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Police in Lower Saxony, Germany, who decided to teach a vulture to sniff out

corpses of missing people have run into difficulty two months into training.

Vultures aren’t what they used to be. We think of them as shrewd, rapacious, ruthless, eternally patient, collegial until the chips (or should I say ‘the meats’) are down. So shrewd, in fact, that they are the best of all animal forecasters – especially of doom. Ralph Hodgson said it all in his poem “The Bull” with its ominous warning of a gathering of vultures “waiting for the flesh that dies”.

Sherlock, unfortunately, does not live up to this demanding reputation. Pretentious little upstart as he or, rather, the German Police, have claimed, he has yet to take off on his important but so far neglected mission of finding the missing of Lower Saxony. I was not aware that Lower Saxonians are given to excessive ‘out days’. In fact, having a quart or so of German blood myself, I rather thought they were conventional to a degree, reporting in regularly every hour on the hour.

Apparently I was wrong. People go missing in Lower Saxony on a monotonously regular basis. They say SKYPE and TV reception isn’t as good there as it might be. There are possibly other reasons, too. Whatever the cause, the overworked police came up with this ingenious idea of training a vulture to circle the skies above and identify the miscreants, signaling where they were and keeping a beady eye until the officers arrived to apprehend and demand an explanation.

Sherlock is not as good as his namesake; he cannot, for example, distinguish between human and animal. While the police of Lower Saxony are always willing to register the whereabouts of a dead dog they do find it distracting from their principal objective of returning wanderers to their homes and restoring peace and tranquility.

What is worse, Sherlock is refusing to fly. Having discovered the medical benefits of walking he prefers to take a daily stroll in the summer sunshine to circling his terrain. It is not as though he was not adequately supported. Like Holmes, Sherlock has a side-kick – two, in fact, appropriately named Colombo and Miss Marple.

But Sherlock is shy and regards his colleagues much as Holmes regarded Watson, not very bright. He refuses to leave the confines of his zoo. There is considerable concern in Germany over the antics of Sherlock. Germans are not used to disobedient, seemingly lazy employees who do not live up to their job descriptions. At a time when the whole of Europe is looking for role models of energetic work and prudent enterprise, Sherlock is letting the side down.

I hate to mention it but it is rather as though the Greek citizens were suddenly and unexplainably to take a day off rioting. Surely Germany isn’t – but perish the thought. I echo the words of a well-known British politician in a time of crisis: “Be off, Sherlock, on yer flight!”