Her skin is always moist and her cheeks pink and peachy. She’s usually seen nibbling at her caretakers’ knees, running around her pen — belly rolls jiggling — or opening her mouth in an apparent scream.
It’s Moo Deng, the baby pygmy hippo that has become the internet’s latest obsession.
Since she was born in July in Thailand’s Khao Kheow Open Zoo, Moo Deng — whose name roughly translates to “bouncing pig” or “pork patty” — has reached viral stardom. So far, she’s been meme-ified by the Utah Jazz NBA team, turned into an eerily lifelike cake by a Bangkok bakery and inspired a dewy pink makeup look by Sephora Thailand. She also has her very own Wikipedia page.
But what seems like unlikely celebrity has a simple, if surprising**,** explanation, according to scientists.
Moo Deng and other baby animals spark adoring reactions worldwide because their cuteness hijacks our brains, studies show. The animals’ human baby-like features strike at people’s ingrained nurturing instinct — something scientists think is an evolutionary trait that has allowed the human species to survive across millennia.
“When we see these infantile features — those big eyes, large foreheads, small chins and pudgy bodies — we interpret that as helplessness and as dependency, and it motivates us to care for them,” said Daniel Kruger, a research scientist in evolutionary psychology at the University of Michigan and the State University of New York at Buffalo. “And it’s so powerful that it happens across species.”
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Her skin is always moist and her cheeks pink and peachy. She’s usually seen nibbling at her caretakers’ knees, running around her pen — belly rolls jiggling — or opening her mouth in an apparent scream.
It’s Moo Deng, the baby pygmy hippo that has become the internet’s latest obsession.
Since she was born in July in Thailand’s Khao Kheow Open Zoo, Moo Deng — whose name roughly translates to “bouncing pig” or “pork patty” — has reached viral stardom. So far, she’s been meme-ified by the Utah Jazz NBA team, turned into an eerily lifelike cake by a Bangkok bakery and inspired a dewy pink makeup look by Sephora Thailand. She also has her very own Wikipedia page.
But what seems like unlikely celebrity has a simple, if surprising**,** explanation, according to scientists.
Moo Deng and other baby animals spark adoring reactions worldwide because their cuteness hijacks our brains, studies show. The animals’ human baby-like features strike at people’s ingrained nurturing instinct — something scientists think is an evolutionary trait that has allowed the human species to survive across millennia.
“When we see these infantile features — those big eyes, large foreheads, small chins and pudgy bodies — we interpret that as helplessness and as dependency, and it motivates us to care for them,” said Daniel Kruger, a research scientist in evolutionary psychology at the University of Michigan and the State University of New York at Buffalo. “And it’s so powerful that it happens across species.”
Read more here: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/09/18/baby-hippo-moo-deng-viral-science/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com](https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/09/18/baby-hippo-moo-deng-viral-science/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com)