Recalcitrant Baby Hippo Refuses to Leave the Pool Unless it Sees a ‘Mom Stare’

At a zoo in Kansas, keepers were having trouble with a slippery, recalcitrant, baby pygmy hippopotamus who didn’t want to get out of the pool.

It’s something they deal with every day, but in a viral video shared by the zoo, they demonstrate the best way to resolve the situation: calling his mother.

It amassed 4.6 million views on TikTok, and thousands of comments pointing out that Posie, the mother hippo, arrives and gives her son Mars the “mom stare.”

In the video, zookeepers are seen attempting to muscle Mars out of the pool so he can go inside a shelter in his enclosure for the night. The slippery devil continues to escape them and run back into the pool.

Tanganyika Wildlife Park’s staff explained to Today.com that baby hippos are covered in a slimy secretion called “blood sweat”