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Husband's surprise starts llama ranchBURLINGTON, N.C. (AP)--Twenty years ago, Jackie Shoffner would have never thought she was going to be raising llamas on her farm. "It was kind of a fluke," Shoffner said thinking back to the late 1980s, when she saw a llama for the first time in a national stock show in Denver, Colo. Right before the show started, "I saw a little boy (who) looked to be about 6 years old leading this great big-old llama, beautiful animal, around the show ring and I just fell in love with it," she said. "I thought, 'It looks like the nicest pet.'" The Times-News of Burlington reports she didn't think about llamas after that for a couple of years. Then one day in 1991, her husband took her to Wake Forest for a surprise: He was going to get her a llama. His name was Rocky, and he was 3 months old at the time. He is 28 now. When she brought him to the farm days later, "I didn't know anything about him at all," she said, other than he had been hand-fed. The owner didn't give her much information, either. She didn't know, for instance, that llamas are social animals. Unaware of this, Shoffner kept Rocky in a raccoon pen. When she worked in her garden, she would take him out and tie him in the yard. "He just stayed at the fence looking at the house, looking for me," Shoffner said. "He was so lonely. I felt sorry for him so I bought another one to be with him." After that, Shoffner decided to buy more llamas as an investment. She bought four at an auction sale in Kentucky--three females and one male--and started breeding them. Also at the show, Shoffner bought 500 $1 raffle tickets for a chance to breed one of her llamas with a male of her choice. She won the raffle, which Shoffner said was a cheap breeding. "If you had to pay for it back then, it'd cost $1,000," she said. She picked a full Peruvian male llama as the breeder and out of that, she got a girl. She named her Lucky J, which is what her car tag said at the time. "I was having such good luck with them having female llamas--so I decided to call her Lucky J." And so, the Lucky J Llamas ranch was born. Native to South America, llamas are primarily used as beasts of burden in the Andean region of that continent, though their meat and wool is also widely used. But for Shoffner, the sad-eyed animals are simply gentle companions. "They are my babies," she said, adding that like humans, the animals have different personalities. "They are all different and you learn their personalities by working with them just like you do with the people you work with," she said. Rocky, for instance, has "a lot of personality," she said. He is very territorial and doesn't like when other males come in the pasture. Shoffner explains that when he was growing up, Rocky developed berserk male syndrome, a condition that causes llamas to become very aggressive toward humans. This syndrome typically develops in bottle-fed llamas or in llamas that have been raised isolated from other llamas. Shoffner was able to curve Rocky's aggressiveness by having him neutered. In general, llamas are very docile and generous, she said. "They won't hurt you other than spit at you and they won't even do that unless they feel frightened," she said. They recognize people by smelling them, she added. Shoffner said that there was a point in her life when everything she did revolved around the llamas. She was breeding them for business then and, at first, she sold "quite a few" to farmers who wanted to use them as guards for cattle and sheep in other states. But she was never able to find a market for them in Alamance County or North Carolina. "The problem with llamas is people don't know what to do with them," she said. "They don't take care of them properly." She said she worms them religiously every 30 days, adding that if they happen to pick up a deer worm while they are pasting and ingested it, "It can get in their spine and paralyze them." In its heyday, the farm housed up to 48 llamas. Now there are only 28. Each one has a name, and each one responds to it. At first, Shoffner started naming them after her grandchildren. When she ran out of names, "we started using ice-cream names and whatever we came up with," she said. Such is the case of Oreo, who looks like the cookie, Butterscotch, which resembles an ice cream Sundae, and Javier, a beautiful male that was named after the Braves' catcher Javier Lopez. Sadly, Javier died of heat stress some time ago. In all, Shoffner said she has lost three llamas to heat stress throughout the years. She said that the full-blood South American ones are more prone to heat stress since they are not used to the warm Carolina weather. Most of her llamas are half Bolivian or half Chilean. Every year, she sheers them when the spring comes. This year she was planning on doing so last month, but the highly unpredictable weather forced her to put it off until mid-May. She said that some of her llamas act like they are embarrassed without their coats. She said she is not planning on breeding them anymore but simply keep them as pets. "It's hard to part with them," she said. Though the property is still hers, she no longer lives on the farm. Through the years, many schools and elderly groups have come and still come to the property on Huffman Mill Road to pet the animals or simply to see them interact with one another. On a given day, passers-by can see the llamas grazing in the pasture throughout the day. "They are so pleasant to watch," she said. "It's just interesting to watch them from a distance. If there is something in the pasture that doesn't belong there, like a coyote or a deer, they all stare in that direction, she said. When they are in the pasture, "They follow each other in a single path," she said, adding that you can see a worn path through the field where they usually walk on. "They are not stupid animals," she said. "They are very intelligent in fact. They are very quick to learn." 7/7/08 Date: 7/1/08 Advertisement
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