Being a sheep is blindly following the crowd. Is a sheep's sheepiness enough to make an entire flock walk around aimlessly for days on end?
That's a mystery the internet has pondered for a week now and it has proved more difficult than you would think.
On 17 November, a news outlet run by the Chinese state, called People's Daily, shared an eerie video of a group of sheep in a circle.
The flock had been tracing the shape for more than a week before the video was released.
The great sheep mystery! Hundreds of sheep walk in a circle for over 10 days in N China's Inner Mongolia. The sheep are healthy and the reason for the weird behavior is still a mystery. pic.twitter.com/8Jg7yOPmGK
— People's Daily, China (@PDChina) November 16, 2022
Some people on the internet thought the sheep were going to die.
The ruminant's were thought to be suffering from a disease. The disease is caused by soilbacteria that can cause a lean on one side of the brain. In an outbreak of circling disease, only a few percent of sheep are affected, and they tend to die after a few days.
Dozens of sheep were found walking in a circle, with no details as to how the animals were eating, drinking, or defecating, with media outlets reporting that the animals did so for 12 days in a row. They are still on their way.
"As soon as I saw it, I thought, 'I've never seen sheep act like that,'" said Emma Doyle, a livestock expert at the University of New England.
It seems a little questionable. It seems like they put something in the middle to stop them from entering.
At times, images of the sheep shared by other outlets show people in the middle of a circle frozen in time.
Matt Bell is an agricultural scientist at Hartpury University in England. When sheep are kept in a pen for long periods of time, they might start pacing in a circle.
Big cats are held in captivity and this is a common symptom. Repetitive behavior that doesn't seem to serve any purpose can be caused by zoochosis. If a herding animal starts acting this way, it could catch on and cause a lot of problems.
The other sheep join as they are flock animals and bond with their friends.
More and more people joined the ring as the days went on according to UK Metro. Bell has an explanation. No other pen of sheep on the same property was acting this way. Only this group was present.
Another odd event that was captured last year is the endless ring of sheep. There is a flock of sheep in a circle.
It turned out that the owner of the sheep had put food in rings that caused the flock to form a sphere.
There isn't an explanation for the circling flock. The 'great sheep mystery' will continue without more information.
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