Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Hippopotamus Attack - Angry Angry Hippos

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe: a story about one man's death-defying showdown with an angry hippopotamus. Jeff and Mike are chastised by Wes for even thinking of the best way for surviving a hippo attack.�� ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If you want to get more value from your points without becoming a points nerd, visit point. dot me and see what your points are really worth. Get 25% off an annual membership with code points 25. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of tooth and claw, a show where we talk about the most intense real wild animal attacks and what we can learn about how to avoid, prevent, and survive them. Today, Wes walks us through a vicious hippo attack on a man that he describes on multiple occasions as looking like a James Bond villain. His name is Paul Templar. Uh, we couldn't get a hold of the hippo to find out its name. But all the same, It's a story worth listening to, especially if you're looking for some life hacks on how to make it through a wild encounter with a hippopotamus.

Real quick, before we get started, we wanted to take a small moment to thank all of you who have left us some really nice reviews on Apple's podcast platform. I, for one, was not expecting to hear from so many of you guys, and it really motivates us to keep it going and just makes us feel good about what we're doing. So thanks. And please, if you have anyone that you think would enjoy our show, share some of our stuff with them. That would really be a big help to us. Oh, and fair warning. This episode starts with a direct and quite frankly slanderous attack on my character from Jeff that has really nothing at all to do with hippos.

So if you want to skip all that, just move forward to around the three minute mark. All right, let's get to this episode's story. All right, welcome back. Jeff, Wes, and Mike here. Hey. How you guys doing? Good. So, fill you in with what's been going on here.

Me and Mike are in like a really tiny roommate fight, I think. I'm not even sure if he realizes it. Okay. But like on Saturday, he comes home with a milkshake from Arctic Circle. Uh-huh. So I'm just like, hey, what type of milkshake did you get? He's just quiet for like 10 straight seconds.

And then he just goes, ice cream. It's such an exaggeration. And then I'm just like, okay, whatever. And then he starts talking to me about flavors of me. milkshakes he likes like gummy bear and stuff you're a gummy bear i mean not flavored like a gummy bear sometimes i like a gummy bear in my ice cream all right like a whatever how so then like i can't even just get over that he won't tell me what type of shake it is because we're talking about milkshake flavors why do you need to know why won't you just tell me what flavor it is this is unbelievable and then on sunday

he goes to his parents house comes home with a delicious looking thing of lasagna to be baked in the oven. So yesterday, I'm like sitting in the living room. He starts getting the lasagna ready, and I want some lasagna. But I'm not going to just straight up asking for it. I don't know why, but I'm not. I'm like, oh, you're going to make some lasagna. I think there's some carryover from the whole milkshake thing where I'm talking about

his food. It was a week ago. No one in their right mind would remember. Okay, whatever, keep going. And then I start making a lot of garfing. field jokes because there's a Monday and he's eating lasagna. Uh-huh. But then I go in the kitchen once the lasagna's out and I'm just kind of like over his shoulder

looking at it. Uh-huh. He gives himself one square. I turn around for like a second and when I like look back, he's already got the rest of it covered up with tin foil and putting it in the fridge. If you would have just simply asked, no jury would convict. This is outrageous. I just can't believe that all of a sudden the onus is on me to offer the,

lasagna that you know I gladly would have shared I've never had a okay whatever this doesn't need to keep going but what flavor is your milkshake it was Reese's oh okay why would you tell him because I know I walk in with something in my hands and all the sudden it's like a mere cat popping out of its hole and it's like ooh what's Mike got this time speaking of milkshakes uh we're talking about hippos today you want to know what flavor my lasagna was uh yeah lasagna what would it be tomatoes tomato tomato awesome Like this is lasagna taste like. Meat flavored. Yeah.

Anyway, that's quite the intro. We are going to talk about hippos. Hippos are probably one of the animals that we've had requested the most from our listeners to do a story about. They were always on our list of an animal that we wanted to talk about. So we are going to talk about them. And I'm excited because I didn't know too much about hippos. And I had to do a lot of research. And I've learned a lot about hippos.

So we're going to be talking about an attack that actually happened in 1919. 96 to this guy named Paul Templer in Zimbabwe. And one thing, so the actual name in the animal is hippopotamus. I think everyone knows that, but we just call them hippos. Do you know what I tried? I tried to think of animal names that are funnier than hippo. Yes, it's a good name. Hippopotamus is very satisfying to say.

I'll give you a quick run out of what I came up. Hippotomous. Hippotomous. Good. Gotcha. I think, so I came up with dingo. Dingo's fun. of funny. Yeah. Doong.

Doong. Yeah. Duckbell platypus. Mm-hmm. And then I found one in my research called a spiny lump sucker. Is that a bird? I don't know. I didn't really want to know.

Bird names are always great because there's like blue-footed booby. Oh, that's a good one. You know, there's like a lot of pretty funny of bird names. Dung beetle. Dung beetle's funny. Yeah. That's kind of funny. Yeah.

That's bathroom humor, Jeff. Gross. Anyway, yeah, I do think they're an animal, though, where their nickname has become really normalized. Like, Gator is the only one I could think of that is another one that's shortened that we really use their nickname a lot. Anyway, we're talking about hippopotamus. I'm mostly going to be saying hippo just because it's easier to say. Not as fun to say, but easier. Okay, so I think we're ready.

Are you guys ready for the story? Yeah, I'm excited. Yeah. So as I mentioned, this attack happened in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is a country in Africa. it's just north of South Africa. Paul Templar is a native Zimbabwean. He actually think he maybe was born in the U.S.,

but he moved to Zimbabwe pretty early, lived a long time in there. He is kind of like this big, tall, like bald white dude just for your kind of visual image. And he was a river guide who owned his own business on the Zambizi River near Victoria Falls. You guys are probably familiar with Victoria Falls. It's that really amazing system of waterfalls in southern Africa, and it forms the border between a few countries there. And now I'm wondering if I'm right that Zimbabwe's just directly north of South Africa. But I can't remember.

I mean, most everything in Africa is north of South Africa, so you're right. But it forms a border with South Africa. So I do think it's directly north. Anyway, Paul Templar is a river guide. He owns his own business. At 27, he considers himself to be a river expert. He spent a lot of time on the Zambezi River, guiding this particular. stretch of a river and he takes people out on canoes and they look for wildlife and they enjoy this really

beautiful country and this really beautiful part of zimbabwe so on this particular day it's march uh 6th 1996 paul is out and he's on high alert and it's because six months previous a big bull hippo had charged him bluff charged his boat and attacked an empty upturned canoe and the hippo had been like biting the water and showing some really aggressive behavior Now, Paul's really familiar with hippos, but the behavior of this particular bull hippo seemed abnormally aggressive to him. It was definitely the most aggressive hippo he'd seen. And in addition, he had heard that there had been six other reports of this aggressive hippo in the area. Why would it be aggressive, is they?

They're like a lot of animals where they have a harem, so like the bull has multiple females that he breeds with. Nice. Yeah. And when you have that same, system in nature, usually those bulls are really territorial and aggressive. So think about like sea lions, which we've swam with. Sometimes when you go out there and you get too close, those bulls come in and they start charging you and really letting you know that you're too close to their females. And that's a lot of times what happens with these bull hippos.

And there are the bulls a lot bigger than they are. Yeah, we'll get into how big they are. And real quick, there's four countries above South Africa and Zimbabwe is one of them. Okay. It's right next to like Botswana, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's right. Yeah, it's right next. Anything else you want to know now? And Mozambique. Mozambique.

Oh, no. We just need to have a show where we have Jeff pronounced places around the world. Okay, yeah, so these big bull hippos can be really aggressive. Females with calves can be really aggressive. Hippos are a really aggressive animal. So Paul is really aware of the fearsome reputation. that hippos have in Africa, he's not taking the threat lightly. So a little bit about hippos, just so you guys can understand this threat. They are primarily vegetarian. They hardly ever eat meat,

but they are reportedly responsible for more human deaths in Africa than any other large mammal, and that's due to their territorial nature. Now, I want to talk a little bit about that statistic later, but for this point, we're just going to accept that. They can weigh up to 6,000 pounds, although some of the articles I read said up to 9,000. They're the third largest type of land mammal. That's so heavy. Yeah, it's big. The only thing that's bigger is elephants, rhinoceros. We were making your mama jokes earlier and we both just thought in one right when you said the only thing is bigger that's bigger. But keep going. Yeah, that is. We don't usually, that's not typically our brand of humor. The only thing that's bigger.

is an elephant, a rhinoceros, and you're a mama. Right. Okay. No, but really, they're the third largest type of land mammal. Elephants and rhinoceruses are bigger. They're the next, and they're pretty on par with rhinoceruses. I read only white rhinoceruses are bigger. Yeah, white rhinocerces are bigger.

Black rhinoceroses are around the same size, from what I remember. We could have that backwards, but I don't think so. They also have really huge canines and incisors that grow out. When you look at a skull of a hippo, they look like an alien because they have like kind of a normal molar set and then just these teeth that just kind of go all over the place. Yeah, and they're often called tusks, but they're really just canines and incisors. And they can grow up to a foot long. So that's really long. A lot of times you see cartoons of hippos with these kind of blunted small teeth and really their teeth get really super long.

Yeah, I always thought they were tusks. They always reminded me of walrus. A tusk is often a tooth. Okay. It's just like a tooth that they don't use for eating necessarily. And with hippos, they don't. They don't use those incisors and canines for eating. They're for fights with other hippos, for defending against other predators, for aggression, essentially.

Hippo, they always reminded me of a walrus that shaved its mustache. Interesting. I mean, you'll see, if you look at the next time you see what you're saying. You'll see what I'm talking about. They have a 2,000 PSI bite force that's up there. I mean, that's one of the strongest in the animal kingdom. And they can extend their mouths to almost 180 degrees. So, I mean, they can open them.

So it's like they have like weird jaw flexors and stuff to where they can pretty much open them all the way. I'm sure you guys have seen videos where they toss watermelons to hippos and they just completely obliterate them in one bite. So a crazy thing about hippo attacks. Again, we're going to get into that number of they kill up to 500 people a year. But the thing that actually has been tested is that they kill humans in roughly 87% of their attacks. So these guys, when they attack a human, it often leads to a fatality. It's not an attack where you're probably going to walk away. And the other 13% probably get pretty messed up.

Yeah. And so I don't know if you guys understand what a confidence interval is, but it's when you analyze data, there's a confidence interval that says, you know, it could be this much and it could be this much. that's at the upper end of that confidence interval. So it could be less than that. It could be like 50% or something. It was a really big confidence interval for that, but it's up to 87%. And in, you know, in comparison,

grizzly bears is like 5%. Shark attacks is like 23%. And even crocodiles, which I thought were like really high, is around 25%. So hippos are probably the most fatal of any animal when you're talking about attacks on humans. Wow. So I got a lot of the information.

When I do this research, I try really hard to find scientifically supported information because I think there's a lot of false information about most of the animals we talk about. And I hate as a bear biologist when I get online and I read an article that people are quoting that has myths and stuff about bears. So I try and find stuff that is as free of myths as possible. So I found this medical publication where they're talking about how they treat hippobites. And it was one of the only publications I could find that talked in depth about hippo attacks. But it's something interesting from that publication is that they recommended that hippo attacks be treated as major trauma rather than mammalian bite.

So they're like when they get a hippo attack victim, it's like, okay, we need to, this is like triage. We need to have, you know, major trauma ready. Okay. Also, you can find videos online of bull hippos taking on pretty much every animal in Africa. including elephants, rhinoceruses, lions. I saw this video where a hippo is out of the water, and a lion kind of is investigating it, and then the lion's just kind of casually walking away.

The hippo charges it, just grabs it by the head and just tosses it through the air. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, they're like one of the top dogs. I think really the only thing that gives them a run for their money is elephants. Not loving your AT&T or T Mobile Bill? Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news.

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Paul was doing what he'd done hundreds of times, and he's leading a group of six tourists down the river. The group consisted of three canoes and a kayak. So Paul was paddling this lead canoe with two tourists in the canoe with him, and each of the other canoes had a paddler. There was an experienced guide plus two tourists, and then the kayak had like a guide that was kind of moving in between, making sure everything was okay. So they're paddling around this extremely scenic part of the river. they're about half mile up the river from Victoria Falls, and they round a corner where Paul spots a hippo with a calf, so a female hippo with a calf.

And he understands hippo behavior, and he knows that mother hippo's protecting calves can be really unpredictable and pretty aggressive. So he decides to break off and take this other small arm of the river and try and avoid this female with the calf. Now, he also knew that this male that had charged him earlier had been seen in that part of the river, but typically it hung out further downstream.

so he wasn't really thinking about it. And right as he was kind of just registering that that hippo was there and that the male could be around, the canoe pulling up the rear got completely lifted up in the air. He turns around to see the guide in that canoe go flying through the air. Oh, wow. And Paul immediately turns around. He knows what's happening.

He paddles to pull that guide out of the water. And as soon as he reaches out to grab him, he says their fingertips were almost touching, he's just engulfed in darkness. No, what? So the hippo had surged. out of the water and swallowed him. Oh, my.

The lights go out. Like in one gulp? Yeah. What he says is like he didn't know what happened. Like he knew a hippo had just like blasted this boat out of the water. But all of a sudden, you know, he's in his boat reaching out for this guy. And then he's just in darkness. Yeah.

He feels around and his torso is completely dry and his legs are wet. So the hippo has him like by the middle. His upper half is completely in its mouth and his legs are. sticking out. Wow. Yeah. And he smells this terrible rotten egg smell and he managed to get an arm free and he pulls out his arm and starts reaching around and he feels all these bristly like kind of wiry bristles that the hippo has on its mouth like whiskers. Yeah. And he's like, oh, I'm in a hippo. Yeah. He starts fighting and wriggling around and the hippo kind of adjusts its bite for a second and he gets a gap and he managed to get free and he swims to the surface. And on the surface,

he grabs this other guide whose name, in some of the articles they called him Evan and some of them they called him Evans. I'm going to call him Evan. But he grabs Evan, who was like struggling to even keep a float and they start backstroking for sure. Now he understands that a second attack is really rare. So he thinks like pretty much the worst of it is over, but the hippo proves him wrong really quickly. So it grabs them again and it bites into him with those huge incisors and canines and pulls them down separating from Evan. Paul finds himself on the bottom of the river, this time with this lower half in the mouth of the hippo,

and he's staring up at the surface and just wondering who can hold their breath the longest. And as he's sitting there, and the hippo can't. As he's sitting there, he remembers seeing clouds of his own blood drifting up to the surface. So he knows he's in trouble. So he starts... It's especially hard to hold your breath

when a hippo's biting your waist. Right. Like if you try and... just hold your breath and your calm and like thinking about holding your breath you can go a while i bet we could go a couple minutes but like if you've ever like held my head underwater or something after five seconds you feel like you're about to die you know and that's i'm yeah i'm sure he was like i mean i'm amazed he yeah anyway he starts fighting as hard as he can because he doesn't want to drown he doesn't want this hippo to kill him and the hippo releases him again and he swims to the surface

So he reaches the surface and he's like, okay, two attacks. It's not going to happen a third time. Start swimming to his friends, turns around and sees the hippo just full on charging at him, mouth wide open. Why would it even let go of him like in the first place? Well, it's not trying to eat him and it like he fought back pretty hard. And I'm guessing it just was like opening its mouth to just and he got out. Okay. So you could say that this was not a case of a hungry, hungry hippo.

Yeah, I'd say it was an angry, angry hippo. Not a hungry, hungry hippo. So hippo's charging at him. Its mouth is wide open, which is a really aggressive sign for them. If they're ever yawning or have their mouths open, it usually means they're aggressive. And it bites them a third time. This time his legs are sticking out one side, and his arms and shoulder and head are the other side. So it has him, like, bitten in the middle, and he's sticking out the side of it.

He's got him every way you could get him. And this time, the hippo just goes absolutely nuts. It goes berserk. It's like eating a hot dog from the middle first. Yeah, exactly. A big old Paul hot dog. So everyone on shore said that at this point it looked like a dog with a rag doll and the hippo's just shaking them back and forth,

tossing him up in the air and grabbing him again. Wow. And like slamming him into the water and pulling him underwater. So what he ends up doing is grabbing these teeth that are in sight, like going through him and holding on to him as hard as he can because that way his flesh isn't tearing as much as it shakes him around, because he can literally feel his flesh like separating and tearing as these huge teeth are ripping through him.

That's amazing. Yeah. Finally, you know, the hippo gets frustrated and just releases him. Because, you know, typically when a hippo does that to any animal, by now it's dead. And he's managed to survive and he's holding on to these teeth. And it just releases him and disappears. So Paul, this guy who was in the kayak, I think his name was... So technically he wins.

the fight because the hippo gave up. He left the ring. Yeah. So the guy that was in the kayak is really brave because he paddles over to Paul at this point and helps him to shore. Paul is a long way from help. He's in really bad shape. His left arm is completely just smashed into a bloody pulp like in a million pieces.

Blood's pouring from gaping holes in his chest. One of his friends turns him over and looks through one of those holes and they can see his lung, which had been injured. and it's like struggling to inflate. They can actually like see his lung. And he's in unbelievable pain. Like he says he remembers thinking he didn't know that a human body could support that much pain without dying. And he actually like wanted to kill himself, which is something that I kind of appreciated in his story.

Because a lot of times when you read these stories, like you can kind of tell the person's putting on like a brave face, you know, which I think is great. Like I can't imagine what it would be like to be attacked by an animal. And I'm not doubting that a lot of these people, really just truly wanted to survive no matter what. But he was like, I wanted to die. It's like when I woke up and stub my toe on my new massage chair, it's just that type of pain. Yeah.

Yeah, so, yeah, I would say this is a little bit higher than that. Now, luckily, he usually had a gun that he had on his side and he had lost this gun during the attack. He never really had a chance to use it. But had he had this gun on him, he said he 100% would have killed himself. Just because he couldn't handle it. he couldn't handle the pain. Most of the time when people are in that much pain, I feel like they pass out. Yeah, and he's fully coherent. Yeah, that'd be awful. Now, he really lucked out because there's a medical

team nearby that was on some emergency drill on the river. And so they showed up and did like some quick triage and like dressed his wounds. And then they helped get him to a hospital, which was called the Victoria Falls Hospital. But I think it took him like eight hours to get to the hospital. And this whole time, he's in a ton of pain. So, doctors found over 40 puncture wounds and bite marks on his body. They had to amputate his left arm. And the hippo had narrowly missed his heart, kidney, and could have done much more damage to his lungs.

He also mentioned that the tusks like skimmed his vertebrain, his spine and stuff. They had actually severed an artery and then immediately closed that artery too. Like it severed it and then closed it. Oh, wow. And he really lucked out there because had that artery been severed and opened, he would have bled out in the water. Dead as a doornail. Yeah, so he was really lucky to survive.

Now, who wasn't as lucky was Evan, the guide who had been thrown in the water. They never found him. Or no, sorry, they found him two days later, his body. So he had probably drowned. I think they actually blamed the hippo like that counted as like a hippo fatality. But chances are he'd just drowned. Hippo was never located. So Paul thinks he ran into the same hippo like years later.

And I guess it like busted out of the water and he screamed and everyone didn't know. know what was going on. Like Captain Hook and the crocodile. Yeah, like some serious PTSD. Yeah. He's still doing the tours? So I don't think he is anymore, but he did for a little bit. After the attack? Yeah. So now he's like a motivational speaker. There's a ton of photos of him online like paddling with one arm. Yeah. And he wrote a book called What's Left of Me, which is pretty much everything but an arm, I guess. That's a good title. I'm interesting. Yeah. And you know, not bad for a guy. that looks and sounds exactly like a Bond villain. Like, you guys have to look him up.

Yeah. Watch an interview with him and tell me I'm wrong because he's like this big, bald white dude with his Zimbabwean accent, which everyone with his Zimbabwean accent sounds like a bond villain, or at least every, like, big white guy like him. Anyway, so that's the story. Turns out I have a thing for stories of people being swallowed halfway by animals. Yeah.

Because that's our second one. He did. This one counts as like three, too, because he is halfway swallowed three. separate times. Yeah, I mean, it really like worked the whole body on him. And honestly, I think it counts as being fully swallowed. Because he got his front, then

he got his legs, and then got his side. So he was fully swallowed just not all at once. I mean, if he tried to join the swallowed club, they'd probably... They wouldn't have... They'd talk behind his back, but they'd let him in the club. And I was wondering about that actually, as I was driving

over here, like, is there an animal, is there an attack where someone was fully swallowed. Yeah, dude, Joe. You ever read the Bible? No, not Joe. What's his name? Jonah.

Jonah. Yeah, I honestly don't know. Like, probably, I saw this video recently of a humpback whale, like, swallowing some kayakers, immediately spit them back out, but I'm pretty sure they were, like, fully swallowed. But yeah, I don't, I don't, like. It'd have to be a whale, pretty much. Yeah, I was trying to think of any animal besides hippos that have the capability of, like, even swallowing half a person.

And really it's just like great whites, hippos, Killer whales. Like huge anacondos. Yeah, but that takes like, it takes like hours. But I guess that's true. Like they get fully swallowed. Yeah. Or little babies.

They probably get swallowed by animals a lot. Yeah. Like baby humans. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. I guess. It's really dark. Yeah, all the time.

Anyway, you know what? As far as hippo attacks go, he's super lucky to have only lost an arm and to still be functioning. He mentioned that like he got really close to ruining his private parts. Oh no. Yeah, he's good. Yeah, he's good. But it like grazed that area and almost really messed him up down there too.

I feel like such a like child saying private parts. What's the word for that? I don't know, his dick. Anyways. His Willie. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, most of these attacks that you read about hippos, either a person is completely devastated to the point where they die or they drown.

And that, you know, going back to that stat that we talked about where it said up to 500 people die every year by hippos, I couldn't find any data for that. I think it's a pretty big guess. And I do think they count a lot of these attacks where like, I read about one where a hippo overturned a boat and 13 people died. And I imagine most of those people drowned. but they accredited those attacks to the hippo. So I think a lot of the hippo attacks that we read about are people drowning from a hippo attack, having their boat flipped over or whatever. Some people think they flip boats because they appear to be a crocodile, which hippos hate.

There's a lot of theories out there about hippo attacks. They are a really aggressive animal. They tend to only attack people in the water. When they're on land, they're generally feeding and they're much less likely to attack someone in the water is when you know you usually see these kind of attacks. But yeah, as far as that number goes, I'm not going to say that's an official number. They're known as being the like most dangerous animal in Africa.

That's definitely not true. Crocodiles kill a lot more people than hippos, a lot more than hippos. A lot more than crocodiles. Skeeters? Skeeters kill the most out of all of them. That's mosquitoes for us who don't speak redneck. Anyway, so they're definitely not the most dangerous.

animal in Africa. For large mammals in Africa, they're one that you have to be really careful about. I would be surprised if they kill more people than Cape Buffalo and elephants, though. Cape Buffalo are the meanest animal in Africa. Yeah. How do you quantify meanness? Just like, they're just always smoking, hanging out in the back out. No, that just sounds like the coolest animal in Africa.

No, they're just like constantly charging people. They're very, very aggressive and territorial. So one thing that's really interesting about hippos is their history. Like, first of all, a really interesting thing is that their closest living relative are whales. So you'd think that they're, like, related to elephants or pigs or whatever. And pigs are somewhat close, but whales are their closest living relatives. So essentially what happened with whales is they shared a common ancestor with hippos that lived on land. And then it evolved into an animal that moved back into the water, which is pretty rare.

evolutionarily speaking that something goes back to the ocean. Yeah, that's really cool. Turned into a whale. And then, you know, it also branched off and turned into hippos. So that's really interesting. And then another really interesting thing is some of their modern history. So one thing that I had no idea about that I read about was that in 1910, there was this legislator who introduced the American hippo bill.

And what his idea was was that we introduce a large number of hippos to the bayous of Louisiana. And he wanted to do that because there was this invasive plant that was taking over down there. And the idea was that hippos would eat that plant and they would provide meat for Americans during this meat crisis that was going on at the time. And it just seems like such a wild idea to introduce an animal that big into an ecosystem. But the crazy thing is President Teddy Roosevelt supported it. The Department of Agriculture supported it. And it just barely didn't pass like Congress. Probably because there was someone in there that was like, wait.

These are like 6,000-pound animals. Yeah. And they're mean as hell. Yeah. So another, you know, speaking of introductions, another thing that's really interesting to me and like something I could just, we could probably do a whole other episode on, like outside of attacks, is that when Pablo Escobar, when his complex got raided and they kicked him out of it, he had four pet hippos that were living there.

And the people that... They had like a full zoo. Right. But these hippos were so hard to like get out of the water or remove whatever. They just left them. So they left these four hippos and then they escaped into the wild and they're breeding and reproducing. And to this day, there's hippos in Columbia and there's up to a hundred of them now. And they're like...

That's crazy. They're really changing the ecosystem of those waterways because their waste is so like nitrogen-rich and it changes everything. But I read this really kind of interesting paper that talks about how they could potentially be filling this niche in that ecosystem that, like, really big mammals that went extinct tens of thousands of years ago used to fill. And so, like, there's this small argument for just keeping them there. But people are scared of them. They're doing, like, really well, right? Yeah, I mean, there, it's been like. The environment in Columbia.

Yeah, it's been like 30 years, and there's a hundred of them, and they started at four. And for a big animal like that, that's pretty fast reproduction. I'll post a video on the Instagram. There's like a crazy video of a hippo just walking down a street in like a town in Colombia. And it's just insane. Like it's so big and people are just standing right next to it. So a little bit more about their biology really quickly. There's only two living species of hippo.

There's like the typical African hippo that we've all seen. And then there's pygmy hippos. I don't know too much about pygmy hippos, but they exist. And both types can wiggle their ears all cute? I think so, yeah. I think they're both ear wigglers. They average, males average around 3,300 pounds. Females around 2,900 pounds.

But again, the males can get up to like 8 or 9,000 pounds. They're roughly 12 feet long, but they can get bigger than that too. As I mentioned, they're not nearly as aggressive on land, and that's where they do most of their feeding. They can run something said like 20 miles per hour, some said 30, so we're just going to split the difference and say 25. I read they can run faster than Hussein Bull. How fast does he run? 23 miles per hour.

Yeah, they're faster than him. Hippo would be a first round draft pick if I was starting an animal football team. Yeah. Okay. Mike, without saying a yo mama joke, can you think of anything that's like 8,000 pounds off the top of your head? Yeah, I could. And 8,000 pound meteorite. That's a pretty good answer.

One of the more interesting things I learned about hippos is that they're not good swimmers and they don't float. So when you see hippos with their back sticking out of the water and their head sticking on the water, they're in shallow water and they're standing on the bottom. Like when they are in deeper water, what they do is this kind of porpoising thing where they'll sink to the bottom and then they like push up.

and that's how they swim. And the reason they spend so much time in the water is because their skin is really sensitive to like UV radiation and the harsh African climate. So they have to stay wet. And when they are out of the water, they secrete a reddish orange oil that's like sunscreen to them. And they call it blood sweat because it's like really bright red. Okay, I've heard like a weird, maybe it's not even a rumor, but hippo cows have pink milk. Is that maybe what that's a bio?

product of maybe? I don't know. Or have you even heard that? That could be just like that. I read that. Okay. I don't know. That's a thing that I heard.

I don't know. I wonder if they sell that anywhere. Like if it's some delicacy. They could probably like sell it like this would make you more fertile or something like that. Like it's an aphrodisiac. Yeah. For sure. Pink milk.

Yeah. Definitely. You should start that. Forget this whole podcast thing. Let's not start exploiting hippos. Their skin is two inches thick. So it's really hard for anything to kill a hippo. There's like a couple.

anecdotal observations of lion prides killing hippos or killing hippo calves. Oh, wow. A crocodile can kill a hippo calf, but there's really not much that kills these guys. They don't have a lot to be afraid of. If anything, it would be a pride of lions that could take them down while they're on the land. They sleep underwater, and they actually rise to take breasts subconsciously. So they'll be sleeping, and then they're on their own. They just kind of do these little rises to take breaths.

And that's not like a decision they're making. Their bodies just do that for them. Okay, so that's kind of some basic biology on hippos. Where they live to, they live throughout sub-Saharan Africa, mostly in coastal Africa on the west side, and then throughout kind of central Africa in just lots of different waterways. So if you're near water in sub-Saharan Africa, there's a possibility that you're around hippos.

So just be aware of that. I read just following up on what you already said, that they like close their ear holes and nose holes, and it allows them to run on the bottom of the water. Yeah, like a nickname of theirs is water horse because, again, they're not like swimming underwater, they're kind of like running underwater. Trotting.

Yeah. Maybe like seahorse would be a cool name. Yeah, sometimes hippos do go out in the ocean. So we got sea horses, water horses, and horses. Horses, yeah. Mike's least favorite. Oh, that'll come up later, trust me. Okay.

All right. So that's kind of our basic hippo stuff. Look up Paul Templar. There's a lot of really great articles and interviews with him. Pretty interesting dude. This is a great story. He's like flipping him around and like swallowing different parts of him and stuff. Yeah.

I mean, and it was like very in view of everyone else that was there. I think it was pretty horrific to see a hippo shaking a person like a dog. And you have just like, if you're one of those people watching it, I would just be like, oh, he's dead. That person's 100%. Yeah, that's a good point. You know? You'd be so surprised once you, like, pick up their body and they're like, help. That really hurt.

Yeah. But then the hippo got chased off, so it's like an underdog story. Yeah, it kind of is. Yeah, he won. He still don't know if I would say he won. All right. So that's the story. I think we'll launch into our categories.

Let's do it. Let's start off with our favorite hippo from pop culture. Yeah. So the Disneyland jungle cruise. Oh, that's a good hippo. The hippo like comes up by the boat and wiggles his ears at you. And like, even in like that boat with like the animatronic hippo. It was close.

Yeah, I got nervous halfway through. It's a hardware. I wouldn't. Like I'm feeling like, this boat's kind of small for a hippo. Like I wouldn't want to get in a canoe by the hippo that big. It's crazy the size of boats they can rock or flip. Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah.

That was a clutch. Yeah. Mike? So this is, I couldn't think of a single hippo in pop culture or fiction or anything. So I went with the hip hop epitomis. Oh, yeah, from Flight of the Concord. I thought of that one. Yeah.

So I went with the dancing hippos from Fantasia. One of our listeners really put in a plug for Fiona. of the hippo, which is a really famous premature-born zoo hippo that's really cute and everyone loves her. But I'm going to go with the dancing hippos from Fantasia. Fantasia was like one of my favorite movies growing up and that scene was always a fun one. So that's what I'm picking. I just need to shout this one out.

Some Dutch programming show had Dolph the fascist hippo. And he was a foul-mouthed racist fascist hippo. Okay. And yeah, I'm going to look that up a little. That's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, don't get too into Dolph's worldviews. If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort.

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limited time. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleep number.com. Sleep number to a good life sleep. Anyway, so our next category, I think this one fits pretty well for this story. We're going to do the Anaconda Scale. John Voight's a villain in that movie, and he, like, leads people with villainous intent. Paul isn't a villain at all, even though he totally sounds and looks like one.

He's making him sound like one. He sounds and looks like one, but he's not. He's a pretty inspiring motivational speaker, but I'm going to give him a John Voight. It's pretty much literally what John Boyd does is take people on dangerous cruise trips. Right, with the intent of finding a wild animal. And yeah, I mean, this other guy ends up dying, and he, you know, Paul ends up getting viciously mauled by this hippo. So I'm going to say John Boyd. He also gets swallowed, which literally.

Yeah, that's a good qualification. A tick towards more of an ice cube than Alan Wilson, but. I think his motivations are more of an ice cube or Owen Wilson. Like he's not a bad guy, but his actual actions are very John Voidy. Okay, we're going to move on to our cage match category. Mike, for us. Oh, yeah. So the cage match, basically what we do is we take the animal of the week and we compare it in a fight situation with the other animals that we've discussed, how it stacks up, kind of where it would rank.

And they're like in an area they can't escape. In a cage fighting... Nicklaus Cage. 1B1 against Nicholas Cage. This animal, again, is one that's kind of weird because it could be terrestrial. It could be aquatic. So I think we can kind of compare it to both. And I think the only animal we've talked about that gives it a run for its money is a great white underwater.

Really? It would take all of the other, like a polar bear, tiger, all of those. Yeah, cool. I think so. What would its strategy be? Like what do they do in a situation? Do they like square up? They just bite into them and pull them underwater, just like it did with Paul.

I mean, like truly use those huge teeth to just like instantly pretty much kill them. With like the polar bear and the tiger, it's on land. Yeah, on land, they're maybe a little bit more vulnerable, but I, you know, watching that. Like, what's their strategy? Watching that video of that lion. Just a bite it. Where the lion comes up and kind of sniffs at it and then walks off, the hippo just charges after it. grabs it by the head and chucks it.

And this is like a full adult lion. I mean, it's what? Like you said six, seven thousand pounds, two inch thick. Yeah, there's nothing. Like, it takes a pride of lions to maybe bring one down. And it's like a challenge for them. A pride of lions kills any of our other animals. Maybe all of our land animals so far versus the hippo.

That'd be a good fight. Yeah, all of our land animals. Like the polar bear, a grizzly bear, a buller. Black bear. Chimpanzee. And they're all, and the tiger. And they're all fighting the hippo. I think they could all bring it down if they're coordinating.

Yeah. If the hippo's underwater and you got a big Great White, I would say the Great White. Okay. Because they don't really, from what I understand, they're, like, not great at, like, biting underwater as much as they bite up on land and bring something underwater. So I think if they're underwater, the Great White's winning. They kill crocodiles all the time. Crocodiles are bigger than alligators.

So we're going to give that to the hippo. So really, it's only a threat is a great white underwater. We have a new champ. Yeah. Yeah. Hippo is going to be hard to overthrow until we do elephants. Although Nicholas Cage and Sorcerer's Apprentice has some cool magic. Oh, sorry.

For a second there, I had no idea what you're talking about. That's understandable. Okay. So our next category is what would you guys do if you were attacked by a hippo? So what are Mike and Jeff going to do? All right. I can start us off. Go for it.

So I actually think this one's pretty easy. Okay. So all you need is like a four-foot metal bar. Okay. That's all I need. Right. It opens its mouth, yons because it's mad at me. I stick the bar in its mouth.

I like the rancor. Can't close its mouth now. I start going in its mouth. Tie its tongue in a knot. Okay, so you're going in after you drop open its mouth. I'll tie its tongue in a knot so it can't like lick the bar and get rid of the bar. Okay. And then I just crawl down in there and grab its heart and rip it out.

Okay. Grab it's hard. How thick is your bar? It's like the one Homer uses and the rocket to close the door. Okay. Mike? Yeah, I don't, that doesn't sound that easy. But mine, I know I've seen a lot of videos.

And I'm not sure if it's because hippos love watermelons or we just love filming hippos eat watermelons. But I would take a bomb and paint it like a watermelon. Oh, interesting. And throw it in its mouth. Okay. Yeah. So this has quickly turned into a, how are you guys going to kill a hippo?

Not so much. How are you going to avoid an attack? Which is pretty dark. I don't want to kill any hippos. But to answer you, Jeff, you're, like, started off with the bar. I was like, huh, interesting. Yeah. I think it would be really hard to get it wedged in there just right.

If it was a skinny enough bar, the reason I asked you that, I don't think the hippo would have any problem. just bending it, closing its mouth, and bending it in half. The rest of your answer is terrible. You know, if it were me, get the bar in there, get out of there. And the bar is terrible, too. Don't get me wrong. The bar is also a bad idea.

Mike, yours is just really terrible in general because you're trying to kill a hippo, explode it. It's a fight to survive situation. That's the way I'm like it. It sounds like you're throwing a watermelon to a hippo with its mouth open. Yeah, everyone else is thrown their water. It'll never expect it. What you actually should do, if any of you find yourselves on a river or in the bush with a hippo,

first of all, the main thing is to avoid being attacked. So make your presence known. Look for any hippos that are acting aggressively, opening their mouths, slapping the water with their faces, any kind of like big vocalizations. You just really want to pay attention to what they're doing. If you're in a boat, sometimes one guy that I read what he said to do is you should tap the side of your boat often. so that they realize that you're around. They don't mistake it for like a crocodile.

If you're on land, you want to avoid thickets or places where you don't have a good line of sight because hippos do go on land pretty often, and if you surprise one, it might turn around and attack you. If you're being attacked on land, climb a tree. It's foolproof. They can't even jump. Hippos can't jump physically. Climb a termite mound or get up a hill. Those are great ways to get away from a hippo on land.

Are they afraid of termites or something? No, they just can't get you up there. They're big. Termite mounds are huge. But then you're not that bad. You got to worry about the termites then. Yeah, you might get some, I forgot about your aunt story that you got kind of a fear of little bugs. But you just tie the termites tongues and knots.

From what I read, it's all about avoiding an attack. So you're just paying attention your surroundings, trying not to be attacked in the first place. If a hippo actually does attack you, all you can do is what Paul did, which is essentially like fight back as hard as you possibly can. but you're probably going to die. If you're attacked by a hippo, more so than any other animal, your chances of dying are very high. So really, there's not a lot you can do aside from avoiding it.

If you are in hippo country and you're doing these canoe tours or whatever and you can have a gun, I would bring a gun and know how to use it because it's a real threat. Okay, so that's kind of what you should do. Again, I'm not a hippo expert. That's what I could find online. There's not a ton of information, but that's kind of the best stuff I could find. So where can you see them?

I kind of mentioned that already. They're throughout sub-Saharan Africa. They're pretty easy to see. I went to South Africa. I went into Kruger National Park, and I probably saw 30 hippos. So they're not hard to find. You can find them. Did you see them more in the water or out?

All of them were in the water or right next to the water. Did any of them wiggle their ears? All of them pretty much wriggled their ears. That's glow. Yeah. Like 100%. Yeah, they're pretty, I mean, they do a lot of earwiggles. All right.

So how are we messing things up for them? They are poached pretty extensively. The IUCN, which is kind of a regulatory group for wildlife conservation, ranks them as vulnerable. There's roughly 150,000 in the wild, but there used to be a lot more than that. What do poachers gain from a hippo? So they do use their tusks for like a type of ivory. And then also, it's not nearly as valuable as like elephant ivory or a rochers.

or a rhinoceros horn or something like that, but they do use them. I imagine they're used in the traditional medicine market. I couldn't read too much on that. And then also for bushmeat, I guess they taste pretty good. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So they are vulnerable. They've lost a lot of habitat, but there's plenty of them out there right now.

They're not endangered, but they do need protection. Okay. Jeff, do you have some listener questions? Yeah, I do. All right. First question. Was Mike trying to look like an old-timey Dutch boy with that haircut? It was not a direct inspiration, but I do have Dutch family history, so it could have been like a genetic thing. All right.

And that's from Curly Pot Hook. Thanks, Curley. We got one from Carl Balling. Sorry, if I'm saying your name right. I mean, your name wrong. Obviously, I can't speak very well. But if you had to live in the body of an animal for a full year, what animal would it be and why? For me, I think it would be a raven because they're one of the only birds that we think flies and for fun will go up and do loops and flies around for fun.

And I would definitely want to be a bird if I could live in an animal's body because I'd want to fly. So for me it would be probably a raven. How are you, Mike? I was sorry, I wasn't list. I was still thinking about the hair que. I'm just glad someone's asking about my hair. It makes me feel good. I'm kind of thinking sea turtle.

Yeah, that's a good answer. Just kind of float around. Can they get very deep in the water? Yeah. And they live in, like, beautiful parts of the ocean sometimes. They seem pretty chill most of the time. You'd have to be scared of sharks. Yeah, you get eaten by some stuff.

So maybe I'd want to be a shark. But I agree. For me, it was between, like, an ocean animal and a bird, but I'd definitely want to be a bird. I'd want to be able to fly. Yeah. Can we pick animals from any time in history of the world? Sure. Dinosaurus?

Yeah. I'd be a dinosaur. Yeah. Okay. What kind would you be? Oh, I have to pick. Probably a crocodile. Okay.

You could be that without being a dinosaur. All right, whatever. Let's go to the next question. Okay. Miriam Boss? Oh, yeah. How do you feel after watching Tiger King? I watched Tiger King, and I feel like those people shouldn't have tigers or big cats.

I think anyone that breeds a wild animal. What do you mean by those people? I was getting to that. Anyone that breeds a wild animal just for the purpose of like a tourist attraction where people can touch it and pet it and like take a photo with it is doing a real disservice to that animal. But Carol Baskin seems all right. I fully believe that she probably murdered her husband. But as far as her preserve, it seems like she is actually like she cares about the animal. And they're not just like a photo op.

If you have a wild animal like a tiger or a big cat or whatever and you're using. it just to make money off of it and exploit it, you shouldn't have it. And I actually think the big cat act was just passed, which is going to make that illegal for people to have those petting, cub petting operations and stuff, which is great. I think he should be in jail. I think they all should be in jail. Totally. It makes me feel like greasy and criminal. All right. This one's from Sky as the High. Has a bear ever dutch ovened you while you were in its den? Uh, no, they don't really... What, really?

Their whole, like, systems pretty much shut down, like, their whole digestive system and everything. They don't even poop in their den. So they're not pooping, they're not farting, really. Yeah, that's not happened. The Bairden's surprise... They're, like, plugged up. Yeah, Bairden smells surprisingly good. Because they usually rip up, like, pine and stuff.

Until you get in there. Yeah, exactly. I'm the one smelling it up. So, no, but that's a great question and very, um, imagine it. And the Dutch oven, can you explain what that is? Yeah, for those of you who don't know what a Dutch oven is. It's when you fart underneath the covers and then pull the covers over your head so that you're just kind of swimming in it. What are your most hair-raising butt-puckering experiences with an animal in the wild?

I'm trying to think of times that my butt is puckered. It looks pretty puckered in that National Geographic picture. So that's the one I think of. Like me and Jeff had to crawl into an 80-foot den with a 350-pound bear in it, and it was a really narrow little tube that we had to go in. And that was one of the most scared I've ever been around an animal. That's like most scared I've ever been. In your life, yeah. So let's just say that one.

There's been some other dens that were really scary, but that one probably takes the cake. You were more scared then than like during the housing market crash of 2008? Yeah, I was. Okay, let's do one more question. Okay. Which country in the world do you think has the most exciting range of animals? For me, it's probably India. And this is from Michaela.

Okay. Michaela, for me, it's probably India. They have so many different types of animals, and I'm constantly, like, looking up an animal and then being surprised that it lives in India. So they have the most bear species. Give us like your top ten. In India?

Animals that live in India. Okay, so tigers, sloth bears, snow leopards, Asian elephants, dolls, which is a type of wild dog, spectacle cobra, leopards, red pandas. There's so many more that I'm just like blanking on. Peacocks are cool.

And then they have like a ton of ungulates. So they have like tons of different types of deer and stuff too. I mean, they have a ton of stuff. I'm blanking. Oh, Asiatic Lions. Yeah. They got a ton of stuff. For me, it's India.

All right. Okay. Thanks for the questions, guys. We really like answering them. It's a fun part of the podcast. So thanks and keep sending them in. Okay. So our final category is do we,

like this animal. I just think that for how aggressive and how, you know, they think they're so awesome, they're like not that awesome. They're not that cool looking, I don't think. They seem to have a really bad case of wet dog nose. It's like, you know, when they're in the water all the time. Well, yeah, I know. It's not their fault, but like it doesn't mean, you know, when a dog, like, runs by you and like whisks its nose across your hand. It's like, ew, gross. Yeah. You wipe it off real quick.

It looks like a hippo's entire body. Yeah, because they're in the water. Yeah. It's not their, I said, it's not their fault. They have no choice, but they're just like their weird skin. They kind of look like pig. Pig skin is gross. I don't know why this is offending me, but it kind of is.

I just hate them. Jeff. I like hippos. I think they're kind of weirdly cute. Yeah. Like, it's kind of like the... What? Yeah, it's kind of like the...

What? Yeah, it's kind of like... Like when you see something ugly that's cute, like a baby, a human baby. When their heads are like on the water and they're twitching their ears and they have like... When they wiggle their ears, it's cute. And in the zoos, like baby hippos are so cute. Baby hippos are cool. Yeah, I'm on board with baby hips.

Okay, this is not one of my favorite guys. I'm going to rank it number 20. 20. No, 25. Okay. It's like rank a billion. They're not. So for me, they're not one of my favorite animals, but I do like them.

I actually think in like, like, we mentioned, this already, but in zoos, I think they're one of the coolest animals to see in a zoo, because they usually have these enclosures where you can see them underwater and stuff, and they, like, are weirdly graceful underwater. But I'm kind of with you, Mike, in that, like, they're not the most, like, visually appealing animal, and they're really smelly. One thing that I forgot to mention that hippos do, like male hippos, when they poop, they, like, fan their tail back and forth, and it just sprays, like, their poop, like, everywhere. I've seen that. And it's It's a dominance thing and it's like claiming their territory.

I'm just going to say, I think they're interesting in that they fill this kind of weird niche of like a huge mammal that lives in rivers and stuff. So I'm super interested by hippos, but I don't feel any kind of real connection to them. So I'm going to put them somewhere in the middle of like animals that I like. But I like them all. We know that. They're not endangered. It's like the one animal we've talked about that's not endangered. Well, they're vulnerable.

I mean, they're on that. Cool name hippopotam. That is a cool name. Cute babies. Wiggle their ears, really tough. No one would miss them if they died out. People would miss them for sure. What about Paul?

All right. We can't say that. We can't say that no one would miss it folks. What do they do? What about Paul? I don't think I have to tell you guys this at this point, but don't listen to Mike when it comes to this kind of stuff. Hippos fill a niche.

They're important to the ecosystem. We need hippos. Yeah. So I think this is our first fight over whether or not we like an animal. Dude, welcome to being his roommate. Oh, my gosh. Just tell me what type of shake you have, dude. Anyway, so we're going to wrap it up.

For you guys out there listening, and if you like the podcast, something we would really love for you guys to do is share it with your friends. If you have Instagram, share our Instagram, tell everyone about the podcast. We're trying to grow up. We want to be able to do as many of these as possible. So share it, rate us, review us, do all that good stuff. We've read all the reviews and makes us feel really positive moving forward. Totally.

You know, it's easy to doubt different things about what you're doing. So thanks for the great feedback. Yeah, and I just want to say that we really love our friend Mike. I feel like we were a little hard on you this episode. I get it. You know, it's on me. All right. Thanks again, guys, and we'll see you soon.