Getting some first impressions

With 12+ crias on the ground here, Jen and Kim have been starting to shear some little ones over the past several days. I know breeders have different ideas about when and how to shear their crias and for us it’s all really just based upon what we’ve experienced. Namely that by waiting until a cria is around 30 days of age there is a greatly diminished chance of their mom freaking out and rejecting them when the baby gets its groovy new haircut. Though it makes them look a little goofy for awhile, we have also learned that by not shearing the tails of the crias (please don’t ever shear your adults this way BTW, it really does look kind of stupid), their dams are more apt to think their kids smell right even if they don’t initially quite look right. In any case we still put the little ones back with their dams into a bonding pen after they are shorn and we don’t let them out until we see the female letting the baby nurse again.

All of this is done of course in order to get those cria tips off the true tui fleece, which then allows the fleece that grows in over the ensuing 10 months or so to be both more uniform in its appearance and generally — now that those tips which behave like velcro are gone — much, much cleaner. Is it an automatic advantage in the show ring to have shorn your juvenile animal as a cria? While as a general rule I would say that that is the case I have also seen plenty of animals at spring shows win championships that were never shorn the year prior. So all things being equal we like to shear all of our crias, though we don’t panic if we miss someone or it just gets too late in the season, which for us here in northern New England is usually sometime in early September.

The exciting part of shearing these little guys of course is that it is in some ways the first real chance for us to evaluate them and maybe get an idea of where we think they’re headed developmentally. Though the fleece of any alpaca still nursing off its dam can change radically over the course of the first year of its life, it is still interesting to get that snapshot of them around a month of age. While it may well be that a cria we like at this stage will go through what we have come think of as the their fleece’s awkward, adolescent faze in the coming months, it is rare (though alas, not unheard of) that a cria fleece that turned our heads at a month of age ultimately disappoints us in the end. Sometimes our expectations for those animals are not ultimately even met until we see them in their true second fleece say around 14 to 16 months of age (Boss-A-Nova was the classic poster child for that scenario) but they do usually come around. The head-turner du jour from our latest round of shearing was Avenger and Savannah’s little brother out of CP Stacey, though this time sired by King of the Ladies (the older siblings were straight Arch kids). Jen got excited enough about what she was seeing that she even brought me down a zip lock bag filled with little locks of white fleece. At the end of the day it will of course mean nothing if the young fellow in question doesn’t really develop. Though given a choice we’d much rather be excited about an animal from the get-go than not. Time will of course tell whether that excitement was warranted.