What “The Sheep Detectives” Doesn’t Understand About Sheep

The formidable historian Carlo Ginzburg once published a paper called “Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method,” in which he argued that the late-nineteenth-century obsession with the “clue,” meaning a piece of evidence crucial to the solving of a mystery (earlier, the word meant a ball of yarn), was most influentially expressed in detective fiction and in the new field of psychology. For Ginzburg, Holmes and Freud were engaged in the same project: doing things that early humans did—that animals do—and pretending that it was some kind of superintelligence. Holmes knows the difference between a hundred and forty types of tobacco ash. Freud knew how to interpret dreams. Detectives follow footprints. So what? Sheep do that, too.

People once knew this sort of thing about animals, when more people knew animals better. Into the nineteenth century, in some parts of Great Britain, there were at least two sheep for every human. In “The Animal Mind” (1908), the psychologist Margaret Floy Washburn, explaining that the only way to understand the animal mind is to observe animal behavior, argued that, although animal behavior is quite obviously not the same as human behavior, “the difference is one of degree, not of kind.” She was the last scientist to make that argument for rather a long time, because behavioralists, led by Edward L. Thorndike, the author of “Animal Intelligence” (1911), said that she was wrong. For Thorndike, as for Descartes, animals were creatures without ideas. All animal behavior could be reduced to reflex and instinct. Success at tests like puzzles and mazes, which appeared to Washburn to be the result of reasoning, or insight—observation and detection—Thorndike insisted was instead merely the result of blundering, repetition, and trial and error. There could be no animal detective. It turns out that Thorndike was wrong.

“The Sheep Detectives” is notionally adapted from but in every meaningful sense a betrayal of “Glennkill: Ein Schafskrimi,” a devilishly well executed “sheep crime novel” published in Germany in 2005, written by a then Ph.D. student from Berlin who uses the pseudonym Leonie Swann. “Glennkill” was translated into English by Anthea Bell and published that same year as “Three Bags Full.” (Swann has since written an even funnier and more irreverent sequel, “Garou: Ein Schaf-Thriller,” a “sheep thriller” published in English as “Big Bad Wool.”)

The barnyard fable is as old as the barnyard, as old as Aesop, older than the Bible. It has very often made for heartbreaking and magical children’s literature and children’s films, from “The Wind in the Willows” to “Charlotte’s Web.” Grownup novels about animals are usually serious political parables, such as “Animal Farm.” Leonie Swann’s début novel didn’t have much in common with any of these genres. It’s neither heartbreaking nor magical. It is definitely not political. The sheep don’t stand for humans. It’s not a serious book. The sheep are sheep.

“Three Bags Full” can be read by children, but it is not a children’s book. Its hero is Miss Maple, certainly the cleverest sheep in the flock, probably the cleverest sheep in the village of Glennkill, and maybe the cleverest sheep in the world. The murder mystery is nicely plotted, but the book has something of the quality of a translated work itself—because Swann, whoever she is, has thought a lot about how sheep might think. Swann, in other words, takes Washburn’s side of the animal-mind argument. These sheep think. As Swann sees it, sheep mostly think about grass, but they know, too, that there is more to the world. In one scene in the novel, a black ram named Othello, who lives in misery in a carnival, forced to fight dogs, is visited in his pen by a strange ram bearing advice.