According to reports, on the evening of 3 November 1888, thousands of sheep in hundreds of Oxfordshire farms got spooked and bolted. The next morning they were found miles away, cowering under hedges.
Two weeks later, The Times ruled out “malicious mischief” because “a thousand men could not have frightened and released all these sheep”.
In 1921, the science journal Nature suggested that lightning might have been a trigger – yet sheep regularly endure storms without panicking.
The cause remains uncertain, but whatever did happen most likely led to a turbocharged game of Chinese whispers to account for those numbers of sheep!
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Calum Cohran, Oxford) 'What caused the Great Sheep Panic?'
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