In Sinaloa, Mexico, home to one of the world's most powerful drug cartels and famed for ostentatious displays of wealth, people clamor for exotic animals.
Drug baron Pablo Escobar once brought four African hippos to Colombia for his own private zoo and now they are a multi-tonne problem. Escobar, the head of the powerful Medellín cartel, was shot dead in 1993, but his hippos remain and have since become an outsize pest, disrupting the local ecosystem, destroying fields and endangering residents. The government long delayed tackling the invasive species but has now come up with a range of solutions, starting with sterilization. "Surgical sterilizat