Black Sheep, 2006

I'm back from my hiatus and continuing on in my eco-horror marathon. Few subgenres of horror film are as prescient or important for examination as eco-horror. The environment is everything, of course, and these films can help illuminate issues in our anthropocentricity and our destructive ideology of human-species supremacy, which is the real horror. As a reminder, here is the list of the 20 eco-horror films I planned to cover at the beginning of pandemic times. I started in April with1953's The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, and I took a break after the 9th film, 1999's Deep Blue Sea in May.

While eco-horror is important for intellectual consideration, as ultimately a form of entertainment, it can also be goofy and fun. Such is the case with Black Sheep. From writer-director Jonathan King, Black Sheep is another science-messes-with-nature-and-nature-gets-revenge type eco-horror film. This is one of the most common tropes we see in the subgenre with films like Mimic, Splice, The Fly, and perhaps most famously Jurassic Park. A horror comedy out of New Zealand, Black Sheep tells the story of a ovinaphobic, ex-farmer who returns to his family's sheep farm after years of being away to find his brother conducting terrifying genetic experiments. At the same time, a pair of animal activists release one of the mutant sheep from the farm and chaos and carnage ensue.

"Mother nature spent millions of years making sheep. She doesn't need your help." - Grant, played by Oliver Driver, one of the animal activists in the film.

Despite being a rather silly film where zombie-like sheep get their munch on, there are also several topical directions to explore with the themes presented in Black Sheep. There is enough here to discuss big environmental issues such as the implications of genetically modifying nature, animal experimentation, or even the horrifying impact of animal agriculture on the environment, health, and animals. Pieces of those topics have been touched on earlier in the marathon: see Deep Blue Sea and Razorback. Perhaps in an unexpected way, I want to focus my attention on the sheep themselves. So often, talk of environmental destruction happens in broad strokes; we know that capitalism and its pressures on animal agriculture, transportation, production, and energy have caused an immense environmental catastrophe for the world, but what is the story of a single species in that mess?

Roughly 10,000 years ago, human animals began domesticating more-than-human animals like sheep and goats in what is now Eastern Europe and West Asia. These more-than-human animals were targeted for their natural behaviors: they lived in herds, ate a wide variety of grains and grasses, and had natural predators, which made them more docile and welcoming to human animal attention (Alberto et al., 2018). Sheep are thought to be the first domesticated “farm animal,” as we know them today. Historians estimate that between 11,000 and 9,000 BCE the ancient Mesopotamian people began the domestication process of the wild mouflon (Meadows et al., 2007). Before they were popular for their wool, sheep were primarily raised for meat, milk, and skins. It was not until around 6,000 BCE that evidence first emerged suggesting sheep were used for wool (Eugene Ensminger, 2002). The mention of this is not merely to provide a history of one of the earliest domesticated more-than-human animals, but to point to early trends in the breeding of more-than-human animals to fit human-animal needs and consumption. Though these societies may be considered proto-capitalists, survival was achieved through the manipulation of another species for personal gain.

Thousands of years of selective breeding led to the sheep we are familiar with today. There are no more wild sheep anywhere in the world. Although there are some “feral” sheep that live on islands with virtually no predators (Hiendleder et al., 2002), these sheep make up a very small portion of the total sheep population. Basically, without the involvement of human animals, modern sheep would cease to exist. The domestication of sheep is a prime example of human-animal meddling in the natural world through processes like breeding. Before the modern sheep (ovis aries) existed, wild mouflons were capable of sustaining themselves. Today, if human animals are not around to shear their wool, sheep will be subsumed and suffocated by an unnatural, engineered feature: one that they cannot escape, and one they never had the choice to avoid.

Through the lens of speciesism, sheep and other more-than-human “farm” animals are generally referred to as just “stupid animals.” Although intelligence should not be the measuring stick by which beings are judged, sheep are indeed highly intelligent and social creatures. As a prey species, sheep live in flocks to provide protection for one another. This lifestyle means that they are capable of forming close bonds with flock members and that they have a highly gregarious social instinct. There are flock dynamics in that flocks are primarily made up of several ewes (female sheep), offspring, and one or more rams (male sheep). Given their social abilities, it should be no surprise that there is evidence that sheep can problem solve, learn their names, and even be clicker-trained. Sheep are also able to remember and recognize familiar human and ovine faces (Knolle et al., 2017).

The takeaway here is to respect our fellow floofs and don't underestimate them. They've seen the atrocities of animal agriculture from the beginning and given their chance, perhaps the violent world of ovin revenge captured in Black Sheep could become a reality.