Patient and amazingly trainable, these gentle four-legged pack animals make the perfect golf caddies

North Carolina has many sights worth seeing; the gentle curves of the Blue Ridge Parkway, starry nights on the beaches of Cape Hatteras and expansive, picturesque golf courses.If you’re really lucky, you can even shoot a round of golf with your very own llama caddy.Llamas are having something of a cultural moment, akin to the rise of goat yoga in the late 2010s.

From hiring them out as whimsical Zoom meeting companions during the darkest days of the pandemic to easing the nerves of anxious travelers at airports, people are catching on that the robustly necked pack animals are actually big ole sweetie pies.Llamas have been bred for centuries to carry goods and heavy building materials in the Andes Mountains, so lugging a couple of golf bags is no problem for the accommodating beasts of burden, which makes them natural caddies.Talamore Golf Resort in Southern Pines was a pioneer in the llama caddy world, its owner introducing them in the early 1990s to generate publicity and as a market differentiator for the newly opened Rees Jones-designed course.The addition of the unusual course companions proved to be a PR coup, spreading like wildfire across newspapers worldwide and putting the golf course on the map in a big way.For nearly 15 years the wooly creatures dutifully lugged golf bags around the links for patrons, often creating a spectacle as golfers would stop what they were doing to take pictures with the famous camelids.It was this slowing of the pace of play that led Talamore to wind down its llama caddy program in 2005, but to this day four resident llamas are still living large between the 13th green and 14th hole, and still know how to draw a crowd.About 250 miles west of Talamore is Sherwood Forest Golf Club in Brevard, another Tar Heel State golf course renowned for its llama caddies.The program started up in 2008 when Mark English, a golfer and owner of a nearby llama farm, pitched club pro Brian Lautenschlager on the idea of enlisting the animals as off...