THE VIOLENCE OF THE RAMS

A lamb enters the fold.

- DAVID SEDARIS

Our British friend Luke, who is redheaded, and a shepherd, turned over a five-month-old lamb one afternoon not long ago, and when he discovered that it was male he carried it from the pasture across the lane from our house in Sussex, where the ewes live, to the field behind us, which is like a playground at the junior high they might have in Hell. “Go Demons!” Or “Go Rams!” Same thing, really.

I know you can’t hold animals to human standards. Cats don’t kill songbirds because they’re innately cruel; they do it because it’s in their nature, just as it’s in a wolf ’s to rip the throat out of a calf, and a rabbit’s to chew through the cord you’re using to charge your laptop. That said, rams are assholes. We’ve had them on our property for five years now, a slightly different mob every summer, and each new addition is meaner than the last. Light a bonfire in their pasture and they’d likely headbutt the flames, just to show them who’s who.

The current dominant ram is Igor, and he was named—as were all his associates—by Luke’s three young sons. He is the color of a storm cloud and is Icelandic, which makes him shortlegged but still slightly larger than most other breeds in his group. Igor’s eyes are burnished gold, and are like a goat’s. While searching online, trying to find out if there was an exact name for his sort of horizontal, almost rectangular pupils, I came across the question “Can dogs eat sheep eyeballs?”

The answer—no surprise—is yes, but with the following caveat: “When feeding sheep eyeballs to dogs only offer small portions. Going overboard can lead them to suffer from a nutritional imbalance.”