What “The Sheep Detectives” Doesn’t Understand About Sheep
Freddy the Detective solved his first mystery in 1927, a passing-of-the-deerstalker year in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his last Sherlock Holmes story and Agatha Christie introduced Miss Jane Marple. The likeliest detectives—rich, idle Englishmen—had already begun yielding to slightly less likely ones—a rich, idle Belgian, say—but Marple, a gossipy old spinster from the little village of St. Mary Mead, was another thing altogether. And Freddy: Freddy was a pig.
“Freddy the Detective,” written by Walter R. Brooks, who was also, very briefly, a writer at this magazine, concerned a missing toy train. “ ‘The first thing to do,’ said Freddy, ‘is to Visit the Scene of the Crime.’ ” Brooks published twenty-six books about Freddy, who not only knew how to read but also kept a very impressive little library in a corner of his pigpen that he called his study. He especially admired “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.” “It’s the best book I’ve come across in a long time,” he told the cat and the goose, “and you’ll admit I know something about literature.”
The flock at the heart of “The Sheep Detectives”—a new film directed by Kyle Balda, starring Hugh Jackman as a shepherd named George, and Emma Thompson as his snappish, big-city lawyer—is similarly well versed in detective fiction. George reads to his sheep every night, and they particularly like it when he reads murder mysteries. When George himself is murdered, they set out to find the killer. Balda, known for his earlier work as an animator at Pixar and as a co-director of two “Despicable Me” films, does not appear to know much about either detective fiction or sheep. This is perhaps more than ordinarily disappointing to me, and not only because I tend sheep of my own. As anyone who has ever watched a cat hold a stakeout by a mousehole, a goat pick a lock, or a lost lamb miraculously find its way back to its flock will know, animals look for clues, inspect evidence, and draw conclusions. They’re natural detectives.
Detective fiction was a product of an emerging set of ideas about the human mind. You can trace the detective as a literary figure to Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, who made his début in 1841 in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” or you can go back further, if you really want to press the case, to eighteenth-century London. But the genre only got good and going with Holmes, who made his first appearance in 1887 in “A Study in Scarlet.” Here’s Holmes, explaining his methods to Watson, in “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” a story from 1892: “As a medical man, you are aware, Watson, that there is no part of the body which varies so much as the human ear. Each ear is as a rule quite distinctive, and differs from all other ones.” Fine, he’s good at ears. Sheep? Sheep are remarkably excellent at faces. Peer-reviewed scientific studies have established that they can recognize and remember fifty different sheep faces for more than two years (they can probably recognize a lot more faces and remember them for a lot longer, but that’s all the scientists tested). A 2017 study published by the Royal Society went further, proving that sheep recognize and remember human faces, and not just the faces of their shepherds, but also photographs of the faces of their shepherds. These mad scientists then trained a small flock of sheep to recognize four celebrities—Emma Watson, Barack Obama, Jake Gyllenhaal, and the BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce—from their pictures on the internet. In this way, sheep are better at facial recognition than people, perhaps even better than Holmes is at ears. Most humans have a very hard time telling sheep faces apart: you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. But sheep can tell human faces apart.
The formidable historian Carlo Ginzburg once published a paper called “Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method,” in which he argued that the late-nineteenth-century obsession with the “clue,” meaning a piece of evidence crucial to the solving of a mystery (earlier, the word meant a ball of yarn), was most influentially expressed in detective fiction and in the new field of psychology. For Ginzburg, Holmes and Freud were engaged in the same project: doing things that early humans did—that animals do—and pretending that it was some kind of superintelligence. Holmes knows the difference between a hundred and forty types of tobacco ash. Freud knew how to interpret dreams. Detectives follow footprints. So what? Sheep do that, too.
People once knew this sort of thing about animals, when more people knew animals better. Into the nineteenth century, in some parts of Great Britain, there were at least two sheep for every human. In “The Animal Mind” (1908), the psychologist Margaret Floy Washburn, explaining that the only way to understand the animal mind is to observe animal behavior, argued that, although animal behavior is quite obviously not the same as human behavior, “the difference is one of degree, not of kind.” She was the last scientist to make that argument for rather a long time, because behavioralists, led by Edward L. Thorndike, the author of “Animal Intelligence” (1911), said that she was wrong. For Thorndike, as for Descartes, animals were creatures without ideas. All animal behavior could be reduced to reflex and instinct. Success at tests like puzzles and mazes, which appeared to Washburn to be the result of reasoning, or insight—observation and detection—Thorndike insisted was instead merely the result of blundering, repetition, and trial and error. There could be no animal detective. It turns out that Thorndike was wrong.
“The Sheep Detectives” is notionally adapted from but in every meaningful sense a betrayal of “Glennkill: Ein Schafskrimi,” a devilishly well executed “sheep crime novel” published in Germany in 2005, written by a then Ph.D. student from Berlin who uses the pseudonym Leonie Swann. “Glennkill” was translated into English by Anthea Bell and published that same year as “Three Bags Full.” (Swann has since written an even funnier and more irreverent sequel, “Garou: Ein Schaf-Thriller,” a “sheep thriller” published in English as “Big Bad Wool.”)
The barnyard fable is as old as the barnyard, as old as Aesop, older than the Bible. It has very often made for heartbreaking and magical children’s literature and children’s films, from “The Wind in the Willows” to “Charlotte’s Web.” Grownup novels about animals are usually serious political parables, such as “Animal Farm.” Leonie Swann’s début novel didn’t have much in common with any of these genres. It’s neither heartbreaking nor magical. It is definitely not political. The sheep don’t stand for humans. It’s not a serious book. The sheep are sheep.
“Three Bags Full” can be read by children, but it is not a children’s book. Its hero is Miss Maple, certainly the cleverest sheep in the flock, probably the cleverest sheep in the village of Glennkill, and maybe the cleverest sheep in the world. The murder mystery is nicely plotted, but the book has something of the quality of a translated work itself—because Swann, whoever she is, has thought a lot about how sheep might think. Swann, in other words, takes Washburn’s side of the animal-mind argument. These sheep think. As Swann sees it, sheep mostly think about grass, but they know, too, that there is more to the world. In one scene in the novel, a black ram named Othello, who lives in misery in a carnival, forced to fight dogs, is visited in his pen by a strange ram bearing advice.
In “The Sheep Detectives,” Othello, renamed Sebastian, is voiced by Bryan Cranston, suitably gruff, if never philosophical. Julia Louis-Dreyfus provides the voice of Miss Maple, renamed Lily and far more fretful and fearful than in the book. “Do you know what humans call stupid people who can’t think for themselves?” a ram asks the rest of the flock (whose members, inexplicably, have accents that run from Irish to New Zealand to American). A ram named Mopple (Chris O’Dowd) is the only one who knows that when sheep die they do not become clouds.
“The Sheep Detectives” is set not in the lethal-sounding and genuinely murderous Irish village of Glennkill but in a Disneyland called Denbrook. It has none of the charm and haystack-and-sunset beauty of the Hoggett Farm of “Babe,” a film about a pig who wanted to be a sheepdog, or the madcap mischief of the Mossy Bottom of “Shaun the Sheep,” the Wallace and Gromit spinoff. Instead, Balda’s Denbrook has more in common with the England of Thomas the Tank Engine, without the occasional bit of wit and nice sense of pace. The Teletubbies had more edge.
In “Three Bags Full,” George’s sheep are very interested in breaking into his vegetable garden. They think about it all the time. “Ruminants have to ruminate,” my vet said last month, when a sheep of mine had fallen so sick he could no longer chew his cud. Sheep ruminate. That’s what they do. When George’s sheep find him dead, with a spade through his chest, they wonder about it. “They had kept calm that morning, when they found their shepherd lying there so unusually cold and lifeless,” Swann writes. They looked for clues. Animals do.
You can skip the movie. But read “Three Bags Full.” Freddy the Detective might have said, “It’s the best book I’ve come across in a long time, and you’ll admit I know something about literature.” ♦