WI:Hippos in America?

There WERE hippos in America, they just went extinct along with pigmy elephants and mammoths

There werent any Hippos in Americas. There was a species of rhinoceros, Teleoceras, which propably occupied similar enough ecological niche, but it went exist long before Pleistocene.
 
https://www.wired.com/2013/12/hippopotamus-ranching/

I found this article interesting and wondered

What if hippo ranching became an actual thing in the USA?

As other posters noted, they're deadly and not domesticable.

OTOH there was this incident:

http://www.williamson-county-historical-commission.org/Hutto/how_the_hippo_came_to_hutto_texas.html
According to local legend, it was in 1915 that a circus train stopped in Hutto at the depot to take on passengers, pick up and deliver mail and possibly take on water and fuel for the steam locomotive. The circus train workers also would have taken this opportunity to care for their animals. At some point during this historic layover, the hippo got out of the railcar and made its way to the nearby Cottonwood Creek. This caused much consternation for the circus workers. Local farmers and merchants watched the commotion in amusement and with interest as unsuccessful efforts were made to extricate the hippopotamus from the muddy waters of Cottonwood Creek. It is said that the Depot Agent, who at that time would have been Hal Farley, Jr., telegraphed the communities of Taylor and Round Rock that were eight miles to the east and west of Hutto to the effect of: “STOP TRAINS, HIPPO LOOSE IN HUTTO”. After much effort the hippo was prodded from the mud and water that resembled its natural habitat and was reloaded back onto the train car.

Low probability: a breeding pair get loose in some rural location and cannot be retrieved?
 
Hippos are notoriously aggressive creatures who kill anything that bothers them. They are very, very far from becoming ideal livestock.
 
https://www.wired.com/2013/12/hippopotamus-ranching/

I found this article interesting and wondered

What if hippo ranching became an actual thing in the USA?
I imagine the importation of hippos for ranching, aside from opening up previously unproductive swamps to agricultural development, would pave the way for other efforts to important foreign animals to similarly exploit other unproductive areas. For example, I recall reading about a similar idea to import camels to the Southwest. While the importation of invasive species would damage local ecosystems, I find the idea of an eventual equilibrium interesting.
 
They were imported to Columbia by one of the Drug lords and escaped into the local river. I haven't heard how they are doing for several years.
 
Read "Bearfish" from Sea Lion Press. It's a transcript of a series of StoryCorps style interviews about how people coped with the introduction of hippos into the South. Some of the overtly stated changes are interesting, and other divergences can be inferred by the conversations.
 
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