15-12-2003, 16:15
The recent vote on the Hippo Awareness Day resolution has filled me with a deep sense of foreboding; this resolution celebrates hippos and misleadingly paints them as harmless animals, I encourage all UN members to vote this down for a simple reason:
Hippos have directly killed more human beings than any other animal.
This staement is completly true and I was as shocked when I heard it as you undoubtedly are now, the simple fact is that if there is to be a Hippo Awareness Day it should warn people of the danger of hippos. Most of you will mock this comment, however many people are killed by hippos in various ways each year. Those who get between a hippo and a water hole at the wrong time are thoughtlessly trampled over, a quite lethal experience, hippos are also quite capable of biting a man in half and; should a scared hippo victim try and defend himself he will be surprised (briefly) to find that hippos are in fact bulletproof.
In short rather than celebrating the hippo we should in fact fear it and thus vote against this resolution.
Hippos have directly killed more human beings than any other animal.
This staement is completly true and I was as shocked when I heard it as you undoubtedly are now, the simple fact is that if there is to be a Hippo Awareness Day it should warn people of the danger of hippos. Most of you will mock this comment, however many people are killed by hippos in various ways each year. Those who get between a hippo and a water hole at the wrong time are thoughtlessly trampled over, a quite lethal experience, hippos are also quite capable of biting a man in half and; should a scared hippo victim try and defend himself he will be surprised (briefly) to find that hippos are in fact bulletproof.
In short rather than celebrating the hippo we should in fact fear it and thus vote against this resolution.