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Seventeen years ago seventeen llamas were brought to a farm in Logan County, Ohio. When they arrived, the llamas were turned out into a large, rolling pasture, which at one end fed into a decommissioned cinder-block milkhouse and at the other end faded into brambles.
The owner of the farm (a farmer) was not the owner of the llamas. The owner of the llamas was the husband of the farmer’s niece. And the llama owner, across all those 17 llama years, left it to the farmer to care for the animals—which the farmer, being an animal lover, did without complaint. He paid for feed—the milkhouse was the llamas’ dining room (as well as shelter)—and he paid for shearing.
The owner of the llamas, besides not paying for feed and shearing, did not do two other things across all those llama years. He did not visit the llamas and he did not (with the mysterious exception of a single llama) sell the llamas—though asked to do so on several occasions.
By the beginning of 2019, death, the uniform gender of the herd, and the sale of the single llama, had conspired to thin the herd to three.
The farmer had not always been alone in owning the farm. For over 60 years he had shared the pastures, the fields, the out-buildings, the farmhouse—everything—with his wife, but she had passed away in 2012. When she died, the farmer’s wife left behind a horse she had trained and cared for and prized. The horse’s name was High Hat.
High Hat was very old at the time of the farmer’s wife passing—he was pushing 30. Thirty years is about all a horse can expect to get, but High Hat persisted beyond that high threshold and in 2017 could be seen from the road, biding his days, taking short walks around the barn and lying on his side in the sun for hours at a time.
(All these details eventually tie together, I promise.)
After a few years of living alone, the farmer fell down in his home and broke his hip. As a consequence, he went to a convalescent home. Friends of the farmer pitched in during this time and took care of High Hat and the llamas. But the farmer had neglected to shear the llamas for a couple of years before that and the farmer’s friends didn’t have the means nor inclination to have them sheared. So, during the time the farmer was recuperating, passersby on the road would see, with no human in sight, three lonely scruffy and tattered llamas roaming a large pasture and a saggy and tuckered horse lying in a dry paddock. To the uninformed eye the animals looked to be suffering, which they weren’t.
Before the farmer returned from the convalescent home enough people in the community had complained about the animals and their perceived conditions that word got back to the owner of the llamas and he decided to take action—finally. And here's what he did. He paid a man to go to the farm with a backhoe and a gun and shoot and bury High Hat.
The farmer was coming home in a few days and his friends had been preparing for his return. They had cleaned his house and installed a hospital bed in his living room. And, most importantly, they had High Hat groomed. They had High Hat groomed because they knew, being farmer's friends, that the horse was for the farmer a connection to his dead wife—High Hat was the living remnant of her life with him, as the two of them had never had children.
The friends of the farmer arrived at the farm one afternoon to finish preparing the house and what they saw was this: High Hat trumpeting and furiously and blindly pivoting about his paddock with blood coming from his head.
The man with the gun and the backhoe was not very bright and did not know horse anatomy and had brought a .22 caliber rifle to the farm and had shot High Hat in the head and the bullet had not gone into High Hat’s brain but instead had just ripped through his skin and mashed against his skull. And then, the man with the gun had shot High Hat in the head a second time.
The friends of the farmer were overwhelmed and confused by what they saw, but being good people and after quick reflection realized High Hat’s suffering could only have one outcome no matter what they did and they demanded that the man with the gun shoot High Hat in the heart, which he did. And High Hat was dead. And the man with the gun buried High Hat in the yard beside the farmhouse, where, to this day, a wreath hangs.
For all of you who say the unauthorized act of shooting another man’s horse, especially when carried out so cruelly and ineptly, is a crime, please note that the deed was reported to the local sheriff, who properly moved the case along towards a court date, until the day came when the district attorney, who happened to be a regular golfing partner to the owner of the llamas (yes, the llama owner was, as they say, prominent in the community), dropped the case. And it has never been picked up.
The farmer came home soon after. His mettle was strong (he was, after all, an Ohio farmer, not to mention a veteran of the Battle of Okinawa), so he placed the previously mentioned wreath over High Hat’s grave, grieved quietly and briefly, and then retired to his hospital bed from which he passed his time watching old westerns on his flat-screen TV, taking visitors, and every now and then hoisting himself into his wheelchair and rolling over to a window to watch the llamas make their lazy perambulations around his pasture.
And this is where Our Farm Sanctuary comes in—not necessarily the heroes of the story, but they certainly carry it to denouement. Our Farm Sanctuary was created (or more accurately, evolved from a single cat rescue effort) to provide a home for animals of all sizes—domestic pet or farm critter, unwanted or neglected. One day, Lisa St. Myers, one of the sanctuary’s founders, was dropping off adoptable cats for display at a pet supply store when she was approached by a woman who, noting the word “farm” in the cards that went with the cat cages, told Lisa of three disheveled llamas on a nearby farm. The woman knew the story of High Hat and was hoping the llamas could find a new home before they met a similar end. The woman did not want her name associated with any efforts that might follow (due to the aforementioned prominence in the community of the owner of the llamas), but gave over the llamas’ location—the farmer’s address and first name. Several reconnaissance road trips later, the first two fraught with confusing backroads and dubious GPS signals, Sophia Kartsonis (Lisa’s sanctuary partner) and her husband Mitch Lear knocked on the farmer’s door.
The farmer, lying on his bed, feet elevated, watching The Rifleman on TV, hailed them to let themselves in, which they did. The farmer was fairly deaf, so a very loud conversation ensued. When the subject of llamas came up (almost immediately) the farmer exclaimed, “They’re not mine!” Despite all he had done for the animals, he made no claim on them. Sophia and Mitch then asked permission to visit the llamas in the pasture. The farmer told them to help themselves and pointed them to the milkhouse gate.
It was early January and the sky was clear and the sun was low. Sophia and Mitch hiked across the pasture to where the llamas stood. They watched and followed as the llamas began to gracefully skirt contact—changing directions, splitting up, reconvening, moving on. The llamas weren’t alarmed but also weren’t cordial.
They were three sizes.
One was statuesque and towered over the other two. Her neck was wide and muscular and tapered upward from a grey cumulus cloud of fleece to a placid and symmetrical white and black face. She, due to her vigilance and poise, appeared to be the herd leader, and you could easily conjure a mental image of this llama, strapped with luggage, nonchalantly making the climb to Machu Picchu.
The second in size was brown, black, and white. She hunched her head forward and down when she walked, and her ears regularly pivoted and tilted in different directions—now perked forward in alertness, now slanted back in wariness—but always ending in cockeyed positions to each other. She appeared the least robust of the three, with a swayback, wet eyes and nose, and legs spindlier and barer than the others.
The third—the smallest—was the most striking. Her body was an outsized bumpy mushroom of thickly matted overgrown fleece. Her face was all black, like a Suffolk sheep, with two dark eyes that were calm and that would fix upon Sophia and Mitch. Beneath her cleft camelid lip protruded two buck teeth and she would turn her body so tightly on her short legs that she could have been rotating on a lazy susan—a very comical girl.
Mitch left Sophia to get his phone from the truck, and there, alone in the pasture, Sophia let her mind spin and lurch. She had to get these girls to Our Farm Sanctuary, but the farmer wouldn’t admit to having the authority to give them up (although Sophia knew that the llama owner’s neglect could be construed as abandonment, in which case the farmer, caregiver for 17 years was in fact the llamas’ owner). While pondering some dubious strategies for extracting the llamas, Sophia saw a pickup stop on the road that ran alongside the pasture. A woman got out of the truck and yelled at Sophia, demanding to know why she was out there. Sophia approached the fence line and received the standard rural pronouncement one hears when one is caught standing in a field not one’s own: “This is private property.” Sophia explained that she had permission to be there—that she had talked to the farmer. And this was all the explanation the woman from the truck needed—she and her husband were the farmer’s friends who had been there the day High Hat had been shot. She and her husband regularly looked in on the farmer and that was her mission now. And then she began to tell the story of High Hat…in detail...with photos...
Shaking off what she’d seen in the photos, Sophia told the woman that after all those years of care the farmer was in fact the owner of the llamas. This assertion sprung spontaneously from Sophia’s hazy sense of the Ohio Revised Code as it pertains to abandoned animals and her innate Greek bravado. If he chose to do so, the farmer could give the llamas to the sanctuary. Yes, that feels right, Sophia thought. The farmer’s friend said she and her husband would talk to the farmer. And Sophia and Mitch drove home, discussing along the way how to steal the llamas, because they knew the farmer was too good of a person to give away another man’s llamas.
As it turned out, there was to be no risk of jail time. Two days later the woman from the truck called Sophia and Mitch to let them know she and her husband had talked to the farmer about giving up the llamas. After several more “They’re not mine!”’s, the farmer had pivoted suddenly to a single “Get them out of here!” The farmer’s friends had convinced the farmer that Our Farm Sanctuary would make a good home for llamas and that Sophia and Mitch and Lisa and company were not grifters. This was not a joke or fantasy on the farmer’s part. There were grifters out and about in the county who would deliver sample feed to nominally interested farmers and once the feed was consumed by a farmer’s animals, the gifters would deliver an outsized bill for the feed. Strange that such a grift could be pursued for any length of time without the authorities dropping the hammer, but it was a fact of life in Logan County.
So, given that folks in Logan County were wary, Mitch wrote up an agreement which stated he and Sophia were removing the llamas to the sanctuary, but only for the purpose of providing ongoing care, and in no way should the move be construed as a theft, but that they were assuming all costs. The document was very legal-ish.
During those two days before the call from the farmer’s friends, Sophia and Mitch had contacted Southeast Llama Rescue (SELR), which in turn referred them to a husband-wife team of llama rescuers, Sherry and Chris Budniak. The Budniaks, two of the best people ever to pull on a pair of muck boots, own and operate Kokopele Alpaca Farm in Martinsville, Ohio. Despite all the tasks crowding their time (and there was a goodly number), they volunteered to assist in the rescue. They agreed to bring along a second horse trailer (the thinking was three llamas would not fit into a single two-horse trailer).
Once the farmer’s friends gave the go-ahead and a meet time was set, Mitch and Sophia, Sherry and Chris, and Lisa set out for Logan County on the appointed morning. When they got to the llamas’ home, the farmer’s friends had already lured the llamas into the milkhouse with a bucket of oats. There was nothing left to do but back up a horse trailer to the milkhouse door and rope and wrestle the llamas in. And there was a lot of wrestling—also grunting, sweating, and heaving-to from the llamas’ hindquarters, along with a couple of cyclonic human-llama chases within the small confines of the building. Finally, lo and behold, all three llamas were cushing (what llamas do when they sit down—legs collapsed under body) in a single trailer and ready for the ride to their new home.
Before leaving, Mitch and Sophia walked up to the farmhouse. The farmer was up and in his wheelchair, and had been watching the wrestling match from his window. He was in a chipper mood and probably is most of his days. He signed the document with a steady hand and accepted an invitation to visit the sanctuary in the Spring. His friends promised to be the chauffeurs. Mitch and Sophia left the house, quickly paid their respects to Top Hat, and started the llamas’ journey home.