Hippo Fecal Impaction

As the humdrum rainy days continue in a life filled with monochromatic greys, I have a singularly grotesque encounter to relate. I was out on a dog walk with my family, when drawing level with an old, disused sluiceway, I discovered that it was occupied by a bloat of hippopotami. On closer inspection, there were two different bloats, separated by a stone wall. One section of the sluiceway held pygmy hippos (Choeropsis liberiensis), whilst the other had their larger, more aggressive cousins, the common, or river hippos (Hippopotamus amphibius). It did not look like they were able to leave the water, being encircled entirely by a concrete barrier, yet all the same, I was concerned to see my daughter lean over and begin petting a hippo on the head.

I shouted at her to stop, then pulled her away. "Are they bad, daddy?" she asked me. I explained that they were unpredictable and dangerous. A crowd of other walkers had appeared, and they came to have a closer look. At the sight of so many people, one of the hippos raised its jowly head out of the water and yawned wide in warning, revealing a cavernous pink, marshmallow maw. I told Lucinda to take note of its yellow tusks, the sight of which caused her to shrink away in fear. As we were engaged thus in contemplation of these hideous beasts, there was a commotion in the water. One of the brutes, a great behemoth that must undoubtedly have been the beachmaster, or in this case, sire of the sluice, launched its hindquarters high into the air.

Two thirds of the behemoth's prodigious bulk was now revealed, full taller than a man, its stumpy hind legs splayed apart, flaccid tail spinning like a pinwheel. As any zoologist worth his salt knows, a hippo defecates by raising its rear in the air and scattering dung in all directions. Before I could take evasive maneuvers, I was appalled to witness the corpse of another animal half ejected from its swollen anus. I recognised the bony, desiccated body of a wildebeest, and realised with horror that the hippo must have swallowed it whole. Hippos are by nature herbivorous, although recent findings have discovered that they will sometimes eat meat in times of drought. Even so, I had never heard of one consuming an entire wildebeest in such a fashion.

The tower of fat bucked and trembled as it fought to discharge the rest of the wildebeest, but its victim's curved horns were lodged in the hippo's bowels and could not be shaken free. This sent the hippo into a furious panic and it churned the water up into a seething maelstrom, splashing the revolted onlookers in filthy sewage water and clods of filth. To witness such a primeval sight was to be unwillingly plunged into a state of abject unrest, I could not help imagining it as some morbid Dali painting illustrating all that is abject, corporeal, and shameful. A contemporary comparison may point to a certain scene from Poltergeist II (1986), in which the father disgorges a ballooning mezcal worm. After a battle fraught with agonised bellows, the wildebeest's broken head finally appeared with a wet crunch, and the exhausted hippo wallowed in a bath of putrescence.