Dr Doolittle-style show about a detective who can talk to animals, except instead of talking like people the animals still talk like animals, just translated into English sentences, so the plot of most episodes centres around trying to figure out what the star witness testimony actually means.
Victim's murder was witnessed by her pet snake, whose tank was in the room. Unfortunately pet snake is incapable of describing the world around them except in terms of 'rocks' and 'meat', with their descriptions of individual forms of 'meat' focusing almost entirely on body temperature and smell.
(Solved when it turns out that their description of 'warm-cold meat with rock' was actually an attempt to describe a suspect with a prosthetic limb, which is pretty unnoticeable to a human, but looks dramatically different in infrared.)
Murder at a honey farm. Each witness managed to see about ~0.06% of the full crime, in order to get the full picture, you have to get them to swarm.
Victim was found several days after death, already crawling with maggots. Days into the investigation, protag begins a frantic search to find any surviving maggots/flies that were on the corpse, after realising that how the victim tasted would give vital information about the poison used.
Also there's at least one or two animals who actually do talk in full sentences and in terms humans can understand, and the reason behind this is never fully explained.
All cats in this universe talk in terms of 'mine/not-mine' and mainly focus on territory, mates and food, with the one exception of the main character's cat who is named Watson and knows how to use sarcasm.
All insects speak in one word sentences where everything is 'food', 'enemy' or (for hive insects) 'friend' and 'queen', with the exception of seven-spotted ladybirds specifically, who for some reason speak in full English sentences and are up to date and knowledgeable about world events. The protagonists is as concerned by the full implications of this as you are.
Pigeons speak fairly simply about most things but also exclusively use coordinates when talking about where something is and are extremely knowledgeable about the postal system.
In one episode the sole witness is a trained monkey who only speaks French.
In one episode, where the victim was kidnapped to a some abandoned shack or a cave, the mc tries to get the bats to describe how the events happened using “near”/“far”/“fast”/“big”/“small” etc. while unable to piece together information from other witnesses, only to later realize one of the bats saw the kidnapper going outside and could describe with a lot more detail who that person was.
Ants have a slightly bigger vocabulary than most insects, because they have words to describe the function of each pheromone, but that doesn’t help because even if they can remember anything, if something changed it’s beyond their control. But they can always remember where the colony is, which turns out to be completely off for one of the colonies, and that’s how the MC finds out a corpse was buried there.
A mantis keeps saying the word “mate” in places where it doesn’t make sense, because the victim was cannibalized.
All mammals have poets, even when their vocabulary is very limited. It’s never fun talking to them.
Cats can speak about clean/not clean, and if something dead ever touches their water they remember that.
Birds cannot be trusted to describe anything that happens in a building. They don’t see the glass.
Dogs will call humans and other dogs by name and describe them the same way so the mc is always confused about who they’re talking about.
The mc doesn’t consult elephants. They’re better detectives than him and he’s ashamed.
One of the animals that speaks in human esque scentences and terms has to be a dog. But this dog speaks in the same manner as a person with SEVERE ADHD mid hysterical ramble about their latest hyperfixation. So like, the information they need is all there and completely understandable, but then there's SO many irrelevant details and tangential stories involved that it takes forever to sort through.
(I say as someone with severe ADHD who has always loved the whole '...squirel!' joke applied to both dogs and people with ADHD)
Also with most dogs you have to be carefull about using the b-word, the w-word and the f-word
Theres several time when the protag says keep your eye on the ball and the dog goes BALL!! WHERE???
