Creekside Animal Hospital in Fleming Island, Florida, apparently didn't hang a sign outside saying, "Please don't feed the alpaca."
Because someone did. And now one is dead.
The Clay County facility posted the untimely passing of its youngest alpaca, which was a little over a year old.
The cause: Eating food that wasn't alpaca friendly. Doritos, peanuts, animal crackers, Cheese Nips.
The normal diet of this type of animal, a mammal in the camel family, consists of grass or hay.
So how did it come to be that this docile grazer would consume "inappropriate" junk food meant for humans?
According to the Facebook post, a man in a blue car would come by and dump the food a few times a week at the hospital. Employees discussed the issue with him on at least "four different occasions," but to no avail.
The culprit may have been a bag of peanuts, which the unidentified man had never left before, and the alpaca "overindulged."
To try to save the little guy, the hospital worked on him for 36 hours, and even gave him a blood transfusion from his father.
"We tried hard guys and we did keep him on a lot of pain medication because his belly was hurting so badly," read another post with a picture of the alpaca looking miserable.
Though there was no comment from a woman reached at the facility, she did say "authorities are on the case." The post adds in the comments section that staffers are "upping the patrolling" of the field.
The post said the cause of death was endotoxemia, when toxins enter the blood from bacterial infections.
"We are going to miss that little guy," concluded the post.
