Summary: <p>Happy New Year! Let’s learn about a few animals that have shown up in places where they just shouldn’t be. How did they get there, and why? Sometimes we know, sometimes it remains a mystery.</p> <p>Some of Pablo Escobar’s hippos:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-425" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/hippos-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200"></p> <p>King Julien, the ring-tailed lemur who was discovered almost frozen to death in London:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-428" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Lemur_2080840c-300x187.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="187"></p> <p>A little alligator captured in a koi pond. In Maryland. Which is not where gators live:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-430" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/gator2-276x300.gif" alt="" width="276" height="300"></p> <p>A monk parakeet eating pizza in Brooklyn, because of course it is:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-426" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/pizzaparrot-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225"></p> <p>How did these beavers get into a Devon river? They’re not telling:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-429" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/beaver-female-with-kits-1-c-mike-symes-reduced-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200"></p> <p><strong>Show transcript:</strong></p> <p>Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.</p> <p>Happy new year! Let’s ring in the new year with some out-of-place animals. Sometimes an animal shows up in a place where it just shouldn’t be, and while the animal itself isn’t a mystery, how it got there is. In this episode we’ll chase down the solutions to a few of these mysteries, and ponder a few others we can’t solve.</p> <p>We’ll start with some hippos that aren’t hanging out in Africa where they belong, but are living in Columbia, South America. In this case, we do know what happened. Back in the 1980s, a guy named Pablo Escobar had a private zoo that contained four hippos, along with other animals. Escobar was not a nice person. He was a drug lord who grew obscenely rich from selling cocaine and killing anyone who didn’t agree with him. In 1993 the police raided his estate and Escobar was killed in a shoot-out. The government took over the estate and turned it into a park, and most of the animals were given to zoos. But the hippos stayed. The estate had a lake that they lived in, and they weren’t hurting anything.</p> <p>But after a few decades, the four hippos turned into forty. The </p>
