Nursing home residents bewildered, charmed by visitor

[cougarnurse]

They do love this: Nursing home residents startled, bewildered, charmed by furry visitor

Four feet tall, bulging black eyes, whitish and fuzzy. What is this thing?

That's the question a lot of people were asking at the IOOF Home on Wednesday, Sept. 17.

It was an alpaca, and that afternoon its owner Debbie Stokes and her son, Brandon, were escorting the animal through the wide hallways of the nursing home so that the elderly residents could gawk at and pet it.

"He won't bite, will he?" one 68-year-old resident asked.

"Oh no," Stokes said. "He's a good boy. And he only has four teeth on the bottom and none on the top."

White Lightning was the animal's name, and he was a 9-month-old alpaca. It was the first time the creature had been inside an air-conditioned building.

He often looked as bewildered as many of the wheelchair-bound residents and employees that gathered around him. One resident, Beula Ward, could not stop laughing for several minutes after she saw the animal.
"Big doggie," another resident said as he stroked the animal.

White Lightning is one of 27 alpacas Stokes keeps at her South Vienna farm, "Alpacas, Posies and Pines," which also is home to a llama, the larger cousin of the alpaca species. This was the second time Stokes had brought an alpaca to the home. The visit came less than two weeks before Ohio's National Alpaca Farm Days, which is the weekend of Sept 27 and 28. The state no longer regards alpacas as exotic animals. Thanks to legislation Gov. Ted Strickland signed into law in May, alpacas are now agricultural animals.

They are raised — like sheep — for their fleece, which Stokes said is a fiber comparable to cashmere.

Stokes explained that the animals are ideal for bringing inside because, though they are not potty-trained, they are very particular about where they choose to go to the bathroom.

"They'll walk quite a ways to go to the bathroom," Stokes said. "That's a selling point."