Did you ever post the "baby sheep meeting Boss Ram for the first time" story (post 682432632204804096 on your blog) anywhere on its own? Asking because I really wanted to recycle it again but OP made the post unrebloggable.
If it's the one I'm thinking of, I can type it up again, with bonus epilogue this time, even!
It all starts with my big breeding ram. Undisputed king of the hill, boss ram, never lost a fight. Real tough guy. The initiation ritual for any male sharing a field with this guy was getting beat up by The Boss.
In the year our story begins, this fine gentleman had sired four sons in his own image. Without my permission he broke through the fence and did this, as the fence was unfairly preventing him from fulfilling his one job upon this earth: creating many miniature copies of himself.
These fine fellows he gifted me with had to be weaned a few weeks early, when they were perfectly old enough not to need milk but young enough they still WANTED milk. (They were fine, they were 9 weeks old and lambs can be safely weaned as young as 6, though I usually try to wait until 12 for behavioral reasons. This is called foreshadowing.) One reason for this early weaning was an interesting bit of trivia about sheep lactation: milk letdown in the ewe's udder is stimulated by the lamb punching the udder really hard with the end of their noses. Really hard. Repeatedly. Usually ewes will start to wean the lambs on their own when the lambs get big enough that the punching gets uncomfortable, but some ewes won't and ram lambs in particular sometimes have to be pulled early because when they get big and strong enough they will punch the udder so hard they'll lift their mother's back end right off the ground and can damage her udder in their enthusiasm for milk that isn't quite as filling to them as it was a few weeks ago.
These boys didn't want to be weaned. There was a lot of screaming. They were scared, with no adult sheep around. Even more screaming. So I decided to give them a babysitter.
I didn't want to dump the little guys right in the boy's club to get ganged up on, so I decided to put them in a smaller pen near the barn with their dad for a few days. He'd always been good with lambs and I figured he'd gently but firmly show them who was boss and then they wouldn't have trouble. He made all these lambs without permission, the least he could do was some babysitting.
He also thought he would gently but firmly show them who was boss. He marched up and started flexing his shoulders and arching his neck, showing off how big his horns were, ready to butt heads with any of these little punks who cared to try him.
These were not his usual rivals. They did not care about butting heads. These were four unweaned lambs, who for their entire nine weeks of life had punched the dangly thing on mom's belly whenever they were hungry and gotten food.
They had never shared a pasture with an adult ram.
They looked at the Big Guy and saw a big dangly thing in the same general area as the punch-for-food thing on their moms.
They quickly put two and two together and made an understandable but deeply mistaken assumption.
The poor guy ended up fleeing for his life in a state of completely bewildered panic while his four equally bewildered and panicky little clones chased him all over the field, screaming at the top of their baby lungs and trying frantically to punch him in the nuts as hard as they could.
Not included in the original version of the story was that this did somehow end up being a bonding experience because once the... misunderstanding... was resolved, he was very fond of that particular group of sons and frequently kept an eye on them even once they were integrated with the rest of the boys. I called them his ducklings for how they would follow him around single file.
Boss Ram figured out how to mount ewes THROUGH the fence and sired another group of unauthorized offspring two years later. He was a recognized fixture on the farm by then with an amazingly good personality for a ram, so I had the dangly bits causing all these problems removed and now he is living out his old age in perfectly happy retirement with all his girlfriends in the ewe flock, convinced he is still doing what he was put on this earth to do, but not actually creating any more mini-mes and thus unharrassed by any lambs who missed basic sex ed.
(Those four sons are now all grown up and collectively terrorizing everyone over in the boy's field in their father's place, but thankfully in the more traditional, foreheads-at-ten-paces sort of way)
