Letting go…

There were some heavy hearts around here late yesterday afternoon. Though we had known it was coming for quite some time, yesterday was a tough one as we finally made the decision to put down both Legacy Gold and 5P Cangalli.

LG, who had lost most of his teeth (front and back) over the past couple of years, had spent the past year living in relative solitude at either the Stud Barn with only the company of one or two other males, or in his own private pen at the Main Barn or Arena, wherever we could accommodate him really depending upon the time of year. With access to a free choice feeder filled with geriatric horse feed, he would spend the vast majority of his days either lying around inside the barns or sleeping outside in the sun. There was many a time this past summer when heading off the farm to run errands, we would see the old guy laying on his back in the middle of the pasture and would have to stop and honk the horn or give a shout until he would acknowledge the racket with an ear twitch to let us know that he was still of this world. Retirement wasn’t such a bad gig in that respect though it was becoming increasingly clear that between his inability to chew down hay and the very obvious pain he was in from an arthritic hind end, that his quality of life was diminishing quickly.

In the case of Cangalli, though she was in good health otherwise with most of her choppers still present, at the age of 17 she had become completely blind and was having more and more trouble getting around as a member of the herd. Having given us what we knew to be her final cria this past spring, we also knew that the end would be in sight once her most recent son was weaned.

It would be hard to overstate what those two alpacas have meant to our farm, our breeding program, and thus our family over the years. Snowmass Legacy Gold arrived here in the fall of 2001, the first big-time Herdsire we would ever co own with his birth farm. Even though we obviously had big plans for the 4 time Futurity banner winner (back then they did age and color championships which he swept 2 years in a row), had we been able to see into the future, I still think we would have been surprised at just how much of an impact he would come to have here. As I walked around the Arena yesterday evening after driving up to say a final goodbye to one of the all time greats, it occurred to me that roughly 1/3rd of our foundation herd carries his genetics in them somewhere. His first two birth classes here at CCNF alone produced a crop of crias that are still influencing the leading edge of our production to this day. His sons Archangel, Sovereign, and Guinness formed a Get-of Sire entry that at the time from 2004 to 2005, was almost untouchable and along with their paternal sisters Nutmeg and Magdalena have had a lasting impact both here and throughout the North American domestic alpaca herd as a whole. Simply put: LG threw phenotype, fleece density, and fineness in a way that few Herdsires of his vintage could match.

Cangalli first came to us roughly a year after LG, as a part of the group of females that came along with our then new partnership in the North American Alpaca Stud, a group of 20+ Herdsires co owned with Snowmass, including her mature son, Snowmass Cangalli Gold. Though she left us yesterday having birthed out 13 live crias in her lifetime — something which despite what the colored propaganda brochures might have told us all those years ago, is a truly exceptional reproductive record — Cangalli will be remembered here most for the little fuzzy bear of an Archangel daughter she bore for us 5 years ago: Ascension. It was from that exceptional young foundation female, who not coincidentally is also a Legacy Gold granddaughter, that we were gifted last year what was perhaps the greatest alpaca this breeding program has ever produced: CCNF Elixir. So while it’s safe to say that though today we are missing the physical presence of those two genetic titans here on the farm, their stories continue to go forward here as strongly as they ever have. RIP.