What could be more peaceful than sheep grazing near a willow tree that hangs like a fussy parent over a chicken house next to a silo?

Certainly not the intervention of a ram. That animal was confined to its enclosure, said Christopher Griffith, who, with his wife, Rebecca O’Donnell, is master of the little flock and all that surrounds it: a barn-turned-home and assorted outbuildings on 14 acres in the Hudson Valley town of Stuyvesant, N.Y.

The ram likes to mate with its family members, Mr. Griffith went on, but an ovine re-enactment of the movie “Chinatown” was not the reason for its exile. It was “because the ram is nasty,” he said.