If you’re anything like us or pretty much everyone else online, photos of the virally famous two-month-old Thai pygmy water hippo Moo Deng, will make you gasp with joy and break out in tears — and perhaps, want to eat the adorable animal in question.
“I am going to eat moo deng and become the most hated person on the internet,” one user on X-formerly-Twitter wrote.
“I want a Moo Deng birthday cake,” quipped another. “That way i can do what i want most and eat the little fatty.”
“Can you imagine,” joked a third, “how good Moo Deng would taste in a lettuce wrap.”
Oddly enough, there may be a perfectly reasonable expectation for this ghastly hunger: a documented psychological phenomenon called “cute aggression,” in which adorable things like baby animals can cause an unexpected urge toward violence.
Perhaps best illustrated by a 2012 “Key & Peele” sketch in which the pair, dressed in drag, become so overwhelmed with the cuteness of puppies that they start killing them, experts suggest that this phenomenon may be behind why people have developed such a terrible ravenousness for the defenseless Moo Deng.
In an interview with HuffPost, social psychologist Oriana Aragón — who also happened to be one of the people who coined the concept under the moniker “playful aggression” — said that visitors to Thailand’s Khao Kheow Open Zoo who’ve started throwing things into her enclosure may be acting out this cuteness-triggered behavior to the extreme.
“Usually it’s this feeling of being sort of overwhelmed by the cuteness,” Aragón said, “and then you just want to pinch and squeeze and bite.”
People who come to visit the famous and endangered baby hippo at the zoo located outside of Bangkok may be unaware, as evolutionary psychologist Daniel Kruger told the website, that between biting her handlers and screaming, she sleeps for 20 hours per day.
“They’re sleeping during the daytime,” Kruger told HuffPost. “I put the responsibility on the people to manage it better, because this poor little hippo could be traumatized by all these people who are aggravating her.”
While those Moo Deng fans should absolutely not take their cute aggression out on our beloved slimy baby, their behavior does illustrate a well-known phenomenon — though one that none of us, needless to say, should be acting out in real life.
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