Like fresh strawberries in the winter? Congratulations, you just killed a hippo.

Apparently, the demand for year-round fresh strawberries has caused Kenyan strawberry farmers to pump more and more water from Lake Naivasha into their fields, leading to a 25% decrease in native hippo population over the last few years.

Lead scientist of the Lake Naivasha environmental surveys Dr. David Harper said: "Almost everybody in Europe who has eaten Kenyan beans or Kenyan strawberries, and gazed at Kenyan roses, has bought Naivasha water. It will become a turgid, smelly pond with impoverished communities eking out a living along bare shores."

As an aside, did anyone here ever see the movie Congo? In it, the intrepid explorers are attacked while on a raft by killer man-eating hippopotamuses. If that isn't funny enough, while sailing through the air to plummet directly into a gaping, blood-stained hippo maw, one of the extras very clearly and distinctly says: "I just knew this was going to happen."

Why fruit shopping poisons the hippo [Times Online]