4. The Scheme to Populate America With Hippos
In the early twentieth century, America faced a meat shortage. Beef prices skyrocketed, as industry struggled to meet rising demand from a growing population. Between natural increase and new immigrants, America had many more mouths to feed, and many of those mouths wanted meat. While that was going on, cattle ranges had been ruined by decades of overgrazing. Herds shrank, and the number of America’s cows dropped by millions every year. The “Meat Question” was a serious issue back then. What to do about it was never far from the minds of American consumers, pundits, and politicians. Things seemed so dire, that there were even serious fears of a potential famine unless a solution was found.
Then somebody thought up a seemingly brilliant scheme: hippos. Why not import hippopotamuses from Africa, set them loose in the Gulf Coast’s swamplands and deltas, and raise them for food? Hippos were full of blubbery goodness, so why not ranch them in America? To many, that seemed like a great answer to the Meat Question. A US Department of Agriculture researcher figured that the solution to the country’s meat shortage was to exploit unproductive lands to produce food. The Gulf Coast’s swamps were unproductive, but that could change with the introduction of hippos. Free range hippopotamuses set loose in the bayous, especially those of Louisiana, could easily yield a million tons of meat per year.
