Yesterday we drove up to Canon to visit our friends George and Judy at Walnut Knoll Farm.
This is where we are getting some welcome additions to our herd, the first is Kloud Dancer and the real purpose of our visit. We were here to see the confirmation that she is pregnant and not just being grumpy when she spits at the rest of her herd. Here she is waiting patiently for the vet to arrive.
Kloud is going to have an external ultrasound and we are hoping that she is 45 days pregnant. This will also mean that when she gets to over 60 days it will be safe for her to travel down to our farm. Here she is going into the chute ready for the vet.
She looks a little bemused by all of the activity although there are a lot if us here, the vet had two assistants with her. The vet was very gentle with her and kind enough to talk us through what she was doing.
The really exciting news was that the pregnancy was confirmed and here is a view of the monitor to confirm it. Bottom middle you can see the head ears and eye sockets and top right you can see two of the feet.
This handsome chap is the sire he s the Mark son of Legato so we are hoping for a real cutie next spring.
The second addition we are getting is an all black male gelding called Magic, the only color variation at all is on his cheeks, he has a lovely burgundy color there. He is a really handsome dude and very gentle. So he will be able to keep any of the others calm if we need to take them anywhere.
The vet was also there for an additional task and Judy asked us if we wanted to see what happens we decided we should probably watch that as well because at some point we may need to have it done at our farm. So we ( well Rob, I was not interested in getting as up close as he did) got to see a castration. First the Alpaca is given a general anesthetic which should have put him to sleep almost straight away but he was so alert it actually took three shots. I guess he must have known what was going to happen next.
The vet then sterilized the area and injected a local anesthetic and the operation was completed. He was up on his feet within 15 minutes and seemed none the worse for the experience. So those of you that don’t have Alpacas may ask why it gets done? well it reduces the aggression levels, if you are not going to breed them and they are overly aggressive with the other males then this helps calm them down.
Last but by no means least – Judy then spent time showing us how she checks their fecal’s for parasites. As we now have a microscope we are going to learn to do our own although we will probably double check the first few times with the vets results. It was a long but very interesting day and as always we had a great time with George and Judy.
Oh one last thing, do you remember last time we visited, we were there just in time to see this little lad being born.
Well look at him now he is just a great big ball of fluff and is growing leaps and bounds, Still staying close to mum though.
