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A US court order says the offspring of hippos once owned by Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar can be recognized as people with legal rights in the US in a case that involves a lawsuit against the Colombian government over whether to kill or sterilize the animals.
An animal rights group is hailing the order as a milestone victory in the long sought effort to sway the US justice system to grant animals personhood status.
But a legal expert in Colombia says the order won’t carry any weight where the hippos live.
“It will be the Colombian authorities who decide what to do with the hippos and not the American ones,” said Camilo Burbano Cifuentes, a criminal law professor at the Universidad Externado de Colombia.
The hippos are descendants of animals that Escobar illegally imported to his Colombian ranch in the 1980s when he reigned over the country’s drug trade, but were abandoned after his death in 1993.
A group of scientists has warned that the hippos pose a threat to the area’s biodiversity and could lead to deadly encounters with humans.
They are advocating for some of the animals to be killed.
A government agency has started sterilizing some of the hippos, but there is a debate on what are the safest methods.
In the suit, attorneys for the Animal Legal Defense Fund asked the US District Court in Cincinnati to give “interested persons” status to the hippos so that two wildlife experts in sterilization from Ohio could be deposed in the case.
Federal magistrate Judge Karen Litkovitz in Cincinnati granted the request on Oct. 15.
The animal rights group based near San Francisco said it believes it’s the first time animals have been declared legal persons in the US.
Christopher Berry, the lead attorney for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, said: “This really is part of a bigger movement of advocating that animals’ interest be represented in court. ... We’re just asking that animals have the ability to enforce the rights that have already been given to them.”
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