Where is the Real Sheep? Exploring the Baahd and Good Sheep Voices in Five Australian Picture Books.

Abstract

Farmed animals, such as sheep, featured in children’s picturebooks usually lack their own voices. Since the emergence of the animal turn, there has been an increase in the examination of children’s animal stories from literary animal studies perspectives, which destabilises the human-animal binary by challenging the human domination of other species regarding human-animal relations depicted in literature. In relation to sheep, children’s stories often rely on tropes—such as counting/listing devices, sheep providing wool, or needing to belong to a flock—along with desentientization to limit or omit sheep voices from the narratives, thus distancing young readers from empathising with sheep and reinforcing the human domination of sheep. In this paper, I draw on and expand upon Janae Dimick’s And This Little Piggy Had None: Challenging the Dominant Discourse on Farmed Animals in Children’s Picturebooks to analyse sheep in Australian picturebooks and engage with the ongoing debate regarding representing animal voices in literature. This article analyses the depiction of sheep in five Australian picturebooks and argues that sheep voices are represented mostly in conversation with humans, either on-page human characters or the implied reader, and thus deny sheep individual voices.