“We have to slaughter that lamb.”
I said this to my husband one evening a few years ago, as we took a break from our evening chores to watch the adorable antics of the young ram in question. It wasn’t a controversial statement. By that point, we’d been raising sheep on our farm for years—for their meat. But every time we discussed this particular lamb, my husband hedged. “We might want to keep that one,” he said.
As he and I began to debate, yet again, the merits of killing him, the lamb was busy gamboling about the barnyard. He was the only baby on the farm at the time and was as spoiled and content as the famous pig Wilbur in the classic novel Charlotte’s Web. I’d made Instagram reels of the little guy’s antics. The children who came to our farm school were training him to eat out of their hands. They would kneel, motionless, palms outstretched, offering a cookie. The adolescent lamb would shyly tiptoe up to them and accept the snack so gently.
This couldn’t last. The lamb was cute, but he was still a ram, with budding horns and imminently surging testosterone levels; the clock was ticking. Most rams grow up to be aggressive; even if we neutered him, there was no room on our farm for more animals that didn’t pull their weight. Besides, it’s the reality of farming: Most animals are destined for the slaughterhouse.
