Ah-ha!! Upon examining the resource you so kindly provided, I see we were the victim of bad advice on llama needs. Clearly "high fiber" and "chews" are featured prominently in their diet and, lacking these, our dear (delicious*) departed sought to remedy this by munching upon Layne.
I also noted "DO NOT FEED TO SHEEP due to levels of copper. Diets are designed to complement forages containing 4 to 15 ppm Cu. 2" Clearly his diet was lacking sufficent copper, and thus he sought my darling man's blood. This then had nothing to do with fangs he was sporting that Layne was attempting to file down, nor the llama's recent loving of shade, avoidance of direct sunlight.
Trudy
PemTech immoral support
*who is vegetarian and who wouldn't really harm a pet
Copper toxicity is a serious problem in sheep... you have to be careful. I bet llamas are similar in their susceptibility to copper, so that's probably not the reason he bit Layne.
On the other hand, given the drought conditions in certain parts of the country (including mine unfortunately) there can be dietary problems in livestock that result in rather, well, UNUSUAL behaviors being observed in animals craving minerals and other nutrients that are lacking in their normal diet.
For instance, Texas A&M did a study a number of years ago on pastured cattle, on a ranch with soils that were unusually poor in phosphorus mineral, which created a phosphorus deficiency in the grass the cattle ate. They decided to see just how far this problem could be driven and then study methods to rectify the situation, so they sprayed the pasture with a chemical which COMPLETELY locked up the available soil phosphorus for a period of time, rendering the available phosphorus in the soil and the grass growing on it completely unavailable to be metabolised in the cattle's diet. The cattle got poor (sickly) and strange behaviors were noted-- eating dirt and gnawing on posts, attempting to satisfy their craving for ANY food that could provide the missing phosphate. The study continued and soon the veterinarians started noticing a disturbing trend-- dead mangled field rabbits scattered around the pasture in various places. Confused by this, the vets started watching the cattle more closely between study visits, and soon determined the reason-- the phosphate-starved cows, those lovable sweet bovines we see in ice cream and milk commercials happily practicing perfect vegetarianism, were SO desperate for foods with available phosphate that when they'd see a wild rabbit in the field, they'd rapidly run over and stomp on it and kill it, and eat what they could of it using their toothless upper palate and front lower grass-nipping teeth, terribly mangling it in the process... the cows had turned carnivorous!
SO, perhaps the llama in question is merely experiencing some form of dietary insufficiency and was seeking to rectify it, and figured Layne had more available phosphorus than the average field rabbit... questionable, but the average llama isn't exactly PhD material...
Later! OL JR
PS. TRUE STORY!
