Watch: sheep mysteriously walk in circle for 12 consecutive days in China

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

The sheep owner, Miao, claimed the circle started with a few sheep before the whole flock joined, according to Metro UK. The sheep in only one of the 34 pens at the spot were moving in a circle.

While the People’s Daily said the reason behind the behaviour of the sheep remains a mystery, Metro UK said a possible cause could be a bacterial disease called Listeriosis, which has been known to cause ‘circling’ in animals. The video was filmed in the city of Baotou on November 4.

The world was also left bewildered for decades by ‘fairy circles’ in Namibia. These are circular patches, mostly barren, spread across 1,100 miles in the grasslands of Southern Africa. A recent study by Stephan Getzin, an ecologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany, proposed that that plants in the circles’ outer rings had evolved to maximise their limited water in the desert, CNN reported.