Hippo burger, anyone?!

America was facing the prospect of a serious meat shortage in 1910. The rapidly growing population was outpacing the country’s ability to raise meat animals. Techniques for the mass production of hogs and chickens had not yet been invented. Overgrazing was destroying pastureland and the number of beef cattle in the country was falling by a million per year, as beef prices soared. It seemed that the country couldn’t continue to rely on its dwindling supply beef cattle. What then to do?

Frederick Russell Burnham, a then-famous adventurer, mercenary, and explorer had an idea, and he persuaded Congressman Robert Foligny Broussard of Louisiana of its wisdom. The idea? To import hippopotamuses to the swampy Gulf coast and raise them for food.

Burnham’s idea was particularly attractive to Broussard, a Cajun planter who saw hippos as the potential solution to a problem plaguing his state. In 1884 Japanese delegates to an international cotton exposition had brought water hyacinths from their country to distribute as gifts. By 1910 the hyacinths were clogging Louisiana rivers, destroying the livelihoods of fishermen and impeding or blocking river navigation. Broussard imagined herds of hippos eating up the hated hyacinths, while simultaneously ending the nation’s meat shortage and bringing wealth to hippo ranchers. It seemed to him to be a win-win.

So, Broussard introduced a bill in Congress for the importation of hippopotamuses, and the proposal was met with acclaim. The New York Times called the idea “practical and timely.” Newspapers around the country enthusiastically endorsed it. President Teddy Roosevelt gave it his hearty approval. According to The Washington Post, it was “a question of only a very few years now when large shipments of hippos will be made to America.”

But as much as Americans loved meat, convincing them to eat hippos would not be an easy task. Then, as now, Americans almost exclusively ate only four animals, imported originally from Europe—cattle, pigs, sheep and poultry, with beef being the predominant meat by far in 1910. Undeterred, a New York Times editorial insisted that hippo meat was tasty and should be called “lake cow bacon.” The general public remained skeptical.

Alas, Broussard’s vision of hippopotamus herds grazing happily on hyacinth flowers in the swamps of Louisiana was not to be, and there would be no hippo steaks on American dinner plates. The Department of Agriculture never bought into the notion, insisting that the solution to the meat shortage was simply to drain the swamps and turn them into grass pastures suitable for beef cattle—a proposal that had the advantage of not requiring Americans to acquire a taste for hippo meat. No hippopotamuses were ever imported to the U.S. and there were never any hippo ranches in the Gulf states.

Congressman Robert Broussard introduced House Bill 23261, to appropriate $250,000 for the importation of hippopotamuses into the United States, on March 24, 1910, one hundred twelve years ago today.

Today the state of Louisiana spends over $2 million per year spraying herbicides on water hyacinth.