Moo Deng spends a lot of time sleeping, just like other babies do.
The 4-month-old pygmy hippo, however, comes alive for a few hours every day, gumming leaves, running around the complex, and flinging her head in a quiet, gaping shriek.
Because of her occasional bursts of energy and tendency to snap toothlessly at hoses and knees, she has become a worldwide sensation and an It Girl thanks to these moments, which were recorded by her zookeeper at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo, two hours south of Bangkok, and posted on social media.
Moo Deng, named after a Thai delicacy that translates as “bouncy pork,” has become the symbol of choice for cakes, apparel, tattoos, and pyrotechnics. Makeup tutorials show how to achieve her glossy skin and baby-pink cheeks. For Halloween, this year’s partygoers dressed up like the pygmy hippo. On Saturday Night Live, comedian Bowen Yangon did the same.
Her isolated home, which was struggling after the pandemic, has been turned into a must-see destination for both locals and tourists from abroad.
The enthusiastic crowds reminded 29-year-old travel blogger Dong Kim of a South American soccer match or a Black Friday door-buster bargain more than a zoo when he went in October.
I have visited Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, the Colosseum, and the Great Wall. However, he said, “I have never waited in a line as long as this one.” This hippo literally made people want to die for it.
However, Moo Deng’s unexpected rise to fame was not just due to her admiration for adorable animals or the fact that the West African pygmy hippo is an endangered species. A 31-year-old zookeeper was planning to turn her into a celebrity while she was still pregnant in her mother’s womb. He was doing this by leveraging a global culture that is skilled at leveraging internet virality and saving the financially troubled zoo.
As of right moment, Moo Deng is the most well-known animal on the earth.
At the Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Pattaya, Thailand, on November 11, 2024, Moo Deng consumes grass in her cage.Tenns/Getty Images/Lauren DeCicca
Another unique hippo saved the world’s first modern zoo over 175 years before Moo Deng became a sensation on the internet.
In an attempt to generate enough revenue to remain afloat, the London Zoo opened to the public in 1847 after starting as a members-only society in 1828. When Obaysch, named after an island in the Nile where he was taken, arrived three years later, the visitors became disinterested. With up to 10,000 visitors per day, Obaysch doubled yearly attendance as the first hippo to be seen in Europe since the Roman Empire.
According to Robert Young, a professor of animal conservation at the University of Salford in England, they needed to find a strategy to maintain public interest. Celebrity animals are what they came up with.
Fans developed strong bonds with their favorites very fast. People demonstrated in the streets in 1882 when the zoo sold Jumbo the elephant to P.T. Barnum. Winnie the Pooh was inspired by a black bear named Winnipeg. Every year, hundreds of birthday cards were sent to Guy, a lowland gorilla in the western region.
Animals in the news (Sea Biscuit), films, and television programs (Lassie, Punxsutawney Phil) won over millions of hearts during the 20th century. Social media has recently accelerated the rise in popularity of animals like the JiffPomthe Pomeranian and Grumpy Cat.
As the world watched Fiona the hippo struggle to survive infancy in 2017, she went viral. She became the Cincinnati Zoo’s most popular attraction, generating a children’s book and ice cream flavor.
Renting gigantic pandas from China has emerged as a further tactic to attract tourists. However, after two years, foot traffic stops, according to Young, and zoos spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on bamboo that the pandas occasionally reject. It is far less expensive to house and support pygmy hippos.
West African forest ecology researcher Huanyuan Zhang, a college lecturer at the University of Oxford, was taken aback by the unexpected spike in citations to his work this year. When he learned that the reason was a pygmy hippo that was born almost 6,000 miles from its natural land, his confusion only grew.
Zhang expressed his hope that the global adoration of Moo Deng will increase awareness of deforestation and endangered animals, saying, “It just feels like, out of many friends, one of your normal friends suddenly becomes a celebrity.” In 1982, there were 12,000 pygmy hippos, but currently there are less than 2,500.
According to Young, zoos frequently use ambassador animals to raise awareness of lesser-known species. However, he pointed out that social media will always give preference to the Moo Dengs of the world.
How to get people interested in the ugly things is the main problem, he remarked. It’s very simple to make people desire to preserve a gorilla. It’s a completely other matter when you try to persuade people to rescue the aye-aye, which is maybe the most repulsive monkey on the world.
The Khao Kheow Open Zoo was still reeling from the financial damage four years after the pandemic cut off travel. The 2,000-acre zoo’s maintenance budget was strained due to the few thousand visitors it received each day. Atthapon Nundee, the zookeeper, saw an opportunity when Moo Deng was about to be born.
Nundee’s first job after graduating from college was driving a 10-wheeler truck across the nation, despite his studies to become an electrician. Three years later, he began searching for anything nearer to home. There was an opening at the zoo, which was five minutes away.
Nundee raised newborn hippos for the following eight years, including two of Moo Deng’s siblings, Moo Wan and Moo Tun, who were also named after Thai pig dishes. Nundee claimed that although Moo Deng is well-known for her feisty demeanor, her brothers were equally playful. Nundee was prepared for the next one.
“I know how to set up the camera, when they get funny, and which angle to take to see when it’s cute,” he said. Any animal, like Moo Deng, can achieve fame. It all comes down to your level of friendliness with the animal.
Moo Deng’s fame did not begin when she was born. On the morning of July 10, Nundee found her moving around with the placenta still attached, much to his dismay. No one was around to record the birth of their star.
However, the zoo asked the public to vote on her name in August through an online ballot. Nundee s close-ups of her splashing in the water and snapping at the air started circulating on social media. Admirers called her sweet, or feisty, or filled with silent rage. Before her fame traveled west, Moo Deng’s appeal in Asia was boosted by the fan art produced by Japanese employees at the nearby industrial park.
A participant looks at a photo of herself with an effigy of Moo Deng, the celebrated Thailand pygmy hippopotamus, in front of a mural celebrating biodiversity at the Thailand Pavilion on day three at the UNFCCC COP29 Climate Conference on Nov. 13, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan.TNS/Getty Images/TNSSean Gallup
By September, influencer Molly Swindall, who shares content about attending Taylor Swift concerts and young animals, had taken notice of Moo Deng’s meme-ification. The 29-year-old was so enchanted that, in early October, she flew more than 18 hours to Thailand, stood at Moo Deng s enclosure for four hours, and then returned to New York the next day.
“She is truly iconic,” Swindall remarked. Whether it s a leaf being stuck to her face for a couple hours, or her moon-walking or biting knees, or running around with rage, she just makes you laugh.
By the time she returned for a second visit, the zoo had implemented a five-minute limit for spectators, after some were caught tossing water and shells to try and rouse Moo Deng. Swindall still went through the queue three times, waiting about 30 to 40 minutes each round.
The baby hippo s economic impact has spread far beyond the confines of the sprawling zoo in the Chonburi province.
Miles before the entrance, posters advertise Moo Deng ice cream. The restaurants in the area fill up at lunch time, and on weekends, makeshift stalls sell snacks along the road. The influx of tourists has boosted local incomes by 50% or more, nearby workers said. The month that Moo Deng was born, the zoo had fewer than 85,000 visitors. In October, total attendance rose to 300,000.
Decha Sontanawan, 59, spent about $1,000 to turn an old truck into a merchandise stall for Moo Deng pillows, keychains and T-shirts to sell outside the zoo. He recouped his investment within four days.
Now Sontanawan, his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law, who all work at the zoo, take turns manning the Moo Deng truck on their days off. Everything is better. Everything s recovered, everything s booming, he said.
Skyrocketing demand has transformedMoo Deng into a brand. About 70 companies have paid the zoo for the rights to print Moo Deng on products such as pajamas, pet food and squeezable condensed milk. A supermarket chain launched its own Moo Deng-themed coconut juice after signing a contract that Monday afternoon, and a Thai business newspaper has reported that collaborations are expected to generate as much as $4.3 million by March.
The money now accounts for 30% of revenue, according to Narongwit Chodchoy, the zoo director, with proceeds going to zoo habitats and living conditions, as well as flood victims in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand.
We have to try to keep her fame and reputation going, he said, although, at some point Moo Deng will lose some of her youthful bounciness, and thus some of her charm.
That s why the zoo is already pursuing its next viral hit. A pair of two-toed sloths is on the way, in the hopes that with three two males and one female the zoo will produce another small star. If so, the baby also will be managed by Moo Deng s keeper, who has enjoyed his own rise in fame, if not in pay.
For now, Moo Deng is still going strong. Other baby pygmy hippos born this year in Sydney, Berlin and Edinburgh, have failed to match her allure. The Edinburgh Zoo promoted its newbornpygmy hippo Haggisthis month as a rival to Moo Deng s famed cuteness. It later apologized for pitting the babies against each other.
When a common hippo was born in Eastern Thailand last month, she was named by an online poll too, and christened Hom Daeng, the Thai word for Shallot. Pygmy hippo fans couldn t help but compare. One Facebook user complained that Hom Daeng was too dry, unlike Moo Deng, who appears perpetually moist in photos.
This one has no aura at all, another critic wrote. It s like comparing a celebrity to an ordinary person.
— Stephanie Yang, Los Angeles Times
Special correspondent Poypiti Amatatham in Bangkok contributed to this report.
2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit atlatimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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