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October 12, 2024 - 8:00am
On 10 July, at Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Thailand’s Chonburi province, a star was born. Moo Deng became the internet’s latest fixation, an “inexplicably moist”, blurry, belligerent pygmy hippopotamus. Since she was introduced to the public last month, she has joined the pantheon of sainted animals — Doge, Shabani the handsome gorilla, Grumpy Cat — who are briefly upheld as zoological zeitgeist-bearers before disappearing into digital oblivion.
She has inspired a skyrocketing cryptocurrency: “Moodeng” has surged 65% in recent days, with a fittingly “short-term bullish structure” which saw one investor turn $800 into $7.5 million. She has also sparked a worrying trend of zookeepers fattening up their charges to court virality, with regional Asian zoos being razzed for overfeeding leopards, bears and a “turkey-sized peacock” (amusingly excused as simply having “loose skin”). Elsewhere, in China’s Guangdong province, zookeepers admitted to showing counterfeit pandas (painted chow chow dogs) to lap up some of Ms Deng’s social-media hype.
But it is not her size or species which has set hearts fluttering — and compelled American tourists to travel 18 hours to catch a glimpse. She is a revenant of the summer’s thirst for “brat”; a subversion of the internet’s predilection for cuteness in that though she is cute, she is also an agent of chaos. She has been described as a “lifestyle icon” for her chaotic mid-twenties written-by-Lena-Dunham vibe; “probably screaming or sleeping”, she chomps at her keepers’ legs or dozes contentedly in squalor.
She is the Generation Z “princess” archetype, and has now reached the inevitable level of fame-strangeness also currently experienced by the singer Chappell Roan, who has cancelled shows for the sake of her mental health and spoken about the obsessive parasocialism of her “stalker” fans.
Recently, this confluence was (bluntly) riffed on by Bowen Yang from the limping megalith SNL. Though inexpertly handled by the writers, the sketch did make a convincing point about the weirdness of a certain breed of fan — young, female, chronically online — which expresses itself in a sort of tender violence: Moo Deng has had objects and water thrown at her, which will do nothing to help her anger-management issues. In the past few days, the cuteness-aggression — the same urge which may find you squeezing your darling dog, or threatening to “eat” a baby — has reached fever pitch: Moo Deng has been carved up in cake form, and subjected to a meme of Kamala Harris describing how she’d prepare a big old, buttery joint of meat (“lather that baby up”). Her political influence goes further still, represented in cartoon form on recent voting guidance in Pennsylvania.
Moo Deng’s virality is partly due to the morally dubious circumstances of her captivity. In this sense, she keeps company with other internet obsessions such as Harambe the gorilla, who was shot at Cincinnati Zoo in 2016 when a toddler fell into his enclosure, and Cecil the Lion, who was lured out of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park and killed by an American trophy hunter in 2015. This is a point made by Peta, which has claimed that the zoo is exploiting Moo Deng “for profit, parading her round like an attraction”. While true, it’s a fact which undoes the whole project of shutting down zoos: if animals roam free, we can’t milk any content out of them.
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SubscribePoppy, girl, for god’s sake, go out for a walk in nature. Put down the digital heroin.
Perhaps UnHerd could replace Ms Sowerby with AI? The articles would probably be better.
I don’t think Moo Deng particularly cares that her fame isn’t going to last. Somehow I have a feeling that chomping grass and wallowing around in a pond might ultimately end up higher on her list of priorities than staying world famous.
I must live a very sheltered life as I have never heard of ANY of that – mind you, I started skipping quite a lot once I got the gist of the article, so I may have missed something I do know about, but i doubt it.
Perhaps something that lives on YT shorts or whatever is not really worth an article, is it. There must be more interesting things to talk about, Poppy.
A cryptocurrency based on a pygmy hippo is far from the most absurd crypto story going around. In fact, pretty much everything associated with crypto is absurd.
Very good work Poppy. Perfect cynicism for the age. Keep it up.
I don’t know what this column was, and I’m also uncertain if we should blame the author’s university professors, or her therapists.
Funny illuminating article. Modern life is so quirky.