Thailand’s got Moo Deng, but the Philly area has plenty of hippo love to go around
In Philadelphia and South Jersey, you can spend hours watching hippos noshing on pumpkins at the Philadelphia Zoo and Adventure Aquarium.
Talk about cuteness overload.
A rosy cheeked pygmy hippopotamus in a Thailand zoo has brought the internet to its knees with a terminal case of the “awww”s. People around the world can’t seem to get enough of videos and photos of little Moo Deng (which translates to “bouncy pig”) who was born about two months ago at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo.
Attendance at the Chonburi zoo has doubled since her birth, and each visitor is being rationed to five minutes of viewing on weekends. Some of the attention has even gotten out of hand. Zoo officials have had to clamp down on visitors who have poured water on the sleeping baby to wake her or thrown food to get her attention, according to media reports.
Moo Deng may be the new kid on her block, but the Philadelphia area has long loved its resident hippos. The superstars are our Nile hippos — threatened, not endangered, like their pygmy cousins, and big: Cindy and Unna at Philadelphia Zoo, and Button and Genny of the Adventure Aquarium in Camden.
“Our hippos are older gals, Cindy and Unna,” said Maggie Morse, the Philadelphia Zoo’s curator of carnivores and ungulates. “They’ve been at the zoo for over 30 years. So they’re the same hippos that I’ve seen since I was a child. They’re a Philadelphia Zoo staple. They’re Philly girls, through and through.”
Nile hippos, in general, are like Philly folks in another way. As amiable as they might seem, you don’t want to mess with them.
“They are the most dangerous animal in Africa, so it’s not actually the Nile crocodiles that you have to watch out for in the water. It’s the hippos,” said Morse. “They’re very territorial, and you would not get that just by seeing them, because they look like little sweet potatoes soaking in the pool.”
And these floating chonks are among the zoo’s most popular critters, according to Morse, especially at events and attractions that involve feeding them.
Every October, for the Boo at the Zoo festivities, Cindy and Unna get to snack on whole pumpkins. And the crowds follow.
A short drive away, at Camden’s Adventure Aquarium, Button, the Nile hippo who just turned 27, and Genny, 24, have delighted visitors since they arrived in 2006. They feed on the hippo herbivore diet: mostly timothy hay but they get added treats, as well.
For their birthday parties, they both love a good whole watermelon smash, although Button has a particular fondness for honeydew.
The hippos’ caretakers have noticed they also have different personalities.
“We sometimes say Genny’s a little more like a dog. Button’s a bit more like a cat,” said Amanda Egen, the aquarium’s assistant curator for birds and mammals. ”When we do training, they’re both very smart. They love to interact. But Button will interact more on her own terms. Genny’s a little more of a pleaser, so she’ll do behaviors a little bit more readily. Button has to be in the mood to want to work with us, which is fine.”
Of course, the hippos respond to food and tend to anticipate feeding times, but they also respond to other parts of their environment, including people.
“We actually noticed during COVID [lockdown], it was helpful to them when we had staff come over and kind of hang by the window so that they would have something to look at,” Egen said. “They did seem to miss having people to look at. We like to say they missed their audience.”
These days, that’s no longer a problem.
“We have a lot of people, especially members of the aquarium, who know them by name,” Egen said. “Kids will come running out to them and say, ‘This one’s Button and that one’s Genny.’ We definitely have a lot of die-hard hippo fans.”
An NPR report says that Sephora Thailand has cashed in on the Moo Deng love by teaching its customers how to “wear your blush like a baby hippo.”
In Philly, we don’t do that. Here we toss our hippos giant pumpkins, but always with love.