They are great guard animals- esp for goats. LOL most critters are pretty good judges of character, too, wrt to 2 legged critters. The males can be aggressive if you don’t- or don’t know how to, establish personal space or whatever. (I don’t & don’t want to mess with it) Obviously, they’re big enough, that it could be dangerous.
Llamas are pretty easy going, as far as camelids go. Like any animal, it probably depends on how much a person interacts with them (which ought to be a lot). & they have personalities, just like dogs, cats, horses, whatever.
The worst thing about them is that they spit & it’s extremely gross, but as long as you don’t irritate them…They spit at each other more than at their owners (lol well, mostly) You can usually kind of see it coming.
Ugh. That’s a bummer about infomercials. Shearing & trimming hooves is just maintenance stuff that has to be done- esp in Texas. They can die from heat, so provisions have to be made for that. There are a few people around who raise herds who will shear them for a fee. And probably people who will scoop poop, too (or add ons that you can put on an ATV or lawn tractor to do that). But anytime animals are “marketed”, it just seems like an invitation to idiots who think “Oh, I’ll just…”, turn them out, & blow them off. & the animals suffer.
It’s not a “piece of cake”. Especially early on.
IIRC, there are “mini” Llamas out there. I don’t think they’re that much smaller & in the case of dogs, genetically altering them for certain traits (like size) hasn’t worked out so well. I’d be leery. I’d rather just have them as they are. Texas has Llamas all over the place. & 2 separate rescue branches. If we’d made it outta town, we would already be there. Someday...
The Llamas here mostly guard the goats for my neighbors-I intend to get a couple or three-goats, not Llamas-when I get enough acreage-there is a good market for goats’ milk products here in gone galt land, along with all other natural things. I’ve been spat on by a Llama owned by one particular neighbor-that Llama-a neutered male that guards a herd of 8-9 fancy dairy goats-runs to the fence as soon as it sees someone hiking on the trail nearby and when you go up to the fence to see the pretty Llama, it drenches you in reeking spit-fortunately, the river is steps away.
I’m leery of down-sized animals, too-no matter how cute they may be, I’ll stick with the full-size creature-those miniature horses are notoriously bad tempered and unpredictable, but people line up to pay as much for one as you would for a “real” horse-just imagine a mini-Llama that kicks and spits without warning.
Having grown up on a small family ranch in SW Texas, I don’t understand people who buy into something like the Alpaca scam without considering that owning livestock means extra work and expense-stock animals are not dogs and cats, and you really need a barn/shelter and enough acreage to provide a fenced pasture for stock to roam around in-confining them to a yard seems cruel to me-even the chickens out here have plenty of space to run around in.
A couple of years ago a frustrated scam victim got busted and fined because he reported his Alpacas stolen/rustled and tried to collect money, but the amount was enough that the insurance carrier got suspicious and started poking around-it turns out the guy had gotten a friend to load the critters into a stock trailer in the dark of night, and cart them off to his place three counties away...