In post Civil War America, the U.S. Congress considered a bold and ingenious plan that would simultaneously solve two pressing problems - a national meat shortage and a growing ecological crisis. The plan was this: hippopotamus ranching.
Hippos imported from Africa and raised in the bayous of Louisiana, proponents argued, would provide a delicious new source of protein for a meat-hungry nation. In the process, the animals would gobble up the invasive water hyacinth that was killing fish and choking off waterways. A bill was introduced in Congress, and newspaper editorials extolled the culinary virtues of ‘lake cow bacon’.
In the summer of 1880, the first hippopotami arrived on American shores. In a few short years, the bayous changed forever.
It turned out that hippopotami were impossible to ‘ranch’ in any traditional sense of the word. They were too large, too strong, and too irritable. The first herds - or ‘crashes’ - soon broke their border fences to roam free along the Louisiana waterways. They ate the invasive hyacinth, all right, but nobody could have foreseen the scale of the ecological shift that would occur due to their introduction. Insect populations flourised, which in turn meant more birds and more fish, who soon outstripped their pre-hyacinth population levels. Without the dry season that had kept their numbers stable in Africa the hippos bred like rabbits, reshaped the land around them with their grazing and territorial habits, and had soon replaced ‘gators as the most dangerous beast on the bayou.
Such it was that in some ways the Hippo Act could be considered to have comprehensively failed. You couldn’t farm hippopotami.
But you could hunt them.
Louisiana, 1899
Brigadier General Theodore Pickford (CSA, Ret) has just purchased a broad swathe of the Louisiana waterways. Not content with the considerable income from his sugar plantations, he is now interested in adding revenue from hippo meat, and the people who’ll pay to hunt it.
First, though, he needs to know just what he’s bought. A small survey party has been assembled to investigate his new acquisition - and to ensure he lays claim to what’s his. A lot of land is changing hands in Louisiana these days, not all of it uncontested…
Hosted and narrated by:
Mo (mordant)
Started 03/06/17.
Scenes played: 3
License: Community License
