Llamas - 101.1

I recently had a request to post more about llamas. Apparently we are the only blog on Entrecard that has llamas so I'm going to do a once-a-week series on llamas. Let me know if you have any specific questions that you'd like to have me address and I'll put those in future posts.

I'll start with what most people ask about llamas - "What do you do with a llama?"

I'll start the list with why we got into llamas:

Llamas make excellent companions.
Llamas make excellent pack animals.
Llamas are excellent fiber producers.
Llamas make our life complete.

We bought our first llama in November 1996 - a two and a half month old llama whose mother passed away when he was about 8 weeks old. He was being bottle fed by the owners, who were also caring for another orphaned cria so the two crias were kept together and bottle fed correctly without handling or talking or unnecessary intervention. Bottle fed crias can develop "berserk male syndrome" later in life and become dangerous because they view humans as a llama and can become aggressive.

Our first llama is named Handel. I fell in love with this cria from across the ranch the first time I saw him (his mother was still alive at that time). But, he was far more expensive than we had budgeted for a llama so I kept going back to Stage Stop Llamas to look at other llamas, searching for "The One" in our price range. On one of our trips back to Stage Stop, I saw Handel in the barn and asked about him and was told that his mother had died suddenly and I asked again what his price was and the owners agreed to sell him to us for the price we were looking to pay. I was thrilled! We boarded him at Stage Stop until we bought our house in May 1997 and brought him and our second llama, Nimbus - a 4 year old large male that we thought would make an excellent pack llama, to live with us at our place.

Little did we know at the time that our llama journey would expand and change our lives the way it did.

More next time on Llamas - 101._