If you’re like us or almost everyone online, photos of two-month-old Thai pygmy hippo Moo Deng will make you gasp with joy and burst into tears. You might even want to eat the adorable animal in question.
“I’m gonna eat moo deng and become the most hated person on the internet,” one user wrote on X-formerly-Twitter wrote.
“I want a To bellow Deng birthday cake,” another joked“That way I can do what I want most and to eat the little fat one.”
“Can you imagine,” a third joked“how delicious Moo Deng would taste in a lettuce wrap.”
Oddly enough, there may be a perfectly reasonable expectation for this horrible hunger: a documented psychological phenomenon called “cute aggressionin which cute things like baby animals can trigger an unexpected urge for violence.
Perhaps best illustrated by a 2012 sketch from “Key & Peele,” in which the couple, dressed in dragbecome so overwhelmed by the cuteness of puppies that they start killing them, experts suspect that this phenomenon is the reason why people have such a huge hunger for the defenseless Moo Deng.
In a interview with HuffPostsocial psychologist Oriana Aragón — who also happened to be one of the people who came up with the concept under the heading of “playful aggression” — said visitors to Thailand’s Khao Kheow Open Zoo who started throwing things in her enclosure can express this cuteness behavior to the extreme.
“Usually it’s a feeling of being overwhelmed by the cuteness,” Aragón said, “and then you just want to squeeze, pinch and bite.”
People who are famous and threatened The baby hippo at the zoo outside Bangkok may not be aware of it, as evolutionary psychologist Daniel Kruger told the website, her handlers bite And screamshe sleeps 20 hours a day.
“They sleep during the day,” Kruger said HuffPost“I put the responsibility on the people to sort it out better, because this poor hippo could be traumatized by all those people irritating her.”
While those Moo Deng fans definitely shouldn’t take their adorable aggression out on our beloved slimy baby, their behavior does illustrate a common phenomenon – though it’s one that, needless to say, none of us should ever exhibit in real life.
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