via Mostly Occasionally / iStockphoto
Wildlife biologist and TV host Forrest Galante has spent his career chasing lost species, dodging sharks, and going toe-to-toe with nature’s most dangerous animals. But nothing has come closer to ending him than a pissed-off hippo.
On a recent episode of The Mostly Occasionally Show, we got into how Forrest is working with the Colombian government on a plan to manage a bizarre ecological crisis: a booming population of invasive hippos descended from a small group illegally imported by Pablo Escobar in the 1980s. They’ve turned into major menaces, causing car accidents and toxic algae blooms in the Magdalena River. And as Forrest told me (in the full interview I wrote about here) he’s had two terrifyingly close calls with them, despite the fact that most people still associate hippos with children’s games and splash pools.
“I’ve nearly been killed by hippos. Twice,” Forrest says. “They’re very, very dangerous animals.”
You can watch Forrest tell about his harrowing hippo encounters in the YouTube video below, or listen to it on Apple or Spotify.
The first time happened when Forrest was working as a safari guide in Africa. A group of tourists drifted too close to a pod of hippos, and Forrest—knowing how fast things could go bad—threw himself between them.
“I put my canoe in between some tourists and the hippos to stop them before they ended up killing themselves,” he said. “The hippo came and smacked my canoe, flipped me out of it. I was flying through the air. Luckily I scrambled up the bank. But it was close.”
The second encounter was worse.
Forrest and his girlfriend (now wife) were walking through Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe when they unknowingly stumbled into the territory of a massive male hippo. It was hiding in a pan, a seasonal wet pool common in southern Africa, and couldn’t submerge.
“When a hippo can’t submerge, it panics. And they don’t have a flight response, they just fight.”
The hippo exploded out of the water and charged.
“It came straight down the game trail. I shoved my girlfriend behind a termite mound and ran around a tree. The hippo got so close I could feel its hot breath. It missed me by two feet, snapped at the air, and just kept going.”
Forrest says that if it had made contact, that would’ve been it.
“They’ve got something like 2,000 psi of jaw pressure. Huge tusks. They don’t just bite you—they stomp and kick you around. We met a guy who survived a hippo attack. He had 48 surgeries.”
Even in Colombia, during his most recent trip documenting Pablo Escobar’s runaway hippo crisis, Forrest had a close call. While tracking hippos on an island in the middle of the Magdalena River, one came up and charged.
“We were about 50 feet away. It was scary, but it wasn’t coming for us—it just wanted to get back to the water. When they charge, they’re looking for an escape. But you do not want to be in the way.”
So yeah. Hungry Hungry Hippos this ain’t.
“People think they’re cute,” Forrest said. “But they’re killers.”
For more on the cocaine hippo crisis in Colombia, listen to my full conversation with Forrest on The Mostly Occasionally Show—available now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
Content shared from brobible.com.