To the untrained person, a hippo seems like nothing more than a silly, fat, blubbering animal lazily walking about and resting in their mud puddles. To someone with the know-how, however, they understand just how dangerous and deadly that a hippo actually is.
Yes, for a creature that seems dopey, relaxed, and lazy, the hippo is actually a well-known and very aggressive killer. In fact, in a one-on-one matchup, a hippo is more than capable of taking down nature’s apex predators like tigers, lions, and bears, while sustaining insignificant damage on its own body.
A hippo’s defensive measures
The hippo is exceedingly heavy, clocking in at around 4000 pounds, while its skin is 6 centimeters thick. To put it in perspective, that’s about half the length of the long edge of a credit card. Their skin is also as tough as rubber, protecting the hippo against many attacks that attempt to pierce it. For clawed predators like tigers, they would be able to scratch the hippo up some, but not do a whole lot of damage overall thanks to the thickness of their skin.
A hippo’s offensive measures
In terms of offensive capabilities, the hippo is one strong case of a bite being worse than its bark. Its bite force is reported to be around 1800 PSI at the minimum, while being able to open their mouth to 180 degrees. That makes it more than capable of biting a crocodile in half, meaning that you don’t ever want to find any of your body parts inside of its mouth, lest it chomps down and tears it off entirely.
Luckily, because of how large it is combined with its stubby legs, you would be able to outrun it, right?
Hippo – marathon runner
I hate to break it to you, but hippos are deceptively fast. While they might seem like slow turtles on the water, when they actually run, they can reach speeds of up to 30 miles per hour. That is practically way beyond a regular human on earth. To put it into perspective, the fastest man on earth, Usain Bolt can run at around 23.5 miles per hour. Hippos are as fast as horses, and it shows, so don’t even try to get away purely by speed.
If you think that a hippo is slow because of the fact that you see it lazily moving about in the water during the day, then you might want to think again. Hippos spend most of their day chilling under the waters to protect their skin from the heat of the sun, but when night comes, they can cover a surprising amount of distance while searching for vegetation to eat.
One strategy that you should adopt if you are being chased by a hippo is to avoid running in a straight line because it will eventually catch up to you. Ideally you can find obstacles that will slow it down as it chases you like rocks, hills, logs, or whatever. Best case scenario: You find something to climb up on, like a tree, saving you from the jaws of a very angry ball of mass down below. Thankfully, for all the surprises that a hippo can show you, climbing trees isn’t one of them.
Hippos are not your friends
For a herbivore, hippos sure have a violent track record. With the body of a giant boulder and the speed of a horse, a hippo charging straight towards you probably looks more like a speeding truck than an animal, and considering its weight, it’s likely going to send you flying if it does crash into you…. or break every bone in your body as it crushed you underneath. This is before it even uses its large mouth to crush your body inside like it was nothing.
But why are hippos like this? Well, it turns out, there is this word called “territorial” that hippos like to take very seriously. They aren’t carnivores by any means, even if they may scavenge and feed on dead animal carcasses on occasion, but any person knows that when an animal thinks that its life is on the line, it’s definitely going to fight back, and hippos are no different. Unfortunately for anyone in its path, that line is much easier to cross than it looks, where even looking at a hippo wrongly might cause it to become aggressive and start barreling towards you.
An estimated 500 people’s deaths per year in Africa are caused by hippos, giving it the reputation as one of nature’s deadliest animals. They are known to attack wildebeest, kudu, and impalas as well. They also have no qualms about devouring their own kind! That’s right, the mighty hippo actually commits cannibalism. As mentioned earlier, hippos aren’t absolute carnivores, and have a diet primarily of grass. Even if you may see a hippo eating meat, it is usually due to a lack of nutrients as their stomachs aren’t actually built to survive off of meat. Still, this information doesn’t make this any less unsettling, especially since that means that human meat might potentially be on the menu for these lumbering giants…
It might be hard to believe that animal that looks as ridiculous as a hippo can be so deadly, but as mentioned earlier, looks can be deceiving. Hippos can and will kill you, and the best strategy out of them all is to stay away from them.