Call the Llama Squad

Any police officer worth his or her salt knows that it's good to take help from non-police in cracking a case, even if the help in question walks on four hooves instead of two feet, and makes a laughing kind of sound to alert others in the area that there's trouble afoot...or on hoof.

The scene is Derbyshire, England, where last week, psychiatric nurse Heidi Price came home after a long day at work and found her road jammed with police cars.

And they were telling her partner, Graham Oliver, that their llamas were heroes. Which is not a sentence many people hear in the course of their lives. But what happened was, Oliver came home and let the couple's dogs out to run around their farm, and that's when he heard their llamas hollering.

"It's quite a weird and haunting sound,” Oliver said. “It sounds like someone laughing.”

There are eight llamas on the farm, and they were forming a circle around a man in a black puffer jacket. Oliver found out that the man was cutting through the farm to get away from the law.

The rogue claimed he had gotten in through a hole in the fence, but Oliver, who also has cattle and peacocks on the farm, asked to see this purported hole, worried that a critter or two might get out through it. But instead of showing the bad spot in the fence, Oliver said, the man ran for it.

He saw the police on the edge of his property and told them what was going on, and what do you know? They were looking for a man in a black puffer jacket too! The police told Oliver to be wary of the guy, because he had stolen two of tobacco from a woman near by.

The police soon found the thief with the llamas keeping him in custody, thanks to the llama squad, and took him off to the Ironbar Hilton, charged with petty theft and not at all ready to tell the tale of his apprehension to his buddies.

“They acted responsibly, efficiently, in an organized manner,” Nurse Price told the local news. “Quite frankly, I think they did pretty good police work.”