Your story made me smile.
The people I used to live next to were ex farmers. They kept a couple of pet ewes for the two small boys, who had bottle fed them. Every year, the two ewes were lifted over the fence to run with next doors tup. The two little boys loved the lambs .......but knowing they would not eat the lamb that had been running round their field, my neighbour would say when they went for slaughter that they had gone to live at a friends farm with her sheep. Poor kids believed this, and ate the lamb happily, although my neighbour always bought another lamb from elsewhere, and muddled them up in the freezer, so she did not actually know herself which lamb she was eating!!
This system worked well, until one year, the two boys demanded to be taken to Auntie Sue's to see the lambs that had suddenly disappeared!!!
It seems Auntie Sue had to hurriedly be told to produce some lambs to be seen when they arrived to visit "their" lambs!!