She’s gorgeous. She’s moist. She’s exploited.
Moo Deng, the Internet’s current “it girl,” is a two-month-old pygmy hippo who lives in captivity at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Thailand. Her adorable face and slippery body have charmed the world, and the memes, TikToks, and tweets are endless.
World Animal Protection has its own hot take on Moo Deng, and, unfortunately, it’s not as cute as she is. Khao Kheow Open Zoo is an exploitative venue that sells dangerous and cruel interactions with wild animals. Sharing Moo Deng content might seem innocuous, but it promotes cruelty to animals.
Wild Animals Aren’t Props
The Khao Kheow Open Zoo allows visitors to touch and feed wild animals. Photos posted on review sites show people feeding and interacting with penguins, petting lemurs and kangaroos, and posing with elephants. The Khao Kheow Open Zoo is flagged as not meeting TripAdvisor’s animal welfare guidelines. World Animal Protection worked with TripAdvisor to end ticket sales to venues that allow direct contact with wild animals in 2016.
Multiple TripAdvisor reviews express concerns about the well-being of animals at Khao Kheow. One reviewer wrote,
“We went with my friends because they wanted to see the baby hippo, but it was really depressing after a few minutes, you can see the sadness on the animals, also an [sic] isolated animals desperate to be with the others, one walking repeatedly from one point to other [sic] non-stop and elephants were really heart breaking to see…”
Due to Moo Deng’s popularity, visitors to the zoo have doubled since her birth in July. Good news for the zoo’s bank account and bad news for Moo Deng and the other wild animals held there. Some visitors are even mistreating Moo Deng, throwing items and water at her to try to wake her up.
Moo Deng Is Endangered and Zoos Aren’t Helping
Pygmy hippos are endangered, and their population is decreasing. Approximately 2,000 to 2,500 pygmy hippos remain in the wild in West Africa. The Khao Kheow Open Zoo has stated that it hopes Moo Deng’s celebrity will increase support for conservation efforts.
Unfortunately, visiting a zoo or consuming its social media content does nothing to help animals. For decades, zoos have argued that wild animal exhibits inspire visitors to support conservation efforts. However, this myth has been debunked by multiple studies, including one that “found very little evidence of any measurable effect of a single informal visit on adults’ conservation knowledge, concern or ability to do something useful.”
Care About Moo Deng? Protect Her Home in West Africa
Pygmy hippos are dying out due to deforestation by the mining and logging industries. Some pygmy hippos are also killed for meat. Memes are fun, but the only way to ensure pygmy hippos are here 100 years from now is to safeguard their habitat from destructive industries and climate change. We need to enact strong laws that protect wild lands. We need to stop the climate crisis by overhauling our food system. We need to stop exploiting wild animals for our entertainment. Moo Deng deserves nothing less.
Want to help? Moo Deng isn’t local, but other wild animals are suffering in captivity right here in the United States. Tell Six Flags to free Joyce, an elephant, and send her to sanctuary.