Saturday ~ show day one

This morning, Saturday morning, is when the actual alpaca showing began at the Best of the US Alpaca Show.

When you arrive at the show that first day of showing, the first thing all the exhibitors want to get their hands on is the Show Book. They can't print up the Show Book until Friday night, after color check is complete (because sometimes an animal ends up in a different class than what the exhibitor registered them for). These are usually hot off the press, sometimes literally just picked up from the printers early Saturday morning.

The Show Book:



The Show Book lists the alpaca by class (age, sex and color), then the dam and sire, along with who owns the alpaca and who is showing the alpaca.

When we get our Show Book, we flip through it to see how many are in our alpaca's classes, and who is in the class. Often we don't specifically know the competing alpaca, but we may know the sire and therefore know what sort of competition we may be up against. We make sure each animal is in the right class, and high light them on the page.

Each alpaca also gets their own number, that number you wear as an arm band when you show them in the ring. On the bottom of the band it shows the animals age in months, and months of fiber growth since their last shearing.



Our only animal to show today was Our Copper Canyon. I should back up a bit to say that since his fiber has been growing in after his first shearing, I have not been impressed with him. My choice would have been not to show him at all. And while J agreed with me in many respects, and has Copper's price listed as a fiber animal price, he wanted to get Copper to at least one show just to see if our thoughts would be similar to that of a judge. Unfortunately we did not get a full evaluation of Copper. Copper walked so poorly on the halter that the judge stated he could not evaluate Copper's confirmation and therefore placed him lower because he just doesn't know. He also said that Copper was not as fine but did have some nice fiber attributes and he could see why we took him to a show. Copper took a 5th place, which is about what I expected from him. However, I wanted to cry hearing the judges words. It wasn't his placement that had me upset, I already considered Copper a fiber boy. It was the fact he did so poorly on the halter that upset me. Zack and I spent so much time trying to train him. I knew he was terrible on the lead, but I didn't know what else to do. Most alpacas train fairly easily, given some time and training. But there are a few that are so stubborn and just don't want to learn, that I don't know what to do with. I still wonder what I could have done. J's feeling is that I did what I could, he is just that stubborn. Either way, we were not planning to bring him to another show anyway, this was our one time evaluation of him.

Here is Copper's ARI and ribbon:



We have 4 more of our alpacas to show tomorrow - it's gonna be a busy day! I expect we will get home very late Sunday night (or early Monday morning). I won't be able to blog about tomorrows showing until Monday. Our most exciting alpacas have yet to show, so stay tuned.