Lake Cow Bacon: How Americans Nearly Became Hippo Ranchers

LAKE COW BACON: "Lake cow bacon, made from the delicious, hyacinth-fed hippopotamus of Louisiana's lily-fringed streams, should soon be obtainable from the Southern packing houses. Properly seeded, Southern streams and marshes will grow thirty to fifty tons of hyacinth to the acre, and on 6,400,000 now useless acres in the Gulf States 1,000,0000 tons of the most delicious of flesh foods, worth $100,000,000 may be grown yearly," reports a New York Times article published April 12, 1910.

Can you imagine?

In 1910, a Louisiana Congressman sponsored the bill HR 23261 known as "The Hippo Bill" to import the large mammals from Africa to the Creole State.

One supporter, a researcher with the US Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Plant Industry named William Irwin, believed the U.S. should raise more animals than it was then. He told the Washington Post:

"I hope to live long enough to see herds of these broad-backed beasts wallowing in teh southern marshes and rivers, fattening on the millions of tons of foodwhich awaits their arrival; to see great droves of white rhinoceri...roaming over the semiarid desert wastes, fattening on the sparse herbage which these lands offer; to see herds of the delicate giraffe, the flesh of which is the purest and sweetest of any known animal, browsing on the buds and shoots of young trees in preparation for the butchers block.” Irwin believed that this was a test of American ingenuity and resolve.

According to him. “To defend our freedom and way of life, some generations of Americans are called to go to war; this generation was being called to import hippopotamuses and eat them.”

Irwin further testified in front of Congress that hippo meat tasted like a “combination of pork and beef.”

A clipping from the North Dakota Evening Times, written by William Henderson, considered the matter: "Great Britain has eaten the Australian kangaroo and likes him, horseflesh is a staple in continental Europe, and the people of Central America eat the lizard. Why cannot Americans absorb the hippopotamus?”

Former President Theodore Roosevelt got on board with this plan and signed immediately, but not everyone was so sure.

Long story short, the bill failed. A growing need for meat saw grazing lands become feedlots and wetlands drained to form grasslands for cattle.

Hippo. It's Not For Dinner.

Today in the U.S. eating hippo meat is illegal. It's classified as "bushmeat," banned to prevent the spread of disease.

There have been cases of anthrax outbreaks in humans linked to the consumption of infected hippo meat.

In 2011, over 500 people in Zambia became infected and 5 died after handling or eating hippo meat during an anthrax outbreak. Furthermore, the two types of hippos (the common hippo and the pygmy hippo) are listed as Vulnerable and Endangered.

Still, hippo meat is being consumed in some parts of the world, even when legality is unclear. It's been likened to both pork and beef depending on how it's cooked and fattiness.

Along the shores of an African Lake, archeologists have uncovered some of the oldest evidence of human ancestors using tools to butcher hippos over 2.9 million years ago.

"The site also held at least 1,776 animal bones, namely hippopotamids and bovids. With this array of artifacts discovered in Nyayanga, the researchers are confident they’ve stumbled on the site of a prehistoric butcher shop where distant members of the human family prepared and hunted megafauna for dinner" reads an article from IFL SCience.

"It would be another 2 million years before ancient hominins learned to control fire, so all of this food would have been served raw. The researchers imagine the tools might have been used to pound the meat into an easy-to-eat mush, a bit like a hippo tartare."