Can Animals Lose Their Minds? “It was like dealing with a thousand heroin addicts,” Loui
Can Animals Lose Their Minds?“It was like dealing with a thousand heroin addicts,” Louise McKnight, a sheep farmer from Australia’s New South Wales, told the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this week. McKnight and her husband recently lost 800 of their herd after the sheep began grazing on the deceptively named “darling pea plant” that had begun growing in their pastures. As the McKnights observed, their flock had grown addicted to the noxious flower, which made them staggery, depressed and even suicidal. “They just go to a post and bang their head on it till they crack their heads open,” she said.Local veterinarians were flummoxed by the sheeps’ erratic behavior, which one described as similar to that of a drunk, echoing another incident in Turkey from 2005 where 1,500 sheep hurled themselves off a cliff (though nearly two-thirds survived as the mounting pile of woolen bodies helped cushion their fall). Incredibly, another flock of 50 leapt to their deaths in 2010.Continue -- source link
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