Geronimo the alpaca has won a last-minute stay of execution from a British court pending a review of the order to have him put down for a tuberculosis infection.
The long-feared alpaca-lypse was postponed on Monday after New Zealand-born Geronimo's Gloucestershire-based owner Helen MacDonald won the right to a judicial review at the High Court in London.
"Defra have agreed to extend their undertaking until 17:00 on Tuesday," said her Solicitor Jan Mugerwa. "A judge has been assigned to consider urgently the question of the injunction and disclosure."
Aptly-named government ministry Defra — the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs — issued Geronimo's death warrant following two consecutive tests for the infectious and fatal lung disease TB. But MacDonald claims both those tests showed false positives.
Geronimo's supporters have vowed to physically block any attempt by authorities to take the alpaca, named after the famous Chiricahua Apache war leader who evaded capture by the US Army for years, away for execution.
"We are sympathetic to Ms Macdonald’s situation, just as we are with everyone with animals affected by this terrible disease," A Defra spokesman said. "It is for this reason that the testing results and options for Geronimo have been very carefully considered by Defra … as well as passing several stages of thorough legal scrutiny".