Video of hippo defecation with fake farting sound effects, you can find other vids of hippo defecation too.
They do something I’ve never seen another quadruped do which is they wag their tail violently while defecating which flings feces everywhere. Compare to a horse, elephant, etc which just let them drop.
What is the point behind this behavior?
Antipathy?
Factual answer: to mark the riverbank as his territory
Farcical answer: to impress art critics
The Master Speaks (from 1982):
It impresses the other hippos, the stinkiest one is the boss. (It’s true I saw it on a wildlife doc.)
When else would it fling feces?
You got me there!
Thanks Cal I guess I should have known Cecil had addressed this. Zookeepers must love hippos for this trait.
On Sundays they sling shit. On Tuesdays they toss turds. On Wednesdays they waft waste. On Fridays they fling feces. On Saturdays they spray stool.
On Mondays they merely mound manure while on Thursdays they tend to be constipated and just think things through.
Since hippos defecate in the same waters that they live in, they must have good immune systems. It would be like humans living in a sewer.
Because they like the alliteration.
Everything else living in a river defecates in it, too. Human body wastes cause disease because we form such dense populations. If a hunter-gatherer human population was shitting in a river it wouldn’t be a big deal to the people downstream because it would be a tiny, tiny fraction of the volume of water. By contrast, there are 500 million people living in the Ganges river basin.