An alpaca found roaming wild in the middle of McAllen before being corralled under the McHi water tower was claimed by and reunited with its owners last week.
Marcelino Torres, a Hidalgo County cowboy, said through a translator that the animal’s owners paid a fee and took the alpaca home the day after he carted it off.
“Monday he picked it up, Tuesday he went back to his owners,” he said
Torres said he’s picked up a couple of alpacas many years ago, but this was the first he caught in the middle of McAllen.
It ranks as one of his stranger encounters on the job, up there with a cow he caught on the loose by the McAllen bus station six years ago.
The alpaca caused some stir last week, largely because of the strangeness of the situation and the community effort to capture it after the animal was spotted loose in the 1700 block of Redwood Ave. that Monday afternoon.
Melissa Molina said she was pulling up to her mother-in-law’s house on Redwood when she saw the alpaca sitting in a neighbor’s front yard.
The alpaca, she said, crossed the canal and dashed across Bicentennial Boulevard before trotting along the south side of McHi’s campus.
“How that thing did not get hit by cars, I have no idea,” Molina said.
Molina called police — who thought it was a joke at first — and they all joined an effort that included a good deal of McHi baseball players and bystanders in hot pursuit of the alpaca.
Eventually the crowd managed to corner the thing under the water tower before Torres came to pick it up.
The animal does apparently reside in McAllen, in the backyard of one of Molina’s mother-in-law’s neighbors.
“We didn’t even know that they had it,” she said. “We had no clue that there was one of those back there. None at all.”
A drive down Redwood and its side alleys Tuesday revealed no alpaca. If it’s still in the area, it appears to be keeping a low profile.
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