BENGALURU: A newborn hippopotamus died after it was trampled by its own mother within a few hours of its birth at Bengaluru’s Bannerghatta Biological Park (BBP) on Wednesday morning. According to BBP officials, it is not uncommon for hippopotamus calves to get trampled by their mothers or by aggressive males.
“In the wild, the females who give birth isolate themselves from the pod to safeguard their little ones. But in a zoo setup, this is difficult owing to lack of space. So the zoo keepers have to manually separate them. But in this case, it was not possible as the female hippop-otamus, Dashya, gave birth in 7.5 months.
Usually, they give birth only in the eighth month. Dashya littered at around 1am. When we went in the morning to inspect her, we found the male calf dead,” a BBP official said. In the past, Dashya had lost three of her calves in a similar way. Her two calves — Alok and Sunny — are now aged three and two, respectively.