How do you define courage?  In our case, it’s a funny little wooly brown guy, with a white mask on his face, and fuzzy ears.  His full name is Xanadu’s Courage Under Fibre, now a full grown male llama.  He came by his name honestly - Courage is a survivor if there ever was one.  We first met Courage on a day in mid July when he was ten days old - the day his mother died.  He was born on a neighbour’s farm, and during his first hours of life, he was attacked and severely bitten on the back by a miniature donkey.  A few days later, his mother collapsed and lapsed into a coma.  Heat stroke was suspected but treatment didn’t help.  As her condition grew worse, Courage was left more and more on his own.  Finally the vet discovered that it wasn’t heat stroke but something far more serious - cancer, and the decision was made to put her down.

We received a call from the mother’s owner. He’d found out that we had  a female llama that had just given birth the day before, and he wanted to know if we would take Courage.  Possibly our female would adopt him along with her newborn.  If we wouldn’t take him, they were going to have the vet put him down along with the mother.  They’d been trying to bottlefeed him for two days without success and they feared that he was starving to death.

We immediately went over and picked up Courage.  He was standing beside his mother, who was lying on her side in a coma, about to be put down by the vet.  Courage didn’t want to go, and struggled in my arms, humming anxiously to his mother as I carried him away. When we got him home we weighed him - he weighed 30 pounds - not much more than when he’d been born ten days earlier.  Our first concern was to get some fluid into him. Although he still was struggling to get away – a good sign - he appeared dehydrated, and no one knew  how long it had been since he nursed.  We tried feeding him by bottle, using some goats milk we’d had stored away.  It was largely a waste of time, and we got very little milk into him.  Now I was beginning to worry that our effort was in vain, and that we might just be prolonging his suffering.  But Courage was doing his best to get away from our restraining hands – his spunky attitude convinced me that there was still hope.  In the next hour, my daughters Carly and Shannon and I got drenched with goats milk as Courage struggled.  For every two ounces of milk on us, we got one ounce into him.  By the end of the hour, he’d  eaten about six ounces of milk - not enough, by any standard but at least it was a start.

We tried putting him in with our new mother and her baby, but she soundly and emphatically rejected him despite our efforts with Vicks on her nose, blankets over both baby’s backs, and other tricks we’d been told. It now appeared that we were going to have a bottle fed baby.  That’s not a bad thing with some species, but with herd ruminants, it can be a death sentence.  For more information about this problem, got to our page about BOUNDER. By raising a baby with constant human interaction, you run the very real risk of developing  “berserk male syndrome”. Basically in this condition, the male becomes convinced that humans are part of the “herd”, and therefore when the animal becomes sexually mature, the human is either there to breed or to fight with - neither of which are acceptable outcomes to the human. The same sort of behaviour deviation is seen with bottle fed rams and calves, but most of those animals end up in the food chain, unlike male llamas.  Courage began to flourish and gain weight on five feeds a day of goats milk, but with every feeding we became more concerned - were we creating a major problem in the future?

I asked for advice from local breeders, and from the Internet llama chat group I belonged to.  The best advice I received was to try to bond him to another female llama, and failing that, to find a female goat, and try and get him to nurse directly from the goat.  We left messages with a number of breeders, and started looking for a goat.  Two llama breeders called me back, both feeling that they had a female that might accept Courage. We drove him fifty miles to the first breeder, and spent a futile hour trying to get him to nurse, and watching for any signs of acceptance from the mother. . He was willing, the mother wasn’t.  We packed Courage back into the van and headed home.  

The next day we found a female goat - a very large older Saanen named Bessy.  Bessy and I looked at each other doubtfully.   She might be the solution, but I still had one more call to make to a llama breeder. I phoned Marilyn Ross at Sterling Farms in Langley. She said she might have a female that would accept Courage.  Annis was a first time mother, a large white llama with a baby boy at foot that was the same age as Courage.  When Annis saw Courage her ears pricked forward, and she looked at him with interest.  Within a few minutes, and with a little encouragement, Annis was letting Courage nurse.  Courage saw this large white llama – the same colour as his real mother - and decided that she was his mom.  It wasn’t love at first sight on Annis’ part, but there was definitely a relationship getting underway.  During the next ten days, Marilyn would put Annis into a shelter and give her some grain, and Annis would let Courage nurse.  Eventually Annis began letting him nurse out in the field as well, without any restraint or treats. Banjo, her little boy, accepted Courage as the brother he’d never had, and played with him constantly.   And although Courage enjoyed playing with Banjo, he would always keep one eye on Annis.  Often when the other “kids” were playing, Courage would choose instead to stick close to Annis, lying down contentedly beside her, happy to have a mom again.

When Courage and Banjo were six months old, and ready to be weaned they came home to Xanadu Farms.  Courage was still like a tiny pixy – hadn’t grown as large as we might like - probably due to the illness his mother had while carrying him.  But he was healthy, happy - and he was a llama through and through. 

That summer my daughter Carly decided to show Courage in the 4H and open shows.  We had him shorn, and it was only then that we realized the extent of the damage done to his back by the donkey bite on the day he was born.  Courage had three broken ribs on either side of his backbone, and a divot in his spine from the damage.  He’d managed to survive both this damage and his mother’s death.  

Courage didn’t do well in conformation classes – people would take one look at the dip in his back and shake their heads, not knowing that it wasn’t genetic.  But could he do obstacles and PR classes? Absolutely.  Courage earned a wall full of ribbons and trophies during the show season last year. Anywhere that Carly would go, Courage would follow.  His absolute confidence and trust was amazing to see. At one fair with forty one entries, Courage came in first in obstacles.

Today Courage is a happy, healthy llama.  He caught up in size to all the other boys his age and went on to become on of our tallest llamas. Courage is a gelding, and he takes care of the female llamas in the back field for us. Whenever there''s a problem, Courage is on the job.  He doesn't get out in public as often as he used to, but he still shines when he does.  In 2004, he was the star of BCIT's Open House, where he visited with the President.  The damage to his back precludes him from ever being used for packing or carting, but Courage will always have a home with us.