Moo Deng Is the Moment

There’s a new main girl in town: a baby pygmy hippopotamus named Moo Deng.

This queen has everything. Beauty and brains. Sass and spirit. A beat face and a biting wit. A cadre of dedicated followers and a face that launched a thousand memes.

If you’ve been anywhere on the internet over the past week or so, you’ve probably seen people fangirling over Moo Deng, posting memes about Moo Deng, or explaining that they feel like this or that Moo Deng today (most common? The Moo Deng biting meme, so relatable).

Here’s everything you need to know about our new shero in the latest edition of TL;DR.

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Give me the TL;DR

A baby pygmy hippopotamus named Moo Deng has captured hearts and minds around the world after her handlers at a Thailand zoo began posting her on social media.

Wait, I need more. What’s the background here?

Moo Deng is a two-month-old pygmy hippopotamus who lives at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Si Racha, Thailand, with a bunch of other hippos. After her birth on July 25, she began to be posted on social media accounts affiliated with the zoo under the name @khamoo.andthegang (Khamoo is an older hippo at the zoo).

According to The New York Times, Moo Deng began to steal the show from her siblings right away due to her fun personality and, honestly, rizz. But what made her star take off internationally was most likely this tweet from Yammi Saracino, a Bangkok-born artist, who told the English-speaking world about the hippo and the naming contest the zoo was having for her.