Thousands of Sheep Went on a Stampede One Night 138 Years Ago. We Still Don't Know Why.

3 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:At the turn of the 20th century, the U.K. experienced a series of sheep panics, the biggest of which occurred in 1888, when tens of thousands of sheep stampeded across 200 square miles.A scientist, looking into the causes of these panics after sheep stampeded again in 1893, theorized that particularly dark nights punctuated by lightning could be enough to startle this easily frightened species. However, this still doesn’t explain how so many sheep were simultaneously startled across such a broad area.Although not native to the island nation, sheep have a 6,000-year history with the United Kingdom. It’s believed Britain’s neolithic farmers first brought sheep to the island around 4,000 B.C.E., and during their nearly 400 years ruling over Britannia, the Romans introduced new breeds to what was then the edge of the known world. By the time the Norman Invasion of 1066 C.E. took place, sheep were by far the dominant farm animal throughout the land. But in all those thousands of years of history, no sheep story has quite lived up to the Great Sheep Panic of 1888.At around 8 p.m. on November 3, 1888, tens of thousands of sheep stampeded across 200 square miles of Oxfordshire, a county northwest of London. They tore up fields, broke through pens, and when farmers went looking for their flocks, they were found miles away from home and clearly terrified. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) says that because sheep are prey animals and have no defensive strategies, they are often skittish and easily frightened. So, while a stampede of, say, a herd of scared sheep isn’t an oddity, the sheer size of this ovine oddity—along with a complete lack of immediately discernible cause—has stumped experts for nearly 150 years.One of the first known references to the “sheep panic” popped up in an article in The Times of London on November 20, 1888, only a few weeks after the panic:At a time as near 8 o'clock as possible the tens of thousands of sheep folded in the large sheep-breeding districts north, east, and west of Reading were taken with a sudden fright, jumping their hurdles, escaping from the fields, and running hither and thither; in fact, there must for some time, have been a perfect stampede…We have not heard, nor can any of the farmers give, any reasonable explanation of what we have described. The night was intensely dark, with occasional flashes of lightning, but we do not think either circumstance would account for such an effect being produced over such a large area.Five years later, another sheep panic occurred in roughly the same area, and this second event inspired Oliver Vernon Aplin (an ornithologist by training) to investigate the matter. According to a Nature article published decades later in 1921, Alpin concluded that these sheep panics were likely the result of extremely dark nights. One of the reports Aplin uncovered from the 1893 event was a witness saying how an inexplicable darkness descended on the area between the hours of 8 and 9 pm, while another witness said that a dark cloud traveled along the landscape and created conditions similar to that of “being shut up in a dark room.”“Mr. Aplin states that animals probably see perfectly well on ordinary dark nights, and we can imagine a bewilderment coming over them when they find themselves overtaken by a thick darkness in which they can see nothing,” the Nature article reported. If this darkness caused fear in only a few sheep, it could’ve been enough to induce a massive stampede as sheep began bumping into troughs or running into each other.But while this is the only plausible hypothesis offered (no, aliens were not involved), it still doesn’t quite explain how sheep across such a broad area erupted into a stampede at the same time. The mystery remains.Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.