A baby pygmy hippo named Moo Deng: she is all we want to look at

The thing to know about the pygmy hippopotamus named Moo Deng is that she is angry, but also she is sweet. In photographs, she is often blurry and at all times, she is shiny. She secretes something known as “blood sweat” which is actually her sunscreen.

She is a hippopotamidae. She is stout. She runs like a piglet and has a snout like a very, very new puppy’s. She is very fast.

In one video, a zookeeper gently gets Moo Deng to open her mouth and reveal her small, pointy teeth. Her mother’s snout enters the frame. It is large, with short white bristles; the way it moves looks a lot like the way a human mother’s snout moves when she smells her daughter’s hair. Her parents are named Jona and Tony.

Moo Deng is two months old. She is not old enough to eat grass, but she pretends to. Her name means “bouncy pork”. She is bouncy even in her sleep.

She is, at the same time, what being in your 20s is like. She is the duality of woman. “Moo Deng the most beautiful girl in the world”. Moo Deng is “literally just a girl”. She knows that the price you pay for the rewards of being loved is the mortifying ordeal of being known.

When Moo Deng’s mother is brought a bowl of roughly chopped fruit and vegetables, Moo Deng climbs into the bowl. In another clip, Moo Deng tries to get out of the water where she had been wallowing, but keeps slipping. Pygmy hippos love water, but not as much as the much larger and much deadlier common hippo, which is more like a bouncy great white shark.

The best sentences written about Moo Deng are the captions for a series of clips of her doing things, which don’t have full stops after them: “Moo Deng is a playful little hippo who loves to bounce around / it often keeps its mouth open and it must have a lot of fun every day before it can fall asleep”. This is one half of the hippo she is, we all are. This is one half, you might say, of the reality we live in.

Then there is her (and our) other side: “For its safety the zookeeper sometimes restricts its movement which makes Moo Deng very angry and it turns its back on the zookeeper / At this point the zookeeper will give its rear a light pat / Moo Deng annoyed by the disturbance will jump up in anger / And later bite the zookeeper’s knee in secret”. Who is your zookeeper?

Moo Deng is dramatic and sweet. She plays like a dog, biting at a hand that grabs her snout. She chomps at the water from a hosepipe. She weighs more than 20kg.

Moo Deng was born in Khao Kheow open zoo in Thailand. Native to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea in West Africa, pygmy hippos like forests and swamps: enchantment and muck. They are nocturnal, but try not to think about that too much as you watch videos of Moo Deng in the daytime.

There is a West African story told about pygmy hippos: they hold a diamond in their mouths to light their way through the forests at night. It isn’t hard to believe.

You can sing Moo Deng’s name instead of Jolene’s in the Dolly Parton song. People seem to want her to go on Hot Ones, a show where celebrities are interviewed while eating increasingly spicy chicken wings.

“I love Moo Deng so much. I would die for her, get reincarnated and then die for her again,” said one man.

She is Tony Soprano’s ducks, which is to say that she is all we can and want to look at, because the future is uncertain and possibly quite terrible, and the past seems to be full of omens, and you feel like if you just look at Moo Deng for enough days, the good future will arrive without you having to experience how close it came to being another future altogether. Or maybe we are just depressed.

As we have said of Moo Deng, and therefore of ourselves: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH but also, ZzZ.

• Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a book for Scribner Australia

• Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you’d like to see profiled by this columnist? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com