Herd Health

The first weekend of the month means herd health at our farm. Herd Health is when we take time to get our hands on each of our alpacas. We trim toes nails and check them over for any concerns. Alpacas are very stoic animals, so they could be sick or injured but wouldn't necessarily let on about it. We found this out the hard way with Gabe. I don't know that I've mentioned this on the blog yet, but he has been very sick. He got very thin and had sores down his back. We have been dilligently nursing him back to health. He is acting much better, so we hope he's on the road to recovery.

Herd Health day is also when we weigh our young cria, and give any necessary shots. This weekend it was A & D injections.

I'm happy to say that Cheyenne, who was born on May 17, is now 31 pounds. And Dark Thunder who was born June 8, 2011, is now 30 pounds! I should add that Thunder's dam is a larger girl and always had big babies. He's actually the smallest one from her that we've ever hard. Both cria are thriving and growing well.

We weighed our 2010 cria. Rose is now over 100 pounds, Twilight is about 84 pounds, Chaska 78 pounds and Challenger 72 pounds. They all body scored at a good weight, they appear healthy and growing well.

Since this year was the first year we did our own shearing, we decided on shearing day that we had enough to worry about that we didn't do anything with the alpaca's top knots. We figured we'd tackle those another day. Well, as it happens, we haven't gone back and done that yet. So during herd health this weekend we wanted to address that. Some of them looked pretty ridiculous with clumps of fiber on the back of their head and face.

While we trimmed up everyone, I only took pictures of our 2010 offspring (they are now almost all yearlings):

Twilight:



Rose:



Chaska:



Challenger: