Pop culture obsessives writing for the pop culture obsessed.

Just a video of 18 turkeys engaging in a strange pagan ritual around a dead cat

Man, what the fuck:

Here are 18 turkeys tracing a patient, steady circle around a dead cat. “This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” the film’s creator says, and while that is not exactly true in a world where (say it with us) a racist orange reality-TV steak grifter is the president, it is still extremely valid and strange! The Verge sought out explanation for this strange phenomenon from a biologist, who suggested the turkeys were doing a thing called “predator inspection,” in which they take a look at an animal higher up on the food chain, except in this case that predator is a fucking dead cat, so why would they be inspecting him? This is a line of thinking that lead to another, even more unsatisfying conclusion:

What could be happening is that the turkeys are stuck in some kind of never-ending circle, with each bird following the tail in front of it. “It’s not unusual for them to get into those dances where they chase each other around,” Scott Gardner, a turkey expert with the California Department Of Fish And Wildlife, tells The Verge.

Sure, that might be the case. Or they might be locked in a pagan resurrection rite, or they might have killed the cat themselves and are now taunting its family, or maybe this is a duck blood orgy, or maybe they have sensed and are earnestly attempting to warn us humans of our own impending doom via climate change.

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If that’s the case, we don’t need science. We need Mark Wahlberg.