I’m at work, reading in The Daily Nation about a mother hippo who wouldn’t leave her calf when it got stuck on a golf course near a river in Nyanza Province. Apparently it’s very painful for hippos to stay out of the water and in the daytime heat, but she wasn’t about to leave baby hippo. The local residents all gathered around with knives, feeling blessed that the new year had delivered delicious free meat in this time of very high food prices.
Someone
calls the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), who are charged with protecting the
animals by law, and they make attempts to move the mother back to the water
without success. They decide not to
sedate her, just in case the growing mob use this chance to pounce and
‘reclaim’ their dinner. KWS eventually
rescue the baby hippo instead, and the mother is persuaded back into the
water. The locals were very sad that
their blessing had been stolen from them by government officials. Hippo 1 Locals 0.
I mention
the story to my lovely colleague Ken sitting next to me, who goes into raptures
about how hippo meat is the ‘sweetest’, tastiest thing ever. Ah, so
you must have eaten hippo meat in the years before the conservation laws were
passed! I say. No, all the time he replies, painting a picture of guys near his
rural home who dig trenches to prevent the hippos from trampling through their
crops. Hippos are enormous, but with short
fat legs they can’t escape the ditch.
The news travels fast apparently, and the whole community mobilise to claim
the meat on a first-come first-served basis.
Ken has some handy advice for us:
You hit the hippo until it is dead, with
hammers and sticks and rocks and whatever you can find. Then the fastest people get the most
meat. Hippo skin is very tough so you
need a sharp knife but the meat is so soft.
You must be careful to eat the meat the same same day or keep a vigil to
protect it; KWS sometimes go house to house, and if you have the meat you’ll be
arrested for poaching.
So now we
know... (Ken 1 Hippo
0)
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