Million Dollar Llama

$6 Million Dollar Llama For Sale.

In the interest of full disclosure, our llama didn’t start out that expensive. But after re-valuing his existence, covering the outstanding medical expenses and adjusting for inflation, we feel that this 4 year old, intact male is reasonably priced at $6 million.

Before you offer to buy him from us, it might be helpful to understand some background: We bought him because he was only $400, which is cheaper than the dirt cheapest companion horse. Running a horse farm, we’ve come to know the most fundamental equine axiom-- to wit, no horse stays in a pasture alone. Ever. It freaks them out, and then we all freak out. Fences aren’t safe, legs get broken, excessive snorting and whinnying causes mascara to fail and run, grass get pulverized. And before the Apocalypse, the sky breaks loose from its supports and falls upon us.

Horses are herd animals and won’t so much as powder their noses alone. But when the alternative is isolation, they will happily tolerate a llama, figuring him to be just a freaky looking, excessively hirsute, dwarfish mutant horse. The fact that we acquire him for four $100 bills and that he has no pedigree to speak of, well that is a fact they let slide.

It would have cost us more to make a decoy ‘companion’ horse out of plywood than it would have been to buy Tono De Blanco, our white-wooled llama. His one cerulean blue eye (the other eye is ‘meadow muffin’ brown) made him virtually valueless to the professional llama breeders and thus drove the asking price down to the root cellar, where we were shopping. As long as the eye worked, and even if it didn’t, we didn’t care. He just needed to , well, be.


He has a long, distinguished nose, making up nearly 75% of his head, down which he always looks at others. His arrogance, for some reason, is both superb and irrepressible. He lords around the farm like he owns it. His gait is careful and cautious. Except at dinner time when he gambols, he moves around the pasture with extreme disapproval, inspecting each part of the grass carefully before deigning to place his fair hoof on it. Like our grass is not green enough, like the footing is too hard, like whatever. Watching him, I’m reminded of the time I got lost and my prom date was forced to walk with me over a stream and then mount a fence in high heels to get to the dance. (It was only a very small stream and a dull barb wire fence, and she promised me she had had her tetanus shot, but that look of contempt feels prickly and familiar 25 years later).

Though Tono can not speak to prove it, one can not help feel grossly inferior in his presence. Think of showing up to a defend your doctoral dissertation wearing cut off blue jean shorts, flip flops and with a copy of “Green Eggs and Ham” tucked under your arm. There’s nothing we on the farm have found that can overcome his judgmental , sideways, patronizing smirk . Yet he is endearing and impossible to not love. And we’ve been through a lot.

We’ve spent time trying to figure him out. We’ve even considered the Eastern notion that llamas are spiritually evolved, perhaps having cycled up and around some reincarnation orbits over a number of lifetimes. He might be smarter in his own estimation than we are, but at the end of the day, we still know how to open the feedbag and he doesn’t. That doesn’t matter to him at all and on quiet reflection, seems like a cheap victory on our part.

For the first two weeks, Tono was a model pasture companion. He kept to himself, grazed lightly and offered palliation to the quivering equine nerves. $400 well spent.

Then he got sick..

Tono was prostrate one wet cold morning and after lifting his head up, ½ gallon of saliva came pouring out. Tono came with no manual, but I didn’t need documentation to know this was not good. After a futile romp through the yellow pages (‘V’is for Vet) I found a Kingston-based doctor who knew about camelids but couldn’t see him because the office was closing in 15 minutes.

Which is exactly how long it took me to drive my truck and trailer up and block him in…

Tono was not going to survive, it seemed, unless we went to Cornell, many (many) hours away in a truck I was pretty sure wasn’t going to survive the short return trip to the farm. I scrounged up a very last minute and shoddy repair kit consisting of a few wire hangers, some duct tape, a scrap of wood , a hammer and a can of ether. (The words of my cousin ring in my head, “If you can’t fix it with duct tape, you aren’t using enough duct tape”)

Somehow we made it to Ithaca and from my cell phone, I alerted the animal hospital staff that our arrival was imminent. The time was 1am. The residents mustered to meet me and Tono in the parking lot under flood lights and with a oversized dolly. Moving Tono was like moving a 300 lb waterbed, but we finally got him on, and even in his near death state, seemed smug that others were handling him. The staff rushed him through the huge swinging Large Animal Emergency Room doors like a harried scene from a TV drama. “We’re taking him to the Llama ICU,” they screamed at me. “Meet us there.” Two thoughts came to mind almost simultaneously. 1) Do they really have a llama Intensive Care Unit? And 2) This is gonna cost some serious cake.

A series of life saving and then life threatening treatments ensued over a series of weeks. I received daily reports that Tono was doing well, then not so well, then well again. Finally they summonsed me to retrieve him and cautioned me that stuffing the empty trailer with $20 bills would only start to address the enormous medical bills my llama had incurred.

2 weeks in a hospital/ hotel (?) room in Ithaca, NY during peak foliage season.. Then there’s the room service bill he ran up. And the cable bill. And the massages. And all the presents he gave to the staff and charged to his (my) account. 5 star service suited Tono just fine, and being doted on up there left him almost unmanageable down here.

So, For Sale: (1) $6 million dollar llama. Because if you afford that, you can afford to keep Tono in the lifestyle to which he is accustomed. And after our initial outlay of $400, plus expenses, we will make a handy profit of $23.