It was a small miracle that my husband and I made it to a recent screening of “The Sheep Detectives,” the surprise hit movie that follows an animated flock of talking sheep through a murder mystery in the British countryside. In the spring my husband and I hardly ever leave our Hudson Valley sheep farm, given the daily needs of our 150-head flock and all the chores that pile up into 14-hour days.
Yet we made it to the movies, and soon discovered another small miracle: here was a high-quality film about the creatures we love, illuminating all there is to love about sheep: their flock mentality, their curiosity, their introverted natures, their resilience. The film was so technically accurate that it even mentioned orf, a nasty sheep disease that causes lesions on a lamb’s mouth. (Who could have predicted that thousands of movie-goers would be learning about “orf”?)
My husband and I marveled at the animation, which captured exactly how sheep move: how they shake rainwater off their wool, how they trot, how they head butt, how they ruminate.
But soon, some of the dialogue in the film turned against us. The storyline revealed that the “bad” sheep farmer was the one who raised lambs for meat (like we do). The local butcher (and we know many butchers, highly skilled in this ancient craft) was called a “murderer” by the good farmer, who only raised sheep for wool. And a dark scene inside a meatpacking plant showed the animated sheep discovering boxes of lamb and asking what that could mean (yet we take our sheep to processing facilities across the Northeast, and they are not like this).
I felt pummeled. Livestock farming, yet again, was being lumped into a simplistic category of “bad” without acknowledgement that the reality is a lot more complicated.
In the reality I know, which I practice every day on my farm, sheep are admired, cared for, even named – and then yes, taken one day to the butcher. People sometimes ask us how we can raise beloved animals and then process them for meat, but that’s because most people don’t engage with life and death in the ways that farmers do. They don’t understand how quickly a sheep’s life is ended in a responsible slaughter plant - basically as quickly as it is taking me to read this sentence. They don’t feel the satisfaction of giving an animal everything it needs and then offering it as food to other people. They don’t know that choosing not to name a farm animal doesn’t mean you are disrespecting it or will treat it badly - it’s just a choice.
Of course there are bad farmers in the world. To me, the bad farmers hurt their animals, prevent them from engaging in their natural behaviors, or push the animals’ physiological limits. To me, if you don’t do these things, you are a good livestock farmer. And the billions of people who eat meat need to know the difference. The dividing line between good and bad farming shouldn’t be whether you raise animals for meat, but how you treat your animals, every day and up to the very end.
“The Sheep Detectives” is a film that seems uncomfortable with the practice of taking the lives of farm animals for food. I absolutely allow for that perspective to exist in the world—one of my closest friends is a vegan. But because billions of animals are being raised for food, a major motion picture should acknowledge the range of practices and perspectives that exist within that reality so that people can choose the type of farming practices they want to support when they purchase meat.
Early in “The Sheep Detectives,” the animated sheep reflect on life and death, sharing stories about “sheep becoming clouds” after they die. They address grief and loss in sensitive ways that I imagine would help and encourage any child seeing the film. I just wish the film had remained in that place of curiosity and openness when it comes to livestock farming.
Carrie Wasser and her husband, Brent, own and operate Willow Pond Sheep Farm, a sheep dairy in Gardiner, NY. She is a member of Farmers for Animals, Community, and the Environment (FACE), a new network of pasture-based livestock farmers.
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