COOK- Little can cause more frantic anxiety than losing an adoptee on their very first day in their new home, even when that adoptee is an 18-year-old llama.
But that’s the predicament Lois Pajari of Cook’s Country Connection found herself in last week after playing Good Samaritan by taking in two llamas and a goat about to be displaced from The Hills Youth and Family Services juvenile justice and youth treatment program in Duluth.
While hoping to keep its day services going, The Hills recently announced it was closing its residential programs, which included an animal husbandry program to give youths the opportunity to care for a variety of animals, Pajari said. Upon learning from a contact there that the animals had to be gone by the end of last week, Pajari went to Duluth on Thursday to get 18-year-old Mocha, 23-year-old Cleo, and a little goat named Oliver.
“We kept them in the exhibit pen all day to get used to the sights and sounds of the farm, and then that evening let them out to have an opportunity to graze in the small pasture,” Pajari said. “I’m not going to let them loose in a 40-acre field, but we let them in the small patch and thought they would get a chance to get acquainted with the smaller animals.”
Believing the trio to be adapting well, Pajari turned herself to another animal emergency. A mother pig had died and left six orphan piglets, causing Pajari to spend the night administering droplet feedings every two hours to the babies.
And sometime during the night, between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m., Mocha disappeared, nowhere to be found on the property.
The search began immediately. Pajari alerted a friend at Canadian National Railroad, since the tracks run behind the farm. She contacted a couple of people she knew who worked for Lake Country Power to be on the lookout. She called St. Louis County Sheriff’s deputies.
“I said he’s a bright brown llama, and I added ‘wearing a blue halter’, as if that would distinguish my missing llama from all the other missing llamas,” Pajari laughed. “I did that about a half a dozen times and then I thought, ‘Any llama walking around anywhere in the 55723 zip code is probably going to be my llama.’”
Pajari and others searched snowmobile and deer trails, unsuccessfully, until it was time to open the farm for the day’s visitors. But that didn’t stop the search from continuing in another odd fashion.
“In my mind, I’m thinking what familiar noise would keep her close or draw her back in,” Pajari said. “At The Hills they had peacocks, and so the only thing I could come up with was the peacocks. So, every so often Jill would walk by with a hammer because any loud noise makes the peacocks holler.”
No one will ever know if it was squawking peacocks or missed companionship or a dwindling sense of adventure that tugged at Mocha, but by early afternoon the wayward llama was back.
“Somebody from the petting zoo pointed out into the field and said, ‘Is that the llama you’re looking for?’ Sure enough, it was,” Pajari said.
While no one saw Mocha escape or knew why she bolted at the time, the reason became glaringly obvious to Pajari the next day when she let Mocha out for a walk.
Mocha had been victimized, nay, bullied, by none other than Penelope the Pig, an ill-tempered, curly-haired Mangalitsa variety that Pajari called “the funniest looking thing on the planet.” Mocha wasn’t a curious llama in search of adventure; she was a terrorized llama fleeing in fear.
“When Penelope has discovered that she can mess with somebody, it’s game on,” Pajari said. “She came out of the flue like this big scary blob monster running, and that poor llama, her eyes got huge and she was foaming at the mouth and running. She wanted to launch herself over the fence again.”
The problem has been solved by moving Penelope farther away, out of sight from Mocha, and Pajari suggested the llama shouldn’t take the porcine assault personally.
“Penelope terrorizes the whole farm,” she said. “She’s just a brat.”
“If anyone would like to purchase a Mangalitsa pig, they should just reach out,” Pajari added, with a chuckle too subtle to determine if she was serious or not.