China: Mysterious video of sheep circling goes viral on social media

Hundreds of sheep have been walking in a circle for more than ten days in China's Inner Mongolia province, creating buzz on social media.

(Illustrative image) Getty Images/clickhere

Text by: RFI Follow

2 mins

The video is going viral on social media in China.

Sheep have been circling in a farm in the north of the country for more than two weeks.

A behavior to say the least mysterious as reported by the local media.

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With our correspondent in Beijing

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Strange music for strange round, these black and gray images filmed by a surveillance camera of a farm in Baotou in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia first fueled comments in the local press before being published on the account People's Daily Twitter on November 16.

“

” said the organ of the Chinese Communist Party at the time.

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

Diseases that make you dizzy?

A mystery that surprised the shepherdess.

The curious carousel would have started on November 4 with a few animals, said Ms. Miao, then quickly others entered the dance, finally joined by almost the entire herd from the same enclosure.

A perfect round in the direction of the hands of a clock which concerns only the enclosure number 13 - that is not invented -, out of the 34 that counts this breeding.

So what happened?

Why did the ovidae start to turn?

It's rare for herds to run in circles, but it's no surprise that an animal gets dizzy, veterinarians say.

It is even a disease, or diseases linked to bacteria in spoiled fodder: polycephaly which parasitizes one of the hemispheres of the brain and causes this movement in a loop, the latter being usually associated with stiff movements and a problem of sight which prevents the animal from following its companions;

or even listeriosis, which also causes this walk in a circle.

A round that lasted more than two weeks

Except that in the case of listeriosis, the animal generally dies within 24 to 48 hours of the appearance of symptoms.

And yet they turn, or at least the sheep kept turning for more than two weeks.

Some local media such as

have therefore come up with another explanation: the tornado effect guided by the herd's instinct for self-preservation like reindeer swirling around the steppe in order to protect the most fragile among them. of the entry of predators into the circle.

What is true for wild animals, does it make sense for ovidae in captivity?

Did one of them get scared and, starting to turn, end up dragging the herd into delirium?

A case to follow.

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• Animal health