cute.

Obviously, down the road this is going to become a huge problem because the area where they are is ideal for them and they are breeding like crazy (for hippos). All it is going to take a few more harems of them to disperse throughout the Colombian and Venezuelan jungles, and it will be damn near impossible to get rid of them!

Letting them be in that environment is a non starter. They are very dangerous and aggressive animals. From what you write, moving them to Africa endangers the hippos there, so thats not a possibility. I hate to say it but the 60 or so hippos that the asshole Escobar brought to Colombia for his selfish enjoyment will probably need to be euthanized as gently as possible.

Just doing nothing is a terrible idea, but the problem is that no one wants to tackle it politically. Financially, even just penning them in one area would be a massively expensive undertaking.

None of the options are good, and I can't see this ending well. The longer they put off doing something, because of political pressure, world image concerns and lack of funding to address it without killing the hippos the worse it is going to get. The "leave them alone" approach hasn't worked out very well so far! They aren't even sure how many of them there are at this point - it might be more than 60 for all anyone knows.

Bad situation all the way around for the hippos, the environment and the people that live there .

Letting them take over can possibly jeopardize the environment, the easiest solution would be to allow hippo hunts.

I'll make an exception.

Africans are able to coexist with them and this provides another population pool for when they go extinct elsewhere.

population has evolved to coexist with them (and the rest of the native flora and fauna) for millenia.

Hippo's for example, are extremely aggressive toward crocodiles because African crocodiles hunt their young. An adult Hippo can easily kill a crocodile, and they do so routinely.

Columbia's rivers are home to the critically endangered Orinoco Crocodile, the rarest crocodile species in the world. By some estimates, there may be as few as 250 left in existence. Allowing an invasive predator to move into their territory could easily push them over the edge and drive them extinct.

Invasive species are disruptive to ecosystems. In areas like Columbia, where vast stretches of the ecosystem are already under pressure, introducing a major invasive species like a hippo can have dire environmental consequences.

They're not invasive, they're just foreign.