Happy Wednesday! 🥳
This week has been such a busy week, but when isn't it?! We are adjusting our young alpaca to their new home slowly but surely. They will be out of their isolation stall starting tomorrow and we will slowly work to have them accepted into the herd.
Alpacas have a pecking order similar to chickens do. However, when establishing the pecking order or acceptance into a herd, alpaca will occasionally turn on the newcomers creating a potential fatal situation. Bringing new animals into a herd needs to be met with a lot of caution and taken very seriously.
When we worked with Mack and Outlaw, they were only eight months old. They were so small and needed a lot of protection. We keep the new alpaca in a fenced area where the established herd can see and sniff them yet they are out of harms way.
In order to establish them into the new herd, we bring one of our alpacas from the established herd into the isolation stall. We chose a less dominant alpaca and we allow them to spend some time alone with the new boys. Alpaca can not be alone. Separating the less dominant alpaca with the new boys will create a need to accept the new boys as his herd. This acceptance makes the transition with the more dominant boys much easier. I have each alpaca in the established herd spend time with the boys before I allow them to be walked into the main pasture for supervised time.
The process to bring on new alpaca is very slow and you have to have a lot of patience. The most important thing to remember is to never allow any of your alpaca to remain alone for long amounts of time. This is why you never purchase alpaca individually. They spend a lot of time in isolation when introduced to a new farm and alone time can hurt the health and welfare of your animal.
After our boys are adjusted, our farm life will go back to all of our usual routines and we can again focus our efforts on spinning natural yarns, collecting chickens, and hopefully building a greenhouse!
Have a great week!