There Was a Campaign For Americans to Start Eating Hippos
In 1910, there was a major monopoly on meat in the United States, which caused meat shortages and price gouging at butcher shops and grocery stores. A senator named Robert Broussard suggested that Americans should start importing hippos from Africa, and let them live in the rivers of Louisiana. Hippos are so large that they could feed a lot of people with their meat.
Obviously, Broussard didn’t mention the fact that hippos are incredibly dangerous animals, and it would be a terrible idea to set them free in the wild in the United States. This plan was highly publicized in newspapers, but it never actually came to fruition. Eventually, the meat market stabilized again when there was an increase in “factory farming” across the nation.
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