Dude, what the hell is wrong with the National Zoo? THEY ARE GETTING RID OF HAPPY THE HIPPO! This, quite simply, is a disgrace.

“With zoos you only have so much space available. . . . We don’t have a strong hippopotamus program right now.”

Happy has a little over a year before he has to move, a zoo spokeswoman said. The zoo has borrowed the giant crate in which he would be shipped, and keepers will soon start training him to enter it. A crane will probably be required to lift him, the zoo said.

But it’s not easy finding a home for a 7,000-pound adult male Nile hippo. Happy, who was born at the zoo 27 years ago, needs lots of clean water, for an array of reasons that include his indoor and outdoor pools, where he spends much of his time submerged.

He also needs his own room, so to speak. Male hippos are extremely territorial, and will attack other hippos, or people, that intrude in their space. “Happy doesn’t want friends,” Smith said, and “hippo space is expensive.”

Solution: The George Washington University should adopt Happy and build him a living area on the site of the old GW hospital. With the amount of money they are charging for a GW education these days, financing the project shouldn’t be a problem. And it makes sense. The hippo, after all, became GW’s secondary mascot after SJT, our University President at the time, purchased a hippo statue after drinking too many Bloody Marys (or so the story goes) while on vacation in Rhode Island. This gave rise to the Hippodrome, an inflatable hippo mascot that accompanied Big George and Little George at the basketball games, and a wide variety of GW hippo merchandise, which, admittedly, I own quite a bit of.

Related posts:

1. Happy the Hippo, Part Deux First off, cheers to the Washington Post for printing my Happy the Hippo rant in today’s edition of the Express: Second, in the comments section to that post, Jamie and I disagreed over the origin of the hippo statue on GW’s campus (H and 21st St NW if you...
2. GDub, you are dead to me Well, forget my grand idea of The George Washington University adopting Happy the Hippo. Apparently, GW is kicking out its own hippo! The hippo, the University’s unofficial mascot for almost a decade, is set to become a footnote in GW history. Administrators said Wednesday that the hippo – made...
3. The GW Hippo: Saved? Administrators rebuffed reports this week that the University was phasing out its unofficial hippo mascot, saying it was never discussed by the senior administration and that the bookstore stopped ordering hippo apparel because of a “misunderstanding.” [...] “Counter to the implications of the story, there has been no high-level...
4. Random hippo photos Hippos are awesome, but their teeth are pretty damn scary. “Fifteen-year-old Hippo Albert opens his mouth to catch a pumpkin, fed to him by his keeper, at the Cologne Zoo.” ...
5. Svetik the pink hippo Zookeepers at the Kaliningrad Zoo showed up for work one morning and were shocked to discover that their hippo had turned pink overnight. One onlooker told the Austrian Times: “He looks very pretty but that colour might not help him much when he gets around to breeding. He doesn’t...