{"id":1101,"date":"2015-01-13T01:00:35","date_gmt":"2015-01-13T01:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/?p=1101"},"modified":"2019-01-07T17:13:07","modified_gmt":"2019-01-07T22:13:07","slug":"hippos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/2015\/01\/hippos\/","title":{"rendered":"The American Hippo Bill"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The water hyacinth is a purple-flowered floating plant\u00a0that&#8217;s native to the Amazon, and is popular, at least in the northern United States, with man-made\u00a0pond owners\u2014it&#8217;s pretty, provides oxygen and shade for fish, and acts as a natural water filter. I sold thousands of them through my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gardenstatekoi.com\/\">summer job<\/a> in high school.<\/p>\n<p>The plant is also a particularly aggressive\u00a0invasive species in warmer climates, because it reproduces at a staggering\u00a0rate (doubling its population within two weeks)\u2014<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Kenya_Kisumu_Harbour_Hyacinths_1997ke09b21.jpg\">overtaking<\/a> entire lakes or waterways, preventing water flow, killing native species, and wreaking all sorts of havoc in the process.<\/p>\n<p>In the early 1900s,\u00a0Louisiana Congressman Robert Broussard introduced\u00a0a plan to fix not only that problem, but a national food shortage\u00a0as well: hippos.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Louisiana Congressman Robert Broussard introduced the &#8220;American Hippo bill&#8221; to authorize the importation and release of hippopotamus into the bayous of Louisiana. Broussard argued that the hippopotamus would eat the invasive water hyacinth that was clogging the rivers and also produce meat to help solve the American meat crisis. Former President Theodore Roosevelt backed the plan, as did the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Washington Post, and <strong>the New York Times which praised the taste of hippopotamus as \u201clake cow bacon<\/strong>\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Needless to say, the bill didn&#8217;t pass\u2014they lost by one vote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The water hyacinth is a purple-flowered floating plant\u00a0that&#8217;s native to the Amazon, and is popular, at least in the northern United States, with man-made\u00a0pond owners\u2014it&#8217;s pretty, provides oxygen and shade for fish, and acts as a natural water filter. I sold thousands of them through my summer job in high school. The plant is also [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"\"Lake cow bacon\" http:\/\/wp.me\/p1G65p-hL","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[157,125],"class_list":["post-1101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-business","tag-wildlife"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s1G65p-hippos","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1101"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3703,"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101\/revisions\/3703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulmaiorana.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}