Pumpkin the celebrity alpaca reminds elementary school kids learning isn’t always hard
Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s been a hard couple of years for the students and teachers of Ballentine Elementary School.
So on Tuesday, school Principal Lutashia Dove went soft.
Alpaca soft.
“He’s so soft, I’m about to cry,” said Tessa Edwards, 7, a Ballentine first-grader who lined up with hundreds of her classmates Tuesday to meet Pumpkin the alpaca and take a turn stroking his silky fur.
“He’s so soft, I just want to grab him and squish him,” a third-grader confessed.
“He’s like a teddy bear,” said another.
Through it all, Pumpkin sat quietly on a strip of pavement between the school building and the playground, his feet curled up beneath him, his nutmeg-colored hair fluttering in the light breeze. Sometimes he closed his eyes and appeared to nap.
Pumpkin is a local celebrity
“This is just how he is. He’s very docile,” said his owner, a local hobby farmer who uses only her first name, Sue, at Pumpkin-centered events to keep the focus on the young lamoid.
He’s one of 40 or so animals Sue has on her 8-acre farm, she said, including a total of four alpacas. While kin to the more familiar llama, alpacas are smaller, more flat-faced and fluffier.
Pumpkin — Sue pronounces it “Punkin’” — is a bit of a local celebrity. Since she brought him home from a Charlotte hobbyist four months ago, Sue has taken him to visit more than a dozen local schools and drives around town with him in the car sometimes. He weighs between 30 and 40 pounds, she said, so he’s light enough for her to scoop up and set down in the back seat of her Mercedes SUV.
While he spends most of his time outdoors, Pumpkin is house-trained and is allowed inside. He especially likes to doze off watching alpaca videos on YouTube, Sue said. When he wakes up and sees another alpaca, sometimes he gets up and kisses the TV.
At 7 months old, Pumpkin has more than 3,000 likes on his Facebook page.
As Sue walked him on a leash around the back of Ballentine Elementary on Tuesday, excited students pressed against a second-floor window squealed and waved, saying, “We love you, Pumpkin!”
An emotional benefit
Hosting him for an hour-long single-exhibit petting zoo was a great treat, teachers said, after everything they’ve been through the past two years: canceled in-person classes, then a socially-distanced, masked return but without a lot of the fun events the school usually plans.
No theater groups, no musicians, no writers-in-residence.
“What have they had to look forward to these past two years?” asked Dove, the principal. At first she wasn’t sure about having a live animal at the school – another Wake County Public School had a minor issue recently with a visiting hawk that declared its own recess – but said she researched it and decided the emotional benefit was worth the risk.
Pumpkin was perfectly behaved, as were the students. One teacher, Becky Martin, jumped out of line, though.
“I just have to pet him one more time.”
This story was originally published April 12, 2022 at 5:07 PM.
