How Americans Missed Their Chance At Hippo Bacon

It’s probably not something you’ve considered. But if Teddy Roosevelt had gotten his way in 1910, hippo tags would have been available to American hunters from Florida to Texas–not to mention, as the New York Times put it, “lake cow bacon.”

Here’s what happened.

A Perfect Storm

The first decade of the 20th century saw two minor crises that would generate the conditions under which a former president, a USDA scientist, and a U.S. Congressman would, in all seriousness, introduce a bill to import hippopotamuses (hippopotumi?) to Louisiana.

On the one hand, the southeastern states were fighting an invasion, not from a foreign army but from a foreign plant–the water hyacinth. Water hyacinth is an aquatic plant native to South America, but it’s also one of nature’s fastest-growing plants. It forms giant, green mats on bodies of water that can double in size in just two weeks. Those mats choke the water body of sunlight, which reduces the amount of native algae and plankton in the water. Without that bottom rung of the aquatic food chain, larger fish and other native wildlife quickly suffer.

At the same time, the U.S. was struggling with too many water hyacinth plants, the country was also suffering from too few beef cattle. Known at the time as the “Meat Problem” (new television series, anyone?), beef prices rose from 10 cents per pound in 1860 to 25 cents per pound in 1925. Modern-day scholars blame meat inflation on several factors, but the biggest was a rapidly expanding population and an increase in animal diseases. While immigrants poured into the country and moved primarily to urban areas, beef farmers struggled to provide enough meat thanks to the rise of anthrax and Texas fever.

The American Hippo Bill

As public sentiment grew increasingly sour, a chorus of national leaders and scientists urged officials to look overseas to bolster the meat supply. Cattle might be struggling, but species of African game like buffalo, bushbuck, and reedbuck could thrive on American landscapes and answer the demand for red meat.

One such scientist was William Irwin, a fruit researcher at USDA, who gave a paper at the 1909 American Breeder’s Association meeting titled, “Animals That Should Be Introduced And Bred For Economic And Profitable Meat Production.” Irwin proposed importing 100 African mammals, including giraffes in the Southwest, antelope in the Midwest, and, of course, hippos in the Southeast.

“Because these animals have not been introduced is not a sound reason why they should not be. Seriously, we need every additional species whose flesh is both palatable and nutritious. We can find a place somewhere in our great country that will be adapted to the successful propagation of each,” he explained.

Conferences are where most crazy ideas go to die, but this one didn’t, thanks to another major player in this saga, Congressman Robert Broussard. Broussard was a representative from Louisiana, and he thought that importing hippos to his home state’s bays and bayous sounded like a great idea. They would give Louisianans another source of meat and eat all the water hyacinth quickly taking over waterways at the same time. So, he did what politicians do best.

House Resolution 23261, known today as the American Hippo Bill, was introduced by Broussard in Congress on March 21, 1910, and assigned to the Committee on Agriculture, according to the congressional record. While the details remain lost to history, the top-line number is clear enough. The bill called for Congress to appropriate $250,000 (about $8 million today) for importing animals from overseas.

To convince his colleagues and the American people of the merits of this idea, he adopted a strategy that will sound familiar to modern-day politicos: he recruited celebrities.

Newspapers at the time reported that none other than former president Theodore Roosevelt had pledged “his hearty approval and promise of cooperation.” Broussard also secured endorsements from Frederick Russell Burnham–an American scout, hunter, and adventurer–and Fritz Duquesne, a South African Boer and German soldier, big-game hunter, journalist, and, later, Nazi spy.

Three days after the Hippo Bill was introduced, the Committee on Agriculture had its first (and only) hearing on the measure. Broussard convinced Burnham, Fritz, and Irwin (the USDA scientist) to testify in favor of the bill, and what followed would be must-see C-SPAN viewing today.

Irwin argued that “we ought to have more creatures than we are raising here” and claimed that the only reason Americans weren’t currently chowing down on hippo steaks was because “their neighbors don’t, or because nobody ever told them it was the proper thing to do.”

When asked by a member of the Agriculture Committee whether there might be any dangers or downsides to importing hippos, Irwin assured the congressmen that “the people who have handled them tell me they are very easily tamed and become very much attached to man.” (While hippos aren’t Africa’s deadliest animal, as some claim, they still kill between 500 and 3,000 people a year.)

Burnham also testified. He wondered, incredulously, why Americans insist on relying on only four animals for meat (cows, pigs, sheep, and poultry). “I think we are allowing one of our greatest assets to lie idle,” Burnham told the committee, referring, apparently, to animals from other countries.

Duquesne’s testimony was more dramatic. Known as “The Black Panther,” the African adventurer claimed that he was “as much one of the African animals as the hippopotamus.”

He claimed that, based on his experience, it was a simple matter to bottle-feed a hippo and lead it around on a leash like a dog. He called the meat both “excellent” and “splendid” and claimed his own people, the Boers of South Africa, lived on hippo meat and suffered no physical or mental defects.

Writing in The Atavist Magazine, journalist Jon Mooallem describes Duquesne as delivering a “fetching, whip-smart whirlwind of a performance” that “seemed to sweep up everyone.” A spate of excited newspaper coverage followed, and it looked for a hot second like the United States was about to be inundated with African mammals. The Three Musketeers of Broussard, Burnham, and Duquesne formed the New Food Supply Society, and they believed they’d be able to get a revamped version of the bill through the next year’s Congress.

As the New York Tribune put it in April of 1910, “Mr. Broussard’s bill in its turn has gone so far as to have been laughed at a good deal and then to have had certain of its provisions taken seriously by the laughers on sober second thought.”

Hipp-No

Obviously, Broussard’s vision never came to pass. The reason isn’t entirely clear, but it seems to have been a combination of infighting among the Three Musketeers and the fact that the idea was more or less insane.

Mooallem reports that Duquesne was obsessed with taking credit for the plan, and the fact that he didn’t always get it led the group to eventually disband. But newspaper reports from the time also indicate that it didn’t take long for holes to be poked in Broussard’s brilliant scheme.

An April 1, 1910 edition of The Lafayette Advertiser (whose readers, it should be noted, would be the ones actually dealing with hippos in their rivers) highlights several potential problems with the hippo introduction.

“Attention has been called to the fact that the hippopotamus is said to be able to smell a rice field ten miles away, and, having smelled it, to make immediate progress toward it with a view to varying its diet,” the paper reported. “It is suggested that he might not like water hyacinth as well as the rice in Louisiana.”

Others wondered how residents (hunters, farmers, or otherwise) could be expected to carry a five-ton animal to a slaughterhouse: “Out in Africa,” read the same article, “the man who bags a hippo carts away as much of the meat as he can and cures some of it, his operation being about as economical as was the slaughtering of buffalo. Some persons cured part of the buffalo meat, but most of them cut the juicy steaks and allowed the wolves to have the rest.”

The final concern raised by the Advertiser is that since hippos are “very shy,” steamboats might scare them away from the hyacinth-infested streams and discourage the animals from staying “on the job.”

For these and other reasons, the Agriculture Committee opted to pass on the Hippo Bill in 1910. Broussard planned to reintroduce the legislation, but he never saw enough support to make a second attempt. He died in 1918, and with him the dream of, as Irwin put it, “herds of these broad-backed beasts wallowing in the Southern marshes and rivers, fattening on the millions of tons of food which awaits their arrival.”

The Idea Lives On

While the Department of Agriculture eventually concluded that importing hippos would be, according to Mooallem, a “terrible idea,” their solution to the Meat Problem wasn’t what conservationists would have hoped. Policymakers answered the meat demands of a growing population by filling in those marshes and wetlands where the hippos would have lived, planting grass, and raising cattle. Everyone likes cheap meat, but it’s worth asking: what did we lose when we decided to embark on a nationwide effort to drain wetlands?

Hippos were more likely to have created new problems than solve old ones, but it’s still tempting to imagine what the country would look like if the New Food Supply Society had been successful. Even though their grand vision never panned out, a remnant still exists today.

Nilgai are native to the Indian subcontinent, but they were imported to South Texas in the 1920s to, you guessed it, beef up the beef supply. Today, their numbers have risen to an estimated 50,000, and as locals told Steve in this episode of “MeatEater,” they’ve become a kind of honorary native species.

If Broussard, Irwin, Burnham, and Duquesne were still alive today, they might point to South Texas as evidence that their idea was a good one. And in that case, let’s be honest, it’s probably a good thing they never got the chance.

Feature image via Bossa Nova Strategies.