It's a girl! No. . . it's a boy. So is she.
We finally received the papers on 3 out of 4 of our llamas a couple of weeks ago. The previous owner had promised the papers to us, and had some trouble locating them, but then here they are! Hurray!
It was sort of a mishmash of papers, so it was an interesting read going through them and figuring out which papers belonged to which llama. We knew the birth name for one of them, but not the other three. Luckily, one paper for each llama included a description. . . "white with black tail" . . . "King Louie". . . "gelded male". . . . check! That's the one name we knew. He's now Ahimsa. Then there's "deep brown". . . . "female". . . . there's only one with that color fur, so check! That's Prani. . . . "White with grey body". . . that must be Santosha, so che. . . wait. . . "gelded male". That's weird. We have 3 girls and 1 boy. Ahimsa's the boy.
Great. We have papers on 2 of the llamas, and the other 2 are still a mystery. Plus there's this set of papers on an unknown gelded male. That's not so useful.
As the days went by, I kept thinking about the papers. White with grey body; gelded male. That really does describe Santosha. The color part, not the anatomy part. I wonder whose papers those are. . . .
You might think that it's easy to tell the gender of a llama. Not ours. They're wary of people, and keep their noses pointed straight at us; all the better to see you, my dear. And their fur is long and thick, reaching far lower than is easily convenient for peering at their nether regions. But, IF they do happen to have their backs to you, and IF they swish their tails at just the right moment, it is possible to glimpse what might be there.
Dambara saw it first. "Definitely a boy." Then we paid attention to their peeing habits. Prani, the confirmed girl, sent it behind her. Ahimsa, the confirmed boy, sent it forward, to land under his bellybutton. Santosha, caught in the act, peed forward, giving another convincing gender clue. She's a boy. A gelded boy.
Then all eyes turned toward Satya. No papers, no descriptions, no nothing. The previous owner had told us that we were buying 1 boy and 3 girls. Since he was wrong about one of the girls, might he be wrong about another one, too?
She's so timid. She and Prani hang out together all the time. The girls hang out together and the boys hang out together. It all makes sense when you assume that she's a girl. Then again, a glimpse. Another glimpse. Sure looks like a boy. Or is that a mammary gland?
It's surprisingly hard to find out boy/girl llama clues on the internet. You have to be careful of your search words, or you can end up on some very odd sites. The FBI probably monitors those sites. At least I hope they do.
Pee watch was surprisingly hit and miss. We're not out there all the time, and they pee at any time of the day or night. Who knows when? Plus, it makes a lot more sense if Satya is a girl. She acts like a girl.
A video went around Facebook a couple of weeks ago, asking young women to pantomime throwing like a girl. It's a very moving, insightful video about stereotyping and how we diminish people when we indulge in those thoughts and sneers. My stubborn insistence that Satya acts like a girl was simply stereotyping her into a body of false information, demeaning for all species.
So, moving past my stubbornness, we're now accepting the fact that Satya is a boy. He's timid, and he panics easily. He likes hanging out with Prani. Maybe Prani is his mom. Maybe her smallness reassures him. Maybe they like the same music or share a delightful enjoyment of puns. Whatever the case, we have, not 3 girls and 1 boy, but 3 boys and 1 girl. And they're perfect, every single one of them. Our friends, the llama troupe.