The common hippo is a herd animal that occupies open water by day and grazes grassland at night. The pygmy hippo does something different. Its eyes sit on the sides of the head rather than on top, its nostrils are less prominent, and its toes are more separated with less webbing, all indications of a life spent mostly on land.
It uses water for cooling and for escape rather than as a daytime residence, often resting in a wallow, a stream bank hollow or a burrow made by another animal. It browses rather than grazes, taking leaves, shoots, ferns and fruit that has fallen to the forest floor, and it lives alone or in pairs rather than in pods.
The species is poorly documented in the wild. Much of the behaviour described in older accounts comes from captive animals, and estimates of the wild population, generally placed at fewer than three thousand mature individuals, rest on limited survey coverage across a range fragmented by logging and civil conflict.