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Q&A

What would be a plausible reason for a prey animal to mimic its own predator?

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The saying goes "a wolf in sheep's clothing", which is a biblical idiom to refer to someone pretending to be harmless. This got me thinking about if the reverse could also be true. So I came up with a fantasy creature, which is a sheep in wolf's clothing in a very literal sense.

The wolf sheep or "Weep" as I like to call it is identical to its real life counterpart, except for the layer of wool around its body which can take the form of a wolf. The Weeps mimicry is so detailed that it can impersonate a wolf to perfection, even going as far as to imitate the howling and other behavior. A shepherd that didn't know of the creature beforehand wouldn't be able to tell it apart from a real wolf or from an ordinary sheep.

What I can't wrap my head around is why this creature would need to mimic its own predator?

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/167054. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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