Hippo Trifecta
Munson's cookie jar rescue from the race track and the shit shower at the Frisco zoo were two hippo-based items posted earlier. The only rational thing left to do now is include the Bubbles story and wrap up the hippo trifecta.
Lion Country Safari was a drive-through animal preserve located in Orange County in the 1970s. The 100-acre site was eventually replaced by the Los Olivos Village containing 1,750 apartments and completed in 2014. Lion Country Safari closed in 1982 never having attracted a sufficient number of visitors to make a go of it. Several incidents that generated bad press helped bring it down.
In addition to bad press insurance claims and premiums shot up when the monkeys started ripping off rubber trim from vehicles. A few of the lions began dining on some of the other four-footed residents and had to be quarantined. An Indian elephant named Misty seriously injured one of its handlers two weeks before it escaped from the compound. Before she was captured she crushed the skull of a zoologist, caused the evacuation of a nearby swap meet and brought traffic to a halt on I-405. She was quickly sent off to join the circus and in 1988 was relocated to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee where she remains to this day at the age of forty-six. However, all of this pales in comparison to the three weeks that the international media spent tracking the exploits of an eight-year-old hippopotamus named Bubbles.
February 20, 1978 was the third time Bubbles wandered off from her enclosure. This time she forced her way beneath a chained-link fence, made her way past a barricade and walked two miles to Clucker Lake. More a pond than a lake, it was a marshy drainage pit formed by runoff that was 100 yards in length and deep enough for bubbles to submerge her two-ton bulk. Other than gulping some air when needed, she remained underwater. The spectacle drew crowds as well as television coverage. After a few days she came ashore, was shot with a tranquilizer dart and fell to the ground. When park rangers approached her she chased two of them up a tree, ran off a third and then calmly returned to the pond.
Bubbles was featured regularly on the evening news and had the attention of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. All efforts to coax her from the water failed for the next two weeks. She ignored hovering helicopters and baited nets and two bulldozers that attempted to drive her out became bogged down in the mud.
Nineteen days after first entering the pond, Bubbles came out of the water and walked up to the top of a hill where she was hit with two tranquilizer darts. Her knees buckled and she rolled down a slope coming to a stop at the base of a tree. Bubbles died a few minutes later and the official word from Lion Country Safari was that she had landed in an awkward position and suffocated. Steve Clark was the ranger that headed up the rescue effort that night. He claimed that bubbles' death was the result of an unnecessary drug injection given to her by a vet while she lay on the ground. An autopsy later revealed that Bubbles was five months pregnant at the time.
Bubbles' remains were donated to the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum and are now warehoused in the City of Vernon along with 98,000 other specimens. If you want to pay your respects, ask to see specimen number 54113. Her skull is on a shelf amid other hippo skulls with the rest of her skeleton in six drawers below. Her skull has a tag attached which reads "This is Bubbles".