Animals cared way less about the eclipse than we wanted them to

2025-04-27 15:41:46admin

Monday was the highly-anticipated solar eclipse, and photos and reactions flooded America's social media and took over all things human.

Everyone knew how us people would react -- but what we really wanted to know was how would animals react to this sudden darkness?

We've heard that animals can react to changes in the weather before they even happen. We expected birds to fly erratically, crickets to chirp loudly, cows return back to their barns, and roosters to crow.

And some animals did those things... kind of... a little bit... OK, barely.

We were expecting animals to completely freak out over the big event. The Washington Posteven set up a livestream to watch what would happen to fainting goats during the eclipse, but then nothing happened. Animals just did not deliver on the reactions we all thought they'd have, and we're a bit disappointed.

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Not every animals was immune to the eclipse.

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Some flamingos at the Nashville Zoo fled their pond and huddled together in the darkness, while the giraffes ran wildly around their pens after the sky went dark. The Nashville Zoo was centered in the path of totality, so the animals there seemed to have the strongest reactions.

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Bird keeper Kristen Clifft explained that the combination of the darkness and the loud crowd caused the flamingos to congregate together the way they did.

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Youtube userjjmonns uploaded a video of a small cow farm in South Carolina where the cows began to get a little crazy and move about just before totality.

And according to WRDW, siamang monkeys at Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, "become angry and agitated; jumping, screaming" as the sun began to disappear.

“Turns out the craziness is when it came to complete totality and that’s really abnormal, this is something I’ve never seen in siamang,” said a Riverbanks Zoo employee.