Living collections and the Moo-Deng phenomenon
- Rosa Dyer
- Apr 26
- 7 min read
We are continuing this series looking at the relationships between animals, objects and museums with our next celebrity animal highlight. All of the highlights have been centred around particular kinds of museum spaces, that is, ethnographic or natural history museums. This has meant that so far we’ve mostly focused on animal-objects that have necessitated the animal dying for us to encounter them, because most specimens in these kinds of museums are no longer living (although of course we can’t forget the wonderful world of museum moths from episode 5 which eke out a pretty successful existence in our museums despite the best efforts of museum staff!).
Today then, let's pivot our focus and think about the relationship between museums and animals slightly differently, by considering the idea of “living collections”. We forget sometimes I think museums aren’t just dusty buildings full of dead or inanimate objects, but that zoos are also considered museum spaces. Now obviously, the ethical and philosophical discussion around the existence of zoos in society is a massive topic that I’m sure this podcast has covered much more adeptly than I can ever hope to in a brief highlight episode, so I’m not even going to pretend to try and add meaningfully to that larger discussion.
However, I am interested in how we can think about zoos as forms of museums and how thinking about the animals which live inside them as a living collection makes us view those animals in particular ways. While we might not often think about them in these terms, zoos, along with aquariums and botanic gardens, are also museums, spaces where processes of cataloguing, curation, display and interpretation take place. The difference being of course, that their collections are living. As a framing technology, the zoo shapes how we understand and relate to animals, similar in some ways to any other museum space.
I thought it would be fun to explore this through the force of nature that is the viral sensation Moo-deng, the Pygmy hippo!
Pygmy Hippos
If you operate in any kind of social media sphere I think you would be hard pressed to have completely avoided the phenomenon that is Moo-deng, the amazingly cute pygmy hippo residing in a Thai zoo, who took over certain areas of the internet and TikTok last year. Before going into the specifics of Moo-deng’s stardom, lets first talk about the life history of the pygmy hippo more generally, because I think it is an important context for understanding Moo-deng’s life in the zoo, and the potential influence of her internet fame.
Moo-deng is a member of Choeropsis liberiensis or the Liberian pygmy hippopotamus, a species native to Liberia. They are one of two extant species of pygmy hippo, both existing in the West African region. As the name suggests, they are much smaller than their enormous cousins, the common hippopotamus, standing at a comparatively diminutive 2 and half feet tall. They are short and stocky creatures, with short legs and webbed feet. They have smooth, grey skin, which is kept slick through the secretion of hiposoduric acid from mucous glands all over their body, which keeps them hydrated and protected from the sun.
In the wild, they are found in swampy dense rainforest areas of Liberia, and are notoriously shy and difficult to spot. Like other hippo species, they are semi-aquatic and will generally be found close to rivers and other bodies of water, in which they spend a significant amount of time. They are herbivores and graze on grasses and aquatic plants, often doing so at night in order to avoid the sun.
From a conservation perspective, Liberian pygmy hippos are considered endangered by IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. An estimate in 1993 suggested there were as few as 2,500 pygmy hippos lefts, and this number has likely further reduced since then. As a species in the wild, pygmy hippos are affected by a number of human-induced threats such as agricultural expansion, logging and infrastructure development which have led to habitat fragmentation that makes the surviving pygmy hippo populations even more vulnerable to collapse. A subspecies existed in Nigeria, but this is now believed to be extinct as there have been no sightings for decades. Efforts have been made to limit these threats such as establishing protected areas and wildlife reserves, but it is an on-going challenge for the wild population.
Around 350 currently Pygmy hippos exist ex-situ in a number of zoos around the world and have been kept in captivity since the early 1900s. They are a much less common zoo inhabitant than their larger cousins, but as Moo-deng’s popularity attests to, they are often highly popular exhibits. They have been bred successfully in zoos for decades and are seen as fairly unproblematic residents, with a reputation for being easy to manage with few health issues, although recent studies do suggest this may be a false assumption, and that captive bred pygmy hippos are often vulnerable to polycystic kidney disease, obesity and high neonatal mortality rates.
Moo-deng the celebrity Pygmy Hippo
So if that is the broader context of pygmy hippos in the wild, where does Moo-deng and her social media fame within the zoo come in?
Moo Deng was born July 10, 2024, at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Bang Phra, Thailand. A name which was voted upon by followers online, signalling the start of her internet exposure and meaning “bouncy pork”, Moo-deng quickly became a viral sensation on platforms like Tiktok, where her tenacious and playful personality was documented by her keepers.
Her adorable bouncy appearance coupled with her tendency to terrorise her keepers by biting their shoes, run around at high speed on her stumpy legs, and chasing water from a hose quickly made her one of the animal icons of 2024. Her screams were emblematic of how we all seemed to feel in an increasingly unpredictable world. Her videos quickly racked up millions of views, and Moo-deng became an international sensation; she was the subject of an SNL sketch and even a crypto-currency was launched in her name. She became thoroughly “memeified” across all corners of the internet, with her smooth, moisturised skin being a source of envy and delight.
There is an excellent article by Isa Farfan which gives a fascinatingly comprehensive timeline of the memes which surrounded her, I do recommend checking it out. Commenters online even began describing her as an “icon of female rage” and anti-capitalist sentiment, with users encouraging us to take her lead as an “ungovernable potato”. Her chaotic and often violent actions were a a symbol of frustration, fury and resistance in a 2024 dominated by the likes of Donald Trump.
Her fame was not just contained to an online following, but also translated into record visitor numbers at the zoo, which doubled in number over the summer in 2024, with many people travelling especially to see Moo-deng’s antics in real life. This was not without problems, and upon seeing that Moo-deng was asleep (likely due to the fact that pygmy hippos are most active at night in the wild), visitors soon began throwing objects like water bottles at her in order to get her to react, to the point that the zoo had to limit the capacity of people around her enclosure.
Moo-deng as a conservation icon
It is unsurprising in many ways why Moo-deng was such a hit, she falls into many of the definitions of “Kindchenschema”, a set of characteristics coined by Austrian etologist Konrad Lorenz to describe the features of babies which are appealing to us – i.e. what makes something cute. These include things like large eyes, a round head or a shortened snout are apparently features which make us inherently want to care for an animal.
As “living collections” the animals which inhabit zoo exhibitions are in part often intended to be ambassadors. Studies have shown that the public strongly favour certain kinds of animals over others in zoo settings, with active, cute, entertaining and endangered animals coming out on top. Moo-deng therefore seems like a perfect candidate for zoo-based stardom.
Animals like Moo-deng have the potential to bring both attention and money to support both in-situ and ex-situ conservation initiatives, or at least this the hope. Charismatic, cute or iconic animals are particularly important for zoos as spaces which proport to support the in-situ conservation of wild populations through fundraising, education and research. This link between in-situ and ex-situ conservation is often inherent in the existential justification for animal being housed in publicly accessible zoos – that captive individuals can help support the continued existence and conservation of their species.
I guess the key question though is does this actually help support the conservation of the species? Studies have shown that while zoos might have large following on social media, their posts rarely actually mention the work of conservation agencies or fundraising initiatives, sometimes as little as 5% of the time. When asked by journalists if the “moo-deng phenomenon” had helped the conservation efforts of pygmy hippos in the wild, a researcher working on pygmy hippos in the Tai National Park in the Cote D’ivoire replied with a rather lukewarm “not yet”. She felt that while Moo-deng had raised the profile of pygmy hippos in some ways, so at least people might now be aware they exist, there is a long way to go before they can benefit from targeted conservation efforts enabled by popular support in the same way that other species like elephants or tigers do.
Interestingly, all the conservationists who were asked also agreed that Moo-deng’s internet fame had done little to actually inform people about the threats to wild pygmy hippos. In their view, watching funny videos and participating in memes doesn’t necessarily translate into greater exposure for conservation agencies. It seems like the memification of Moo-deng, as an icon of female rage, anti-capitalism, cryptocurrency or enviable skincare is more a process of objectification than anything else. Social media is increasingly adding a component to the work animals do as ambassadors in zoos, with individuals like Moo-deng becoming objectified in new ways, and to a much broader international audience.
As living collections, animals in zoos are perhaps in some ways becoming coming more and more like the other animal-objects we have discussed in this series, objectified through new platforms and spaces in ways which are definitely new phenomena, but not necessarily in a direction which actually helps to enrich the life of Moo-deng as an individual or indeed aid in conservation of the rest of her species which continues to be under threat.
Rosa Dyer is a Collaborative Doctoral Project PhD candidate at Birkbeck College University of London and the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Her practice-based project at the Pitt Rivers Museum focuses on featherwork collections made by South American Indigenous peoples. Her work aims to reveal the dynamic relations that exist between birds, people and environments by working with Indigenous collaborators to reimagine how the feathered objects are represented in the museum. You can connect with Rosa via Twitter (@rosajdyer).
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