David Macaulay’s Baaa is a tragically humorous satire that squeezes its way under the umbrella of Children's Literature by conforming to the standards of the classical animal fable.
The novel begins “There is no record of when the last person disappeared” but nonetheless all the humans are gone. It is the sheep that take center stage as they find themselves starved and in search of nourishment inside the glowing refrigerators of the abandoned towns, and egged on by the temptations of ease and greed subsequently follow in the footsteps of the humans. Macaulay pairs the highs and the lows of political stability for an effectively Orwellian satirical commentary on human foibles: The prosperity and growth of the population is contrasted with the rise of bad leadership and inevitable starvation; the more starvation, the more laws, and the more crimes respectively. He captures the cyclical patterns of overpopulation, starvation, bad leadership, laws, crime, and peacekeeping and uses clever observations of absurdities to take a stab at the consumerism driven society that we live in that treasures convenience and lots of it; for example, the attraction to the glow of the television along with the bad music in the supermarkets that compels the sheep to shop quickly and go home. Macaulay pictures the correlative increase in comedies airing on TV with human suffering and crime, and ultimately insinuates that cannibalism was the answer to the sheep’s suffering as the idea goes unchallenged as the rapid decline and breakdown of sheep society is all self-propagated. Despite the culturally tabooed idea of cannibalism, the absurdities of the extremes that Macaulay brings to light effectively paint a dismal picture of our society.