Roses are red, and hearts are, too...

This is my obligatory Valentine's Day post. So.. happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

I (llama) heart all of my readers!

Since today is all about love and hearts and stuff, I thought it would be a good day to post about one of my favorite llamas in the world. I love(d) him so much. His name was Gandhi (because he "sat in protest" every time someone tried to walk him). Gandhi was a screwed up, old llama. Probably pretty inbred, but he was such a nice fellow that it was pretty easy to ignore his hideousness.

Gandhi had been having some health issues for quite some time (lump on his jaw, trouble eating, etc). He was checked out by the vet multiple times, and we always gave him all of the special treatment he needed (which is why I got attached to him).

Before the summer started to get too hot last year, the llama shearers came to give all of the camelids haircuts, and I guess the stress was too much for Gandhi. The next day, we found his body in the pasture.

Being the gore-fascinated freak that I am, I requested to do a necropsy on him (I was also curious about why he had died, but I'm not a vet so I couldn't exactly make the diagnosis). I had never cut open such a large animal, so I set out with some friends, and we found a few tools we thought might be useful: a box cutter and a broken pair of branch trimmers.

The old, rusty scalpel I found wasn't going to cut through anything, so I sliced through Gandhi's muscles with that handy-dandy box cutter, and when I got to the ribs, I chopped through them with the branch trimmers. Our makeshift necropsy kit turned out to be surprisingly useful.

I look way too happy. I was sad that my friend died, I was dripping with sweat, and I was elbows deep in llama guts. Why am I smiling?!?

After exploring Gandhi's insides, I couldn't really say for sure how he died, but he did have a decent about of food debris in his trachea.. and that's not exactly a good thing.

To commemorate him, I dissected out Gandhi's big, beautiful, loving, llama heart and preserved it in an pickle jar (because a llama heart in a pickle jar is pretty hard to forget).