See 80 Escaped Ostriches Race Through City Streets
Check out this video of 80 ostriches running wild!
This article is more than 2 years old
Traffic in cities is bad enough. When you add giant flightless birds to the mix, it can be downright miserable. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen every day, but it did happen in the Chinese city of Chongzuo in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on January 8th. Apparently, 80 escaped ostriches from a farm decided to take in the city’s sights together. Check out the wild video below:
In case you weren’t already aware, ostriches are not small birds by any means. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like seeing an entire stampede of escaped ostriches come your way when you’re trying to just take a nice walk down the street. However, the ostriches don’t seem like they mind too much. Instead, they’re stretching their legs and running amok. Thankfully, it doesn’t look like they’re doing too much damage to people or property.
According to reports, the escaped ostriches ran away from a nearby farm when an employee forgot to close the gates. Residents and local police banded together to help round them up, recovering most of the escapees. Most is the key word here. Apparently, there are still about 20 ostriches still missing. Hopefully, they’re able to recover them and get them back to their farm. Ostriches aren’t very well suited for city life, with some of the escaped birds weighing in at 220 lbs. While that’s not the biggest farm animal ever, it’s absolutely gigantic for a bird.
The farmer is surely happy to get (most) of his escaped ostriches back. These birds can be worth anywhere between 2,000 to 4,000 yuan, which is about $300 to $600 per bird. That definitely adds up and you wouldn’t want to have to replace that many of them. The farmer is also probably happy that there were no injuries reported. We’re going to go ahead and take a guess that the farm employee who didn’t close the gate all the way is going to be double and triple-checking next time they say goodbye to the ostriches for the night.
Chongzuo is actually a pretty huge city in China, so it’s surprising that there aren’t more people in the video. With a population of over 2.3 million, you’d think the escaped ostriches might have run into more crowds, but it seems like they have pretty free reign to run around in the video. With that being said, if you see a herd of giant, dinosaur-like birds, you might keep a good distance too. Chongzuo is known for its beautiful natural scenery and agriculture is one of its biggest industries, so there probably are quite a few farms near the city. Still, it doesn’t seem like dealing with that many animals running through the city streets is something you’d expect to see if you ever visit.
Oh, and if you were wondering why someone would have an ostrich farm in the first place, ostriches can actually provide meat, eggs, leather, and feathers that fetch a pretty high price. Apparently, it’s a pretty good agricultural business as long as catching escaped ostriches doesn’t become a regular part of your job duties!
