Learning About Alpacas

Here is a kind of scary Halloween sort of picture of Hollywick and Ginger, two of my alpaca girls. Ginger is older, seven or eight years, and is displaying the long bottom tooth these animals grow. I don't have any idea why, but the tooth sort of comes and goes as she is able to break it off sometimes. It could also be trimmed off by a human, but this human hasn't the nerve to try that--yet.

Keeping alpacas (I have no male and so I am not raising alpacas) is very different from raising cattle or chickens.  They are sweet, gentle little animals with no real natural defences except a little kicking and a lot of spitting.  And after living with Ginger and company this last year and a half, I'm come to realize the spitting is really a communication device. Also, the spitting's noxious quality seems to depend on age.  Ginger spits fluid from her stomach which smell like vomit.  The others, who are only about two years old, seem to just spit a saliva like substance. The spitting indicates mostly anger and impatience, though when the girls first arrived they seem to spit at me as a defensive move.  Now, the only time I get spit thrown my way is if I'm in the firing line of one alpaca spitting at another.

Tabitha, the gold colored alpaca with one of the ISA Brown hens. Background grey is Pixel, then Hollywick.