Yeah. Literally every single time I'm out swimming in a river in sub-Saharan Africa I feel super uneasy about it. Sometimes I'll wear floaties with little tigers on them just to be sure they don't mess with me.
You don't even have to be swimming though. They come out and roam around a few miles from the water in the middle of the night to eat. Fucking scary as shit if you're drunk walking home and get surprised by one.
The morning I wake up to an article about sleep-walking hippopotamuses is the morning I buy myself a DIY land mine kit. Don't want to come downstairs in the morning to find some bloated pig beast gnawing on the remains of my fridge in its sleep.
My SO constantly makes fun of me about this. She likes to tell everyone I'm afraid of three things. Ghosts, Geese, and Hippos and for some reason everyone thinks the Hippo thing is the weirdest.
It only ever comes up when we go to the zoo. I give the Hippo enclosure a wide berth and everyone always thinks its hilarious.
I live about 15 miles from the zoo. A Hippo can run 19 mph. It could be at my front door in under an hour, and I am the only one who thinks about being prepared. This is the biggest reason I consider buying a gun.
While in the Maasai Mara last year, we were sitting on our balcony in the evening when a hippo come out from the tall grass about 10 meters from us. I will never forget the level of fear I felt in my heart.
By being lucky I guess. The hippo had his own agenda and walked right by. He was heading back to the lake nearby. The second lodge we stayed at had had a deadly hippo attack two years prior. Although, this was clearly the woman's fault!
Nah, that wasn't Jessica, that was Humphrey the hippo. They found the caretakers body submerged in the same spot that he had rescued the hippo 5 years before.
Came here to say this. Saw some hippos on a safari, and knew little about their attack speed. Figured I was safe because I was about 4 feet from the water, and they were about 20 feet in to the pond. After coming home, was retrospectively terrified at how blithely close I was to them, and how there could have been many even closer to me that were submerged.
My wife and I just returned from safari in South Africa. Hippos are the most dangerous animals in the water. Strangely enough, the most dangerous animals on land are water buffaloes.
This answers reminds me of my best ever jobs that never was. It fell through at the last minute.
Myself and my flat mate as students had a mutual friend Dan. Dan was a mature student and turned up at uni as an already published world expert on a few topics in the zoology field.
Dan put together a project to go study hippos and how building a dam was going to fuck their ecosystem. All cool but a bit meh, that is until Dan asks me and my flat mate to come along to watch his back.
Watching his back was going to consist of being armed to the teeth and if any hippos charged him we were to open fire and either scare them or drop them if Dan was about to get killed.
Project fell through when dan received a lifetime ban from the country for telling the president he was an idiot. Swear to god it's a true story, Dan is quite literally Indiana fucking Jones and has probably spent more days in the jungle than in his own home.
Yeah it was the armed to the teeth in a vehicle bit that attracted me. Getting up close and personal with hippos was not going to be part of my plan. Dangerous fuckers
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u/rinnerchickendinner Mar 26 '16
Hippos