A Yorkshire Llama sanctuary has gone viral after it's hilarious Facebook post asking why visitors are avoiding Gary, their oldest Llama.
Bessie and Rupert Saddlesworth own Heathy Moor Pudding Llama sanctuary in Eccles, Yorkshire, a llama sanctuary that organises llama walks for members of the public.
Visitors get to choose a llama to accompany them on a long, seasonal walk through the rolling Yorkshire dales, with particular llamas noted as being more popular with the public.
"It's quite fascinating to us why certain llamas are more popular than others, we know their personalities so well and I suppose some of them just resonate with people better."
The couple like to give all the llamas a lengthy walk, sometimes encouraging visitors to pick the more shy creatures, to bring them out of their shell.
"We had this younger llama called Roscoe, who was very timid. No one was picking him to go on a walk, so we stuck a little sign on his pen saying "I'm Roscoe, I'm very shy, but I want to get out my comfort zone and meet some new friends, please pick me to go on your next scheduled walk".
"It worked like a treat! He quickly became our most popular llama, now he's brimming with confidence, he's cock of the walk! It actually worked a bit to well and he's become a bit of a bully to the other llamas now. He grunts at them, and insists on being the head of the pack when we're out on walks. He seems to have gotten too big for his boots. But we're a positive sanctuary, so we don't want to discourage confident behaviour, unless he turns violent, but llamas are very peaceful creatures, even the bullies are pretty harmless, so it's important to keep a sense of perspective".
The work Bessie and Rupert devoted to Roscoe reaped it's rewards, giving rise to the belief that any llama, no matter how timid, traumatised or anti-social, could grow in confidence, and become a favourite with visitors, but alas this is not the case.
"We've had Gary for over 20 years now, my Mum, who founded the sanctuary, found him wandering the moors alone and walked him over 30 miles to here, which back then was our family farm. I remember he initially struck me as quite a lonely creature, very solemn, drooping eyes, he would stare pensively into the distance and didn't respond particularly well to being patted."
"We assumed he'd been mistreated, but we'd taken in a lot of llamas who'd experienced abuse and managed to rehabilitate them eventually. Creatures who were once aloof became very sociable, but Gary remains aloof all these years later, it almost feels like he's trying to prove a point, but we don't know what."
Bessie explains that they tried to encourage visiting children to pick Gary as their llama, but her efforts were in vain. "Something about Gary put the children off. I think children can recognise when they're not wanted, and Gary's spiky personality seemed to grate with the child-like sense of wonder at meeting such a fascinating animal."
"It felt to us, and I know how stupid this sounds, like Gary was trying to sabotage our whole enterprise. It's something you can only really understand if you've met Gary, but it feels like he's just as cognizant as you and me, like he's playing us somehow, or subverting the reality of his lived existence, which saddens us in many ways, because we love him and want nothing more than for him to be happy."
After many years of failed attempts at trying to rehabilitate Gary and make him a popular llama within the sanctuary, Bessie and Rupert started to bring him offerings and spoiling him more than the other llamas, as a way of establishing a more mutually-beneficial working relationship.
"I know it sounds a bit mad, but we were desperate and didn't know what else to do. We started bringing Gary a rich assortment of fruits and spices from the orient, we'd line his pen with gemstones, hand-picked to bring us luck and good fortune, amethysts, sapphires, garnets, anything that could give us those marginal gains, to use modern parlance".
"We'd get the work experience students to hand wash him with the most luxurious soap and read him Petrarchan love sonnets, I must reiterate, I know this sounds ridiculous, but you have to understand, he has a strange sort of influence over us, and perhaps that influence has been inflated over many years of feeling his resentment and wanting so desperately to please him, but we still have this drive to make him like us, and it dictates everything we do".
One of those work experience students, Natalie Kale, who now works as a primary school teacher, describes her experience with Gary as a formative one, which has improved her empathy towards her students.
"Some students you just don't like. It doesn't feel good to admit that, but it's what all teachers believe, and I know i'm speaking anonymously here. My time spent with Gary when I was 16 was an eye-opener. Here was a creature who showed me utter contempt and was completely unforgiving. Everything I did seemed to be wrong, it felt like Gary relished seeing me wallow in misery."
"But then I always had to remember, he's a llama, and whatever ill-will I sensed from him probably didn't exist, although it felt like it did at the time, and you'd have to meet him to truly understand. It taught me to keep a level-head and try to keep my own feelings out of the equation. So nowadays when I see one of my students slouched over their desk, staring at me with those vacuous eyes, I know not to judge, or at least to reserve my opinion till I know them better."
Rupert's less positive when talking about his experience with Gary. "I'm glad some people who've met Gary have taken something positive away from it, but I struggle to see the positives myself. We've driven up a considerable expense by sustaining a very lavish lifestyle for this llama, and it goes against my deeply-held egalitarian beliefs. I'm not going to use this newspaper to fire shots at my wife, whom I love very much, but she's pretty much elevated Gary to sainthood with the way she treats him."
"She refuses to acknowledge how much of a strain Gary's been on the sanctuary, to the people who work here, and above all, our marriage. Our house adjoins the sanctuary, so sometimes in the evenings I'll watch out the bedroom window as she walks out the house and into the barn where Gary lives. One time I followed her out and heard her weeping and confessing to some kind of entity, I peeped through the door and saw she was kneeling before Gary."
"Now, i'm not a Christian, mind, but I'm pretty sure the holy father wouldn't choose an arsehole llama in Yorkshire as a conduit for channelling his messages of love and forgiveness. If anything, Gary's proof that there is no God, but I try not to let my mind go there, these feelings have been brewing for many years, and I certainly wouldn't share them with my wife, so this is off the record, please don't print this".
Visitors to the sanctuary have noticed Bessie and Rupert becoming more and more aloof in recent years. An elderly couple who regularly visit and delight in the llama walks have told NNNN they've found the experience to be increasingly unpleasant and bitter. The couple are speaking on condition of anonymity, so will be speaking in italicised font to disguise the tone of their speech.
"I think we must've done around 20 walks with Bessie and Rupert. Lovely couple at the beginning, a bit neurotic, but in an approachable way, they devote all their time to these llamas, so I suppose they're in tune with their moods, and all their personalities. But as the years have gone on and the bony hands of history turn the pages on the weighty, moth-eaten tome that is our mortal life on Earth, they seemed to have become detached from reality, but not in an endearing, "wacky" sort of way, but more of an insidious, "when do we step in?" sort of way, and it's not nice to see this happen to such dear friends of ours."
"The other day my wife casually told Rupert that she'd like to try and coax Gary out of his pen to try and bond with him. My wife's a bit of an animal whisperer, you see? I've watched her befriend all kinds of creatures, the neighbourhood pigeons love her, which disgusts a lot of our house-proud, middle-class friends, i'm not sure why we're still friends with them, to be honest. Perhaps the feeling of being disapproved of is equally satisfying as having the loyal company of many, many birds."
"But this is beside the point. Rupert reacted very angrily to the suggestion, he just snapped "no, it's over. It's all over. There's no use in burying the bloody hatchet with this creature, he'll just make us dig it up and start all over again. We're just shit and soil, nowt' more. You'd do well to remember that."
"He later apologised, but we could tell he didn't mean it, and words can sting, they can't break our bones, I know, but they can sting, and my wife was very upset, we decided not to come back until they've reached some kind of truce with Gary, even if that looks increasingly-unlikely. But we've come to accept that Gary probably will be the death of them, and there's nowt' we can do except stay out the way and give them the space they need to let their relationship with Gary reach it's logical conclusion."
As a last resort, Bessie posted a lengthy appeal on the sanctuary's Facebook page, asking people to accept Gary and to understand his curmudgeonly ways. Rupert thinks this is just the latest example of his wife's slow descent into madness. "As I said before, I don't want to speak ill of my wife, certainly not to a journalist, and not for a paper which everyone reads religiously every day. But I do think resorting to social media in a futile attempt to find answers is a bit rich."
"Most of the responses are just people posting crying with laughter emojis, or suggesting Gary is some sort of llama incel, hell-bent on dissociating himself from his surrounding environs out of sheer malice. It hasn't helped us one bit, it's made us more of a laughing stock."
"Gary even has an NFT (non-fungible token) with his face on, I don't even know what that bloody is, but I get all these young people coming up to me asking if they can take a selfie with Gary for their Tinder profile, or some want a more formal photograph taken for their LinkedIn profile.
"They seem to view Gary as an asset to advance their careers. It's very sinister, although ironically Gary does perk up whenever he's surrounded by these new-age yuppies, so maybe his disgruntlement over all these years was out of our hands entirely, and he was just waiting for a time to come when he could be worshipped as a quasi religious icon by wannabe tech bros."
