What Spooked the Sheep?

The Mysterious Oxfordshire Sheep panic of 1888

Around 8 in the evening on November 3rd 1888, something a tad wild happened across southern England. For reasons that have never been fully pinned down, thousands of sheep simultaneously lost their minds.

This sounds ridiculous, and it is, but there is a scope to this that goes beyond obnoxious bleating annoying townsfolk for a couple hours.

At the moment in question these sheep broke free of whatever bonds that held them. Pens, fields, and shelters left abandoned because of sheer terror. Terror so pervasive that it affected sheep over a 200 square mile radius. Take that in, all sheep within 200 square miles go berserk at the same moment.

These sheep were found the next day, some panting with fearful exhaustion under hedges, others cowered together in the corners of fields and some found in fields miles away from the fields they belonged in.

So, how did we get here?

Honestly, no one really knows for sure. On November 20th the London Times reported that "malicious mischief was out of the question because a thousand men could not have frightened and released all these sheep”. One of the only reasonable explanations for this panic came in 1921 from the journal Nature. Nature explained that November 3rd 1888 was "an intensely dark night, with occasional flashes of lightning" elaborating that "panics have often occurred, for sheep are notoriously timid and nervous animals". This explanation has been disputed by those in the area though.

To make matters weirder, a similar panic occurred on year later in 1889, this time in Berkshire.