Episode 4: The Great Guanaco Escape

When Greg and I bought our herd of guanacos we knew nothing about handling big animals.

The closest to haltering an animal each of us ever came was putting a leash on our dogs to take them for a walk. We didn’t know then, what we know now–that haltering and leading a guanaco is more about the relationship you have with the animal than any technique you use. In the last three years, we’ve learned what’s really important in our relationships with our guanacos. Basically, it’s how you choose to show up every day that matters. And you know, when you think about it, that’s true for every relationship.

“I think a lot of it was just being there and being consistent and then they get sort of used to us,” Greg said.

“Right, it’s like that expectation is there. There’s a bond growing,” Lisa said.

“Right there’s something happening where you’re depositing trust in the trust account that you’re not going to hurt them,” Lisa said.

“It’s individual friendships with individual animals. It’s not just a herd of animals that we take care of,” Greg said.

“Yes,” Lisa said.

I think of it like this: trust builds connection, and over time, connection builds bonds. So, how you show up–every day, over time, matters. It’s really a practice. It doesn’t happen because you just want it to, it happens because you are consistent and trustworthy. My friend Shelley, who is a wonderful therapist, boils it down to this. She says, “You can either nurture a relationship or chip a relationship. There’s no in-between.” So, you are either moving toward or away, strengthening or weakening.

Get to know their strength until they’re tested. But you can’t wait for the test to happen, you have to keep showing up and nurturing connections, even if you don’t want to. Then, sometimes, in those sweet quiet moments, you will be able to sense the beautiful power of that connection–and maybe even get a fuzzy guanaco to kiss.

In this episode, we’re going to share with you how we’ve bonded with our guanacos. How, out of desperation, we had to learn a gentler way of handling them which led to deeper connections. We are also going to tell you about how those connections were tested. Especially when one of our girls got out and ran into the forest. But most importantly, we are going to tell you about how we’ve learned to pay attention, to notice, and to really sense the relationship with each of these animals, every day–because, like with any relationship, you don’t want to wait for a test in order to feel connected.

So like I said, Greg and I were novices and naive in our big animal handling skills.

In episode 2 we told you about how one of our mentors taught us to corner 5 or 6 guanacos in a pen, squish them against one another so that we were using their bodies as shields from kicks while we tried to halter the one guanaco we wanted to work with. This was awful and scary.

When we got the guanacos to our farm, we were in the position of having to figure out something different.

“So yes, it was kind of a do or die thing. Neither of us wanted to keep doing what we were told to do, which is sort of rodeo them in order to halter them and lead them,” Greg said.

“Right, and I think I think we were even at the point of, if we can’t do this we shouldn’t have these animals! This is our one last shot to figure out if we can handle them and so we were sort of desperate and kind of going in blind,” Lisa said.

Way back at the start, when we went to help out Dana and learn about the guanacos she had sold us. At the end of that first day, I describe in episode 1, when we ended up shoveling crap for 4 hours at Dana’s farm, she gave me a stack of books to read. One book was written by a woman named Marty McGee. In the book, Marty describes a step-by-step approach to haltering and leading that didn’t look dangerous. In fact, when I read it, it looked quite civilized. And when Marty McGee describes the psychology of her approach, where she takes into consideration the behavioral instincts of the animals, it made a lot of sense to me. So I tracked her down from this really old book to her online web course! Before we registered I emailed her to ask if her method would work with our guanacos. Because remember, guanacos are not domesticated–they have prey instincts that are not tempered through selective breeding–and I wanted to know what she thought.

She wrote back and said, “Yes, indeed my method will work with guanacos. But are you sure you have guanacos? Can you send me a picture?”

Remember, there are very few guanacos in the US–may be less than 1000 and most of them are in zoos.

So I don’t blame her for being surprised. I did send her a picture and she was indeed able to delight in the fact that we had guanacos. So we dove into her web course.

Now, this new approach required that we learned some roping skills before actually going to practice on the animals. Greg and I had some fun re-enacting this process for you.

“So I’m going to reenact how I made a guanaco head to practice our haltering. I have a foam roller,” Lisa said.

“It’s a physical therapy foam roller,” Greg said.

“Yeah, and then a towel and a big thing of tape,” Lisa said. “Basically I just made ahead”

“Well you have to use your imagination to see a guanaco but yes,” Greg said.

“It has a nose and a big long neck. That’s basically what we need,” Lisa said.

“So would you like to describe our lovely guanaco?” Lisa said.

“Well, you have to hold it in your stomach to make it really be a guanaco. Remember when we used to do this?” Greg said. “Like that?”

“So you’re holding it out from your stomach at an angle,” Lisa said.

“At an angle like a guanaco,” Greg said.

“Now watch! We practiced this for a long time. You are not going to wind the rope around your hand, you remember that part?” Lisa said.

“Yes, I do,” Greg said.

“It’s a zig-zag because if they pull on it you don’t want your fingers stuck in there, right? Lisa said

“Right, otherwise your fingers could come off,” Greg said.

“Yep. Okay, so now, I have a nice little handful of rope. Are you going to be the guanaco?” Lisa asked.

“I’m the guanaco!” Greg exclaimed.

“Okay so I’m going to catch you with his catch rope okay ready,” Lisa said.

“Ready! Oh, I don’t want to be caught. I’m bobbing my head around. I don’t want to be caught with a catch rope. Ohhh you’ve got me,” Greg said.

“Okay, so now the rope is around your neck. That’s very good and now I’m going to undo the alligator clasp and let the….” Lisa said.

“You have to put the stick out of the way,” Greg said.

“Because it looks like a snake and you don’t like snakes on the ground when you are working with guanacos,” Lisa said.

“And now I’m going to move the rope—the guanaco is moving around!” Lisa said.

“Because I don’t like you pulling on my neck. I don’t like it,” Greg said.

“I know you don’t like it. Okay now scoot the catch rope all the way up to your chin. Guanaco stood still,” Lisa said. Now I’m clasping it around your neck and I’m tightening it so that I’m going to catch hold of you. Stay still, guanaco girl.

“Don’t put your hands on me then. You have to do all this without touching me,” Greg said.

“Remember how hard we used to work at this?” Lisa asked.

“Okay now you’re all caught in the catch rope,” Lisa said.

“I’m caught,” Greg said.

“Are you happy?” Lisa said.

“Yeah I’m not really happy I’m pulling away from a little,” Greg said.

“Okay, now I’m going to get your halter,” Lisa started.

“Put it over my nose without touching me with your hands. Don’t put your hands on my face,” Greg finished.

“Well your nose is a towel and it doesn’t fit,” Lisa said.

“It’s okay,” Greg said.

“All right, that was a smooth move, did you see that? Lisa asked.

“I did see that. You reached around…..you got the strap and buckled it around my nose.

Lisa: Now I’m going to get the lead rope and put it on,” Greg said.

“The halter,” Greg said.

Lisa: Okay, and now I can get the catch rope off of you and I have you on a lead. Are you ready to go for a walk?

“Yes,” Greg said.

“So that’s how it went! We had a fake guanaco made from a towel and a foam roller. And we worked very hard to learn the moves,” Lisa said.

“I think it probably took weeks of us practicing how to do it. Maybe even longer than weeks. It was very hard for me to get my hands coordinated… and it was very hard to do,” Greg said.

“We practiced in our living room,” Lisa said.

“Yes, walking around,” Greg said.

“With a foam roller for a guanaco and there was no live animal, obviously. There were no nerves, really. It was just clumsiness,” Lisa said.

Once we practiced the rope skills and graduated from the foam roller/towel head, we then had to go learn about where to put our bodies in relation to the animal.

“The thing is that it involves walking backward going around in a circle,” Lisa said.

“Yes, Greg said.

“Which is also a clumsy thing to do,” Lisa said.

“Right, because you’re in a small pen with them and you want them to turn counter-clockwise so that you can do all these things,” Greg said.

“You have to keep yourself at a certain point in relation to their body in order for them to keep going forward, round and round, and sometimes that means you walk backward. It does mean you walk in circles as well,” Lisa said.

“It was hard. It was a lot of frustration and disappointment because of course on the instructional videos it’s all being done with a nice domestic llama that just stands there and our animals would not do that. They kind of fought us every step of the way,” Greg said.

But, we did it. We showed up and videoed ourselves and analyzed our body posture and positions. And in that process, we began to learn more than just the rope skills, we were learning how to be in better relationships with these animals.

“My eventual adaptation was that I became very aware, which I never would have been being it not for these videos, very aware of what I was communicating to the animals with my body. Like if I looked at them eyeball-to-eyeball that was threatening to them. If my hands were visible to them or touching them that was threatening. If I faced them directly- that made them very anxious. And so I learned to control what I was communicating to them through just practice and failing. And I think that’s eventually what made a difference for me,” Greg said.

Every day it was a choice. Even if we didn’t feel like it, we had to choose to nurture these relationships and bank more trust. Even if it didn’t seem like it was working, we were committed to giving these relationships all we had.

“I just want to ask you, would you wake up in the morning and say, “Oh yay I get to practice haltering the girls?” Lisa asked.

“I have never done that. Never thought that. I mean the boys would fight the girl’s spit,” Greg said.

“There’s nothing about it that’s rewarding when you’re in those early stages and even after that it’s not terribly rewarding,” Lisa said.

“Right,” Greg said.

“I think the other takeaway was that it was about showing up even when we didn’t want to and doing this practice,” Lisa said.

“I would agree. I think they formed an expectation that oh yeah this is part of the morning. I get to eat but then I have to put up with these bipeds putting their hands near me and restraining me and walking me around,” Greg said.

So I’m happy to report that our gentler style of handling these animals was successful…for the most part. We were able to halter the females without any trouble. (The males were a different matter and still a bit of a challenge, but I promise, we’ll tell you how we solved that problem in another episode!) But anyway, that year, when the shearer arrived, the girls were all ready to go–no rodeo, no squishing–just civilized handling that felt good for all of us.

With some of our females, the haltering work was enough to establish a relationship with them in which we could lead them. Which is a good thing…because we do need to do that from time to time. And we were proud. Like we’d really bonded with these animals in a way that we didn’t know was possible.

But our girl Georgia was a bit more difficult to win over than the others.

“So for a while, we had given up. Do you remember? I mean we could halter Katie and lead her. Angie was easy to lead but Georgia, the one who had torn her hoof nail off her toenail when we were trying to load originally, was the most difficult one. The wildest of the three,” Greg said.

“Do you think that’s because of her position in the herd?” Lisa asked.

“And her personality, yes. She was the one who always sounded the alarm first whenever there was a coyote near,” Greg said.

“The protector,” Lisa said.

“The protector,” Greg said.

“I’m the biggest, baddest, most in charge,” Lisa said.

“Most in charge guanaco out here, and I’m not going to allow this bi-ped to dominate me and lead me around. That’s not happening,” Greg said.

“Yes,” Lisa said.

Like I mentioned before, we did get to the stage where we could halter Georgia. Interestingly, rather than approaching her slowly and gradually working up to the haltering–the method that worked best with the others.

We found that Georgia preferred just getting it over with. Get her in the catch rope and quickly put that halter on.

The more we tried to calm her in the pen without the halter on, the more worked up she got. So, Greg became an expert at judging the timing so that Georgia was happy with the process and we were too. However, once she had the halter and the lead on, she was not cooperative.

“We couldn’t lead her anywhere. She would fall down, remember, she would crush. You would have to try to pull her back up,” Greg said.

“Well, she falls down kerplunk on her knees. like can you imagine her knees aren’t cracked wide open? But boom, two knees, down, I’m not going anywhere,” Lisa said.

“I won’t move. I’m laying down here. It’s the ultimate in passive resistance. Or she would just plant her hooves in the ground or on the concrete and wouldn’t move. Would fight you every step of the way. And of course, she’s stronger than you are. You can’t overpower her when she does that. You have to try to figure out how to work with her,” Greg said.

And there was some urgency to figuring this leading thing out.

We have a great setup here on the farm. Our male guanacos live in long paddocks on the south side of our property and the females have a large pasture on the north end. This means that the males and females are separated by the barn.

This means that they don’t try to push down fences to get to one another. And are generally just more polite and calm without the excitement of being in close proximity with the opposite sex. But, when we want to breed, this presents somewhat of a challenge.

“As it turned out we needed to lead Georgia over 100 feet of open ground to lead her to this new boy we had in order to breed her,” Greg said

“So in order to get her led away from her herd across an unfenced area into another fenced area, I had to work with her in order to take her that distance,” Greg said.

“It was a last-ditch effort, right? I remember sitting and talking with you about it and you had a plan of getting like three men to haul her over there. One on the tail and two with two leads. And I was like, “Well you know, could we just try to do some more handling with her and see if that could work?” Lisa said.

“And we didn’t want to sign up for that consistency and the frustration and the patience and the lack of progress. All of that right?” Lisa

“Right,” Greg said.

So remember here’s that choice again. We had to choose–were we going to nurture this relationship? Were we going to show up and be consistent and deposit trust in the trust account no matter what? Or were we going to just resort to the rodeo handling that chipped away at the connection we had established?

Every morning, every day for a month plus I would halter her and you would watch. I started out trying to just get her to go around a little circle and that kind of worked and then try to get her to go around in somewhat bigger circles. And remember we would just kind of go from one end of the pen to the other was a distance of about 15 ft… I would have to gently tug and then turn my body away from her. And if I got her off balance enough, she would walk from one end to the other, and then I would reward her.

“At the beginning, she wouldn’t even take pellets from you. Do you remember that? she was like, “I am not cooperating. I’m not even going to take what I most want from you, which is a pellet,” Lisa said.

“No, she wouldn’t at the beginning. but persistence pays off and she ended up liking being rewarded,” Greg said.

“And then leading her out of the barn down the hill a little bit. Not very far and then back. And on the way back she would always try to run around a Pole to pull the rope out of my hands and I would have to go around the pole with her on that side and lead her back out and around,” Greg said.

“She was very stubborn and very good. But I could feel her giving in little by little. That this was not a bad process. That even though she was never going to totally be deferential to me she was going to follow along if I asked her to walk and walk beside her. And she did eventually, she went out to the pasture and we walked around the pasture together,” Greg said.

“It was a good process and at the end of it I got her across,” Greg said.

“Many times,” Lisa said.

“More than just once…..the open ground and she walked away from the herd and didn’t look back and was just totally content to go with me,” Greg said.

“Which was just a miracle really,” Lisa said.

“What did you sense about your relationship with her as you worked so diligently over time? Lisa said.

“It’s just a totally different sort of trust and bonding that was built up,” Greg said.

“She ended up being very sweet, I think,” Lisa said.

“And the reality is–it didn’t take that long,” Lisa said.

“I think that’s right,” Greg said.

“I was much calmer working with Georgia than I have ever been. Whatever she did I was not going to react. No matter if she spit on me, no matter what she did, and she did! I was not going to let her see me react. I was going to just stay calm,” Greg said.

“There was one day that she got you so bad in the face you couldn’t keep going, but I didn’t blame you one bit,” Lisa said.

“I couldn’t see through my glasses,” Greg said.

“That’s so gross,” Lisa said.

“It was a shower day,” Greg said.

So Greg worked to establish this amazing trust with our alpha guanaco, Georgia. It was such a celebration on the first day that he led her over to see Pedro. Greg and Georgia looked like they were walking together in a parade–heads high, confident, and happy with each other. And, of course, Georgia was thrilled to see Pedro! Hopefully, we will have a baby Georgia next summer.

I’ve had a recent chance to learn about building special relationships with these guanacos. We had a baby girl this August. She’s Angie’s baby and it’s been so beautiful because Angie has let me participate in raising her.

Greg: We’ve been talking a lot about our relationship with these animals developing. But there’s one that’s very special. WE just had a baby. Why don’t you tell me about that?

“Little Miss Alma?” Lisa said.

“Little Miss Alma,” Greg said.

“Well, I think what’s interesting about little Alma, is that from day one there was the opportunity to have a bond. And I didn’t fully understand that until it was every single day putting a hand on her. And saying hi and her not freaking about that,” Lisa said.

“I think with Alma, Angie let me have a relationship with her,” Lisa said.

“Yes,” Greg said.

“So I could touch her. I picked her up and weighed her a couple of times. That was amazing,” Lisa said.

“And then eventually, Just interacting in the pen, Alma would take hay from me. Cause she could see that her mom would do the same thing. And then came the kissing…,” Lisa said.

“So how did that happen? It’s not really kissing like a pucker up,” Greg said.

“It’s guanacos kiss–breathing into each other’s noses basically,” Lisa said.

“Exactly,” Greg said.

“But you get to feel her fuzzy little lips on you,” Lisa said.

“So how did that happen?” Greg said.

“I don’t know. I think I just breathed on her one day and she breathed on me back. And then I started doing it as a greeting to her and then she would initiate. And she just likes, “Oh, hi friend!” and come and lift her little face up to mine and sniff and it’s just so precious,” Lisa said.

“So in terms of a bond I think that it started way earlier and she didn’t know any differently, you know? And her mom didn’t tell her any differently which is a big deal,” Lisa said.

“If I had Alma in the catch pen working with her with a rope, Angie would just eat and totally ignore me,” Lisa said.

“And I guess I would also say as you said with Georgia, I think being in a pen with Alma is not anxiety-provoking for me at all. I feel a sense of calm and just a sweet bond with her that makes it go better. I’m sure if I was all nervous and scared and wondering if she was going to kick or spit at me then I would probably amp up her emotion as well and it wouldn’t go as well as if I would just stay calm,” Lisa said.

“But I think she’s amazing. And yeah it proceeded fairly quickly. It was the catch rope and then the halter and then a lead. And now, pretty much, I can lead her out of the barn into the pasture through a gate without her doing much of anything. Just coming with me,” Lisa said.

“But it does feel to me like it must feel with you in Georgia that she’s with me. She’s not just cooperating. She’s like, “I’m with my human right now”……” and then pretty soon I get to go back to the barn with my mom” And it’s really sweet,” Lisa said.

“It is, it’s very sweet to watch. Especially in the morning to hear you coo at her when she comes over and gives you kisses,” Greg said.

“I think that helps, it makes her feel like she has a sweet friend who loves her,” Lisa said.

“She does,” Greg said.

So the bonds were there. We had worked for them and even began to reap the benefits of having such close relationships with our females. But there was a day, a very bad day when we learned something crucial to understanding our guanacos and the bonds they form with each other. Something we hadn’t quite realized before.

Unfortunately, it was the day that Faith got out of the pasture.

Now, just to give you an idea about our property. We live on close to 12 acres. Over half of that is forest. We do have neighbors, but their properties are similar to ours. And our driveway is off of a dirt road–a long one. So, what I’m trying to say is this, when you hear this story, don’t imagine a farm with gently rolling hills where you can see pastures meeting big sky. Where you might be able to see a large animal off in the distance. Instead, imagine mostly big, tall fir trees that encircle pastures and that line driveways and one long dirt road. In order to see the sky, you have to look up. There is no horizon line–it’s just greenery from the trees. Basically, it’s more like “Hansel and Gretel” than “little house on the prairie”.

“So I come down to help with the afternoon feeding And the gate is open,” Lisa said.

“Right,” Greg said. You arrived….and said that we had a missing guanaco.”

“I counted and I counted again. and I was like, “There’s one girl missing!” And I couldn’t believe it. And then I tried to figure out who it was and that was just awful,” Lisa said.

“It was awful, Greg said.

Greg had been dealing with a very difficult situation that had developed between Coacher, the one male that shares a fence line with the females, and Bebo–a new female of ours. Things had become very violent and Greg had been trying to break the two of them up. In the process, on a trip to the barn to grab a broom, he missed the latch on the gate. The very gate that Faith had walked through, out of the barn and into the forest.

Now, remember, our guanacos don’t come when they are called. They won’t let us put a halter on them unless they are in a small enclosure. They run away from anything that is unfamiliar or potentially harmful. Basically, we were completely lost as to how we were going to find her and get her safely back to the pasture. And we didn’t have any time to stand there and talk about it.

“I ran,” Lisa said.

“You ran to look for her,” Greg said.

“I ran every which way I could figure out a guanaco would go,” Lisa said.

“And I stayed to halter Katie thinking that if I could halter Katie and lead her all over the place that somehow Katie and Faith would find one another and faith would follow Katie back,” Greg said.

“So I was there trying to halter Katie and you were running all over the place and when I brought Katie out of our driveway and to the neighbors’ you told me that you had seen Faith but had lost her and didn’t know where she went,” Greg said.

“You know in movies where there’s a mythical creature that keeps showing up in sort of random places and the character in the movie doesn’t quite know if the mythical creature is real or if it has a message or whatever. Faith was doing that. I saw her on the neighbor’s porch literally and I was like, ‘No way that’s our guanaco.’ And then she left. I shook pellets towards her and she wouldn’t come. She saw the pellet a little bit and she likes pellets a lot but she was not going to come to get pellets for me,” Lisa said.

“Then that was when you turned the corner with Kate and I said she was at Bob and Gloria’s but she left,” Lisa said.

“Right, and she ran down this other neighbor’s driveway and was not visible anymore. She was in the forest somewhere,” Greg said.

“Right, but then their dog came running up. Which meant that Faith ran right by me out their gate. And unfortunately, she went down toward the main street, not towards our house,” Lisa said.

“I ran all the way down to the main drive to see if I could see a basic car crash with a guanaco belonging to it and there was nothing like that. And then I went and did a circle around Bob and Gloria’s house again thinking that she went there. And then I came back and…when I ran into the driveway Faith was coming through the forest by the goats,” Lisa said.

“And by the time I got there it was like we were giving up on finding her and doing anything and we thought we were just going to have to call for help somehow and dart her to get her back,” Greg said.

Find and dart her and so …. I turned around with Katie and was trying to walk back with her and Katie was all upset and wouldn’t let me lead really well and was getting grumpy. but I got her down the road and into our driveway and as I’m walking her up the driveway I look over and there you are with Faith in front of you

“I mean I think I was completely out of my mind,” Lisa said.

“Yes I think we were both pretty stressed out and full of adrenaline and couldn’t figure out what to do and finally she just sort of ambled back. And I think you went around to try to cut her off from going into the forest. But she just sort of ambled back and I opened the gate to the pasture with Katie and walked Katie in and she came in right behind her,” Greg said.

“Yeah, and the females were all at the gate like, “Oh we’re right here, Faith just come in here,” Lisa said.

“Right, “Come on back to us please,” Greg said.

“Faith was like, ‘Oh okay!’” Lisa said.

“My walkabout is over!” Greg exclaimed.

“The girls were just like, “Where have you been all this time girl?” Lisa said.

“Yeah, we’ve been here waiting for you to come on back in,” Greg said.

“So, in the end, it’s like all she wanted was to get back to her herd she didn’t mean to go escape or anything,” Lisa said.

“Curiosity just got the best of her,” Greg said.

“Yeah,” Lisa said.

“I think what that did teach me to think more like a guanaco. That when they’re not with their herd, all they’re doing is really trying to find their herd,” Greg said.

“Find where they belong,” Greg said.

“After that day, I remember, I had so many nerves and so much pent-up worry and fear that I just came in and just sobbed. Cause that’s the last thing you want, your guanaco got loose and what are you going to do?” Lisa asked.

“Who are you going to call?’ Greg said.

“So thank God she found her, in a place she had never been, through the forest, she came back to the herd. Which, had we not been so crazy and upset, might have occurred to us to start with. That when things settle down she was going to need to be with the rest of the girls,” Greg said.

“I don’t think we knew how strong that bond or that need was before it was really, you know, tested,” Lisa said.

“Yes,” Greg said.

“That was a bad day,” Lisa said.

“It was a day that I was very happy to be done with,” Greg said.

When I think about what we learned that day, I get chills. We realized how strong the bonds were within the herd. And I realized how strong my bond was to each of our animals. And that we had gone from the last ditch effort to establish trust with these animals to have deep relationships with each one of them.

“After 3 years with these animals we can pick who is who out of the herd,” Lisa said.

“At a distance,” Greg said.

“At a distance, just by their body language and their shape,” Lisa said.

“We also have different bonds with each one of them,” Lisa said.

“Yes,” Greg said.

“The bonds develop very slowly and sometimes you don’t even realize that they are there. That’s my perception of what happened with Georgia. Sometimes you don’t even realize what’s going on because it is so incremental. But when the bonds are tested, you realize how strong they are. When you have to lead her away from her herd across open ground you realize that you really firmly established something with her that keeps her calm in your presence.

And I think the same is true for you and Alma,” Greg said.

It’s pretty amazing, really. Without realizing we were doing it, Greg and I had created a practice of nurturing our relationships with our guanacos. Every day. In every way, we interacted with them. From that last-ditch effort of making our hands learn new rope handling skills–to running miles after a loose guanaco-we went from doubting we should have these animals to establishing and understanding what it is to be bonded with them.

“Let’s face it, we spend more time talking to the animals other than any other human,” Greg said.

“Exactly, …. tangible relationships, you know. And so the fact that they each have names and personalities and we have relationships with each of them,” Lisa said.

“Yes, it’s individual friendships with individual animals,” Greg said.

“There you go, see,” Lisa said.

“It’s not just a herd of animals that we take care of,” Greg said.

“Yes,” Lisa said.

So, I guess what I’m saying here is this: If you have relationships that you wish were different. If you don’t want to metaphorically use a rodeo-style of dealing with the other person or animal, maybe the question you could start asking is, “How am I showing up?” And, in my friend Shelley’s words–” Am I nurturing that relationship or chipping at it?” And, by the way, remember, don’t wait for the bond to be tested in order for you to appreciate it. Because really, it’s the little things–the things you might miss if you aren’t present, that matter most.

Thanks for listening. Tune in next time when we tell you all the intimate stories of breeding guanacos. You won’t want to miss this–especially for the sound effects!

Credits:

Hey everyone. I want to give a shout-out to the folks at Bright Sighted Podcasting. Christine and Steve continue to amaze me with their awesome script editing, audio editing, artwork, and just plain ability to keep it all organized. Thank you, guys. And I also want to give Marty McGee a bow. She’s been a force behind gentler camelid handling for decades. Without her work, I can’t imagine what we would have done.