Episode 112: Buckaroo and The Blues
Gayle Woodsum loves llamas. And her work with them would lead her to help evacuate hundreds of them from a Montana animal sanctuary in 2011. It is still one of the largest rescue operations ever documented in U.S. history.
Megan Feighery
Hello, listeners. This is Megan Feighery back with another great story from human nature. But first, I want to ask for your help. If you've been enjoying what we do here at human nature, please consider donating to the show and help set us up for a great 2024 You can make a contribution in any amount on our website, human nature podcast.org. It's safe, secure, and only takes a minute. Thank you so so much. And now on to the episode.
Megan Feighery
Before we start, I just want to let our listeners know that this episode discusses animal neglect and euthanasia. So, if that's not something you want to hear right now, feel free to come back to this episode when you're in a better place.
Megan Feighery
From Wyoming Public Media, this is HumaNature, real stories, where humans and our habitat meet. I'm Megan Feighery This time a woman helps rescue hundreds of animals from a really bad situation.
Gayle Woodsum
And I picked up the phone and they said when can you get here. And so, the next day I actually took a plane because it never occurred to me what was ahead for me over the next few weeks.
Megan Feighery
Gayle Woodsum loves llamas.
Gayle Woodsum
I was a longtime backpacker who in the late 1990s decided that I was tired of the pain involved in backpacking, but nowhere near done with this desire to be out in the gorgeous back country. A friend of mine was kind of in the same boat after lugging 60 pounds in her backpack around the world for many years and was looking for an alternative way to avoid that part of the challenge of backcountry backpacking. And she had done research and found out about llamas as being excellent pack animals. So, her shopping for and getting her first llama was how I was introduced to llamas. My favorite thing always has been and continues to be being able to get into the high country with animals that are happy to carry the weight for me so I could actually have real food with me and a real mattress and a chair, things that I was never able to bring when I was carrying it all myself. Sort of call them the green animal. They're extremely low impact. They're easy to train. They're wonderful companions, they alert you to wildlife, they just add a whole lot of wonderful companionship as well as assistance.
Megan Feighery
Gail had a small herd of llamas in Laramie, Wyoming. But she eventually moved them to a new home in North Park, Colorado, where she's been ever since. And she got very involved in the llama community.
Gayle Woodsum
I became very involved and have a whole crew. It's almost like my social life. We call ourselves our llama friends. And we're referring to both the llamas and the people involved with them. My experience with llamas is that the vast majority of people fall in love with them for the same reasons that I did. They love the companionship, you know, easy, gentle animals. They're very intelligent animals. You tend to bond with them if you work with them at all.
Megan Feighery
Gayle also showed her animals at llama shows around the country and was a judge for years. Llamas are adorable, but they're also really expensive to keep.
Gayle Woodsum
There's a huge amount of work and investment and risks and downsides. They require being shorn every year; I have to do toenails. They're large animals. People get them they say, oh, this was really fun. And it's like, oh, but wait a minute. I can't just leave and go on vacation. I now have livestock in my backyard. And llamas live into their 20s. This is a long-term commitment. People have them for a few years they may even really enjoy them. And then after about five years, oh, the kids are outgrown this or we're moving or there's a divorce but there's just some problem and the first thing that goes are the llamas. And so, then people just start calling rescue outfits and just saying, will you will you take these llamas off my hands. We don't want them anymore.
Megan Feighery
There are a number of animal sanctuaries in the US that take in llamas. But that doesn't always mean they have the space or the resources to do so. Many sadly get auctioned off and sold to slaughter. However, in the late 90s, a large animal sanctuary in Montana stepped in to try and change that.
Gayle Woodsum
The Montana Large Animal Sanctuary was developed in Niarada, Montana. And they were creating a business on a beautiful 400-acre ranch where they advertised around the country that they would take in unwanted or abused animals in need of all kinds. So, they were taking in camels, they were taking in potbellied pigs, emus, all of these exotic animals that tended to be where people would get them, and then find out this is a lifetime commitment that actually, it was a whim, and I didn't want to stay involved with this. So, they tapped into the fact that these are people with heart. These are people who cared about these animals. And this sanctuary, the Montana Large Animal Sanctuary, we tell them, we'll take them in, we'll let them retire on our beautiful ranch, you'll have a wonderful home. And you don't have to worry about it. There were individual families who just their circumstances had changed. They had to move, they were heartbroken couldn't take their llamas with them. They couldn't care for them anymore and they thought this was a wonderful answer. After a few years, I started to hear from professional shearers and veterinarians who had gone in to supposedly provide services there who would come out of there saying it's not good. They're, they're not treating any illnesses. So, we just started hearing these senses. This is not quite the paradise that was being sold to us all. And lo and behold, January 2011, I was down at the National Western Llama Show. So, there were a lot of llama people there. And the word went out that they had sent out an SOS call from the sanctuary saying that at the last minute, their single primary donor had withdrawn funding. And they had only enough hay to last a week. Well over 1200 animals. So that was strange right there. So, I was very distraught to hear this. But it was also it was this odd thing. People didn't really want to talk about it. Because people have been seeing this sanctuary as their backup plan. So, I went home and contacted them by email. I've been doing nonprofit activism work my entire adult life. And just said, I'm available, I can come up and help. Well, I heard from them almost immediately. And I picked up the phone and they said, when can you get here. And so, the next day, I actually took a plane because it never occurred to me what was ahead for me over the next few weeks.
Megan Feighery
Gayle arrived in Montana and stayed the night with a friend. The next morning, she made her way to the sanctuary.
Gayle Woodsum
It was just such a horrendous, depressing, and terrifying nightmare that was awaiting me.
Megan Feighery
There was another woman already at the sanctuary who worked at a cat shelter in Missoula, Montana. She too, had heard the rumors and had come to help.
Gayle Woodsum
So, she was actually the first person on the ground who went in from the outside and saw what was going on at the sanctuary and met the person who was running the sanctuary. He was very charming. He was distraught, loves these animals. And it was just a shock to them that their donor had pulled funding. And surprisingly, they didn't have any money at all. So initially, she was just oh, well, we'll come in and we'll help you out. It took her a while to discover how bad things were there because the first animal, she saw were the llamas. And with a llama, you can't look at them and tell what their physical condition is. Because it's all covered with wool. You have to actually be able to get your hands on them. And she just saw a bunch of woolly animals wandering around 400 acres. She did, however, see a corral full of donkeys. And notice that they were jammed into a small corral. And their hooves were so long that they were curling upwards. She said, this doesn't look right, what's going on with these donkey hooves. And the owner of the place said, yeah because of the money, I've kind of gotten a little bit behind. And yet the condition of their hooves takes years to get that bad. So, she was tipped off a little bit. She was the one who called in the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries, to say you need to be on the ground here to help us help this guy. So, then it becomes very complicated. And it turns out that the Federation had been tipped off by someone else, that there was something going wrong up there. And they had initially sent a few people in, and when they went in, what they found is they found starving cows, crippled horses, dead animals all over the ranch. They said, “We’ll help you but helping you is going to be we're going to be removing animals. You clearly are unable to take care of all 1,200 animals that are in this place and they're dying at a rapid rate. And they're in grave need of medical attention. And so, we're going to need you to sign off so that we can get them to the places where they can take care of them.” At that point in time the owner blew up. The charming man disappeared and a very angry man who was now feeling threatened that his livelihood his focus in the world was going to be taken away from him.
Megan Feighery
That was the beginning of one of the largest animal rescue efforts in US history. The Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries is a nonprofit that certifies animal sanctuaries and rescue centers. They say the Montana Large Animal Sanctuary never went through the certification process or applied for it. The owner has denied the allegations that the animals were mistreated and not cared for. He claims a lack of funding from the sanctuaries’ one and only donor, plus his wife being ill, were to blame for things deteriorating. The Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries coordinated the effort and contacted rescue organizations across the US. Many responded immediately and agreed to take in as many as they could. The animals would be going as far as Texas, California, and New York just to name a few. Gayle says the crew of volunteers on site in Montana was small. Most are from well-known animal welfare organizations, but it was only about 15 people for 1,200 animals. Gayle says it was just one more thing that made this rescue difficult.
Gayle Woodsum
Niarada, Montana was very far away from any place, and it was January. And it was icy and snowy and horribly cold and miserable. And there was no shelter for the animals. So, it was a place that had an indoor swimming pool of guests, a beautiful log home a beautiful log guest house, and the animals had nothing including food. It was just an awful situation.
Megan Feighery
The volunteers’ first job was to assess all the animals, they had to see if they were healthy enough to be transported.
Gayle Woodsum
There were clearly a number of animals that were not going to last much longer. There was a point at which a lot of these animals would go down. And once an animal goes down, it was really clear that most of them were not going to get up again. And we did have to make decisions about okay, maybe it's time to help them move along. There were a number still being euthanized which mostly had to be done by gunshots.
Megan Feighery
How hundreds of animals were euthanized. Gail says so many are suffering horribly, and it was the most humane thing to do. Later, they were able to bring a veterinarian in to administer chemical euthanasia. So, no one had to shoot any more animals, which was only slightly better for the volunteers.
Gayle Woodsum
These are sentient beings. Anyone who's spent any time with animals knows that know how they help each other out how they mourn when one of their herd mates dies. You can just see it; they're connected in a way, they're aware of what's going on. And that was traumatic and difficult for the people who were doing that. Some of them lasted like two or three days and were so horrified by what they found. Open pits of dead animals, just horrific. It was hard on them. It was just so heartbreaking and so difficult. Like we're war buddies. And it was it was this intense connection that we had to make are very different people with very different perspectives. And yet, we were there on this single mission. And we had the same desire to do right by each animal.
Megan Feighery
Gayle, and the volunteers were desperately trying to put the word out about what was going on social media. They needed help and donations to keep the rescue operation going.
Gayle Woodsum
We also got torn to shreds by the same people we thought we were trying to serve. We would get notices and calls and letters from people saying just who the hell do you think you are? All these animals should be euthanized. You're just adding to the cruelty. And then we have the other side. You're putting some of these animals down. How can you do that you're not God, you should be doing everything you can to save every animal there no matter what. People were trying to help. But they weren't there. They had no idea what it was actually like and what we were actually up against and the kinds of decisions we had to make every couple of hours. That was why we needed each other and we needed the animals.
Megan Feighery
It took a toll on everyone's mental health. The volunteers leaned on each other for moral support. Some took up yoga and meditation. And Gayle says they turned off the news. But ultimately, they had to keep working. The volunteers worked with the animals they knew best. Given her background, Gayle immediately took over the llama operation. She gathered a group of her own volunteers and people she knew. And they spent the next few weeks saving as many as they could.
Gayle Woodsum
We got down to between 600 and 800 llamas. Now all herded together in maybe a five-acre area with some corrals, and some sheds and none of them had been designed to hold animals. They had been designed to hold equipment, protect the equipment at all costs. The first thing we did is that let's go in and look for the ones that are not going to survive. They're not going to survive in a crowded herd having to fight for food, maybe or on their last leg or just maybe not going to make it. Basically, we're looking for our hospice crew. And we were able to take one of the large equipment sheds and turned it into a hospice barn with special care where we could really attend to real special needs. And the way we did that we had marker paint, nontoxic marker paint, and we marked the animals that needed to be moved to the hospice area with blue paint. And so those became the llamas we called the blues. And so that's how I became very attached to the blues.
Megan Feighery
It was an expensive operation. They needed to feed, care for, medicate and arrange transport for hundreds of large animals. A lot of the rescuers on site as well as the sanctuaries across the country receiving the animals paid for the expenses out of pocket, which was 1000s, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. Gayle and some of the other volunteers started sleeping in the barn. They worked tirelessly nursing, the llamas and other animals back to health.
Gayle Woodsum
Three or four of us out there around the clock just feeding and doing medication. There were a lot of eye infections and ear infections. It was the kind of thing that we were dealing with along with the starvation. Freezing cold out, there was snow on the ground. There was ice on the ground and the animals came in which kind of chopped up the ice and stirred up mud. Now we had freezing mud on top of solid ice on the ground. People were falling, animals were falling. It was miserable.
Megan Feighery
Gayle says the owner had moved off the property and was living with a friend nearby. Well, one night Gayle was sleeping in the barn with the llamas, and a volunteer named Shawn, when she heard something outside.
Gayle Woodsum
All of a sudden, I started hearing stories coming from a human being. And so, Shawn and I kind of got up and stepped out of the barn and we're looking off into the dark. And then we could see that it was the owner of this property.
Megan Feighery
Gayle was scared. She knew the owner had firearms on the property.
Gayle Woodsum
I was sitting there and I'm thinking Where are the guns? When is he going to use them? And he hates us because you think we're ruining his life. It was pretty scary. He apparently been running around screaming at everyone and had been waving a gun and threatening things.
Megan Feighery
The owner eventually left without incident. The next morning Gayle went into the main operations building and ran into another volunteer named Angie.
Gayle Woodsum
Angie was a young, lovely woman, she's working away on her computer and on the footstool in front of her. There's just this pistol. She was terrified. Because she was alone in the room at that time. She said I just wanted it sitting there. So, in case he comes in here, he sees that I'm ready. Thankfully, she never had to use this.
Megan Feighery
Gayle says thankfully, the owner never came back after that night, which was good, because they had a lot of work to do.
Gayle Woodsum
We were feeding literally tons of hay and just trying to do it in a big trough. We didn't have the ability right off the bat to be able to put everyone in a little corral and feed them separately. So, we were just doing our best. In that process, you can start to see the herd mentality and the society that llamas create for themselves is quite unique. But there was also this way in which different animals would pair up, they would have like a buddy or a friend. And the first pair that I met were named Franny and Frieda and they looked completely different. One is a lightweight with a long neck and floppy ears. And that's Frannie, and then Freida us with this short gray is you just kind of this homely little thing and they were inseparable. And so, we knew then and there that, okay, we must find an adoptive family specifically for this pair. You can just tell us how they were surviving, and we were able to place them as a pair. We'll get a long trip all the way to the sanctuary to get those two.
Megan Feighery
Franny and Freida's happy ending was a big win. In the midst of all the sadness, Gayle started to see glimmers of hope. Sanctuaries were reaching out and willing to take in as many animals as they could. Over the course of six weeks, truckloads of animals were sent out across the country.
Gayle Woodsum
It was our first chance to see okay, it's not just going to be horror and trauma. There's this wonderful thing that's happening in there, these amazing people on the other side of the country waiting to receive these animals. We started to get donations and adoption applications and wonderful things like that. It was those kinds of things that just kept us all going. And it was a long time. There was a lot of trauma after this. As I said, we were not really prepared for how to do this kind of thing for llamas hadn't been done before. This is a lot to learn how to deal with to learn how to live with your decisions that are sometimes don't work, right that there are accidents, there are things that happen, or you make the wrong decision. And, and it doesn't go well for the animal, even though you're trying to do what's best. It's just not, it's just not possible for everything to be like a Disney movie.
Megan Feighery
Incredibly, by the end of six weeks, almost every animal still alive had been transported, about 800. And almost 600 of those were llamas. The rescue operation was exhausting. The volunteers were physically and emotionally drained, and many were traumatized by what they saw. Hundreds of animals had died. But hundreds had also been saved. It's been over a decade. And Gayle says she really tries to focus on the success stories. But the experience changed her.
Gayle Woodsum
I started drawing lines on the kind of rescue that I would do. People who no longer want to their animals, I don't consider that a rescue process, I that an abandonment. So, I limit the kinds of rescues I'll be involved with. You know, the PSA version of this is know what you're doing. And it's so easy for people who truly love animals to suddenly find themselves with oh, now I have 80 Llamas, and they're living on 10 acres. It just happens without people realizing it. And they think it's coming from their heart, but they don't have the right information. And they don't have the right mentors when they first get their animals. People just need to be responsible.
Megan Feighery
After weeks of hard work, the end was in sight. The volunteers were drained. But all they had left were the blues, the llamas that had gone into Gayle's makeshift hospice area.
Gayle Woodsum
I could feel myself starting to think, “Well, am I going to take a few llamas home with me? How much space do I have, and capacity do I have at my place to take some additional rescue animals?” So right then and there I told myself if any animals are coming back with me, it's going to be the ones that no one else wants. Called a friend to go get my truck, bring it back to my ranch and pick up my big trailer and bring it to Montana because I think I'm coming home with some llamas. The blues were coming home with me.
Megan Feighery
As Gayle and the volunteers were getting ready to load the blues into her trailer, they saw one last llama they had to deal with.
Gayle Woodsum
One llama that no one could catch. He could jump a seven foot fence at a standstill. Anytime anyone got near him, you would just hop over a fence and we were starting to panic. People were saying well, you're just gonna have to leave him. I'm like, I can't leave one animal here. All the other animals were gone. The emus were gone. The camels were gone. There was nothing left. Except this one leaping llama. So, he's getting more and more worked up now because he's out there about half a dozen volunteers who are trying to catch him. And I was afraid he was gonna jump a fence and land in the road, you know, and then we'd lose him forever. I said, you know what, I just have to think this through.
Megan Feighery
Gayle stepped away for a few minutes to take care of some last-minute things. Then she made her way back to her trailer to check on the llama.
Gayle Woodsum
And I said, well, where's that last llama? He says in your trailer. And I said, what? He said, “I opened the door on the back of the trailer, opened it wide and just stepped back. And this little llama was probably about 18 months old, looked around.” And he's like there's no animals anywhere here. And that's a trailer full of animals that are lying down and chewing their cub and he just walked over jumped in with them. And that's how he became part of the blues. And that's the crew that came home with me.
Megan Feighery
Our storyteller today was Gayle Woodsum. Gayle still lives in Colorado with her herd of llamas and is still very involved in the community. That last llama is named Buckaroo, and he and three of the blues are still happily roaming Gayle's property. Gayle says Buckaroo is a real character and has thrived since his rescue. Gayle told me the owner of the sanctuary was never prosecuted and she doesn't really know what happened to him. The volunteers and rescue centers were hoping to be reimbursed after the sanctuary dissolved for all the money they spent during the rescue operation. Gayle says as far as she knows, nobody has seen a dime. But she still wants to get this story out there and preach responsible animal ownership. For photos from this episode, follow us on social media. We're @humanaturepodcast on Instagram and Facebook. On X formerly Twitter, we're @humanaturepod. And right now, we're looking for stories to feature in our next season. So, if you have one or know someone who does, let us know, our DMS are always open or you can head to our website humanaturepodcast.org and contact us there. I'm Megan Feighery. This episode was produced by me with help from Melodie Edwards and Steven Carroll. Our theme song is by Caught a Ghost. HumaNature is a production of Wyoming Public Media.