Turkeys ritualistically circling a dead cat is as beautiful as it is frightening

Prepare yourself. You are about to witness probably one of the weirdest, confusing things you will ever see. This is not a joke.

The video is unnerving.

More than 15 turkeys walk in a circle — not running or distressed, but walking with intention — around a dead cat in the middle of the road.

Twitter user @TheReal_JDavis filmed the moment. "That is the craziest thing I've ever seen," he says on the video. "Bro, this is wild."
 

I'm freaking out.

Twitter user J... saw a group wild turkeys circling a dead cat in the street, as if they were performing some kind of death ritual, and we are so lucky he documented it. 

What the f*ck is going on here? What am I looking at here?

You know how animals do strange things before storms or natural disasters? Is this one of those times? Could this be an omen? Is this some kind of satanic ritual? Will this dead cat now be beamed up to some mysterious place we can't see with our human eyes?

After some research to try to explain such behavior, it turns out that wild turkeys do not normally eat cats, or even dead cats. They typically eat berries, plants, insects and small vertebrates. So, this probably rules out the chance that they were planning on eating the cat.

However, cats are predators to turkeys, often preying on them and their eggs. Was this cat a menace to this group of turkeys and now they are circling it as a part of a celebratory ritual?

OR, could this cat have been these turkeys' leader and now they are mourning its death? There is no evidence of turkeys performing "funerals" or rituals for the dead like other animals do, but this could be the start of something new.

People of Twitter are of course very confused by this and had a lot to say about the phenomenon: