Greetings.
Over the weekend, a tourist taking pictures of a hippopotamus at a watering hole about sixty miles from Nairobi, Kenya’s capitol, was attacked and killed by the hippo. The victim, and a companion who sustained mild injuries, were on a safari holiday.
As a hippo myself, I am here today to speak on behalf of my community. It is with a heavy heart (weighing almost two hundred pounds), that I must, again report that an altercation between a noble Hippopotamus amphibiu, and a Homo sapien, has ended in tragedy. The human’s, of course, not the hippo’s. That would be ridiculous.
I don’t mean to sound glib, but we’ve been over this before. Despite our best efforts toward education, humans still think of hippos as “cute,” and “cuddly” and approachable. I even heard one tourist recently go so far as to call my friend Lars a “chubby mud baby” right before Lars bit the tourist’s boat in half.
Why can’t humans see us for the fierce threats of nature that we are, on par with sharks and lions? Is it because they are predators and we are herbivores? *Giant eye roll.* Is it our big grinning faces with these tiny ears? That we’re bald and rotund? Rude.
Rude and naïve.
Savage. Deadly. Those are the words humans should use when they think of a hippo. We’re basically tanks with jaws the size of grand pianos, full of teeth and tusks as big as table legs. We can run as fast as a man AND move quickly through water. Double threat! Or triple. How many threats is that? I’ve lost count. It’s a lot of threats.
Did you know that we are descended from the whale? THE WHALE, for God’s sake. You don’t fuck with whales, do you? The most famous tome ever written was dedicated to man facing off with that brutal force of nature. WHERE’S OUR TOME, MELVILLE?
Is it that insipid Christmas song that damaged our image? Trust me little girl, you do NOT “want a hippopotamus for Christmas.” That would be a grave mistake. Ask the five hundred hippo-related human deaths in Africa each year. Grave. Like death, grave. You see what I did there?
Five hundred, you say? Surely that can’t be right! A big, dumb, squishy hippo did all that? Indeed. Not to brag, but did you know that sharks only attack some eighty humans a year? Yet those “maniacs” get a whole week and the world loses its damned mind for them! Movies, TV shows, theme songs with which to scare your little sister in the deep end of the pool… even a franchise about them absurdly flying through the air in a tornado.
Please. We hippos do not need to resort to gimmickry. We cause ruination on both land and water, yet no movie has been made about us terrorizing co-eds or explorers! Piranhas got a movie. Anacondas got a movie. Who out there knows Spielberg? Don’t all speak up at once.
Seriously though, would a tourist get out of their vehicle and get that close to a tiger?! Never. Would a diver get that close to a shark? Pfft. Of course not. We went over that. Sharks are terrors of the sea (and… sky). We aaaaallll know that.
I fear the real reason humans have no respect for us is that offensive game from the 1970s with the four artificially colored plastic hippos, where the human children jam their fists down on their asses to make them eat marbles. How is that fun? Yes, we get it, hippos eat a lot. Hahaha, make fun of the portly guy. You would eat a lot of marbles too if you had six thousand pounds of rage to maintain.
The game box should come with a warning: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. IN REAL LIFE THE MARBLES ARE PEOPLE. We don’t actually eat meat, but guess what, chump? Lars considered your canoe a vegetable. Bam.
What do we have to do, start carrying switchblades to be considered a threat? Sigh. In closing, hippos: not cute. Super deadly. Give us a week on the nature channel, or at least a summer blockbuster movie, purge your homes of that hungry, hungry hellscape, and whatever you do, don’t watch YouTube videos of adorable baby hippos taking baths or you’ll forget everything I just said.
Good day to you.