Adventures in the alpaca ICU

A quick note of thanks to all of the people that have contacted us in one form or another offering not just their condolences on Tessora’s passing but also their own personal stories. It has meant a lot to all of us here. There is still plenty of boot-lipping going around but the raw shock is ebbing slowly but surely.

In any case it is the nature of a herd this size that it doesn’t give one much time to wallow in the dark places, especially this time of year. Yesterday we had planned on starting herd health in the morning only to be side tracked by a birth that needed all of the help we (read Jen and Kim) could offer. Tessora’s pen mate in sickbay at the Arena for the past couple of weeks had been our female Fire Starter, suffering from what looked like a spinal injury of some sort. The trauma-to-be-named-later had left her at least partially paralyzed with very limited motor control and strength on one side of her body. When we first discovered her, she was able to stand and walk but would drag her left front foot. That condition continued to deteriorate until the following day by which time she was unable to stand at all. How this injury could even have occurred we truly have no clue. Add it to the rather exclusive list of bizarre stuff we had never experienced before. Wanting to add a layer of intrigue to the situation, Fire Starter was of course only 2 weeks from her due date at the time of the injury. Early on not only could she not stand but she also came to lack the ability to urinate and therefore had to be catheterized.  To be quite frank were this a male or an unbred female euthanasia would have been a real possibility. The fact that she was so close to the end of her gestation and that we could see her cria kicking took that option off of the table though. At our vet Susan Johnson’s suggestion Jen and Kim also devised a sling for our chute (which we almost never use as an actual restraint chute, BTW) that would allow FS to be held up in the air for a couple of hours each day, taking some of the abdominal pressure off that the cria felt when mom was sternal. Closely supervised, Fire Starter would stay there suspended happily munching hay we put up on the chin rest (it really is good for something) while doing a little pseudo physical therapy with her legs and also giving her baby a chance to stretch out a bit too inside. The plan as of 10 days ago was to get Fire Starter past 11 months gestation, perform a scheduled cesarean birth and then, worst case scenario, euthanize mom and bottle feed the new cria if we couldn’t graft him/her onto another dam. Along the way Fire Starter regained the ability to urinate on her own and though still unable to stand at this writing, she has gained back a good deal of her strength. Throughout most of this experience she has also been eating, drinking, and chewing a cud normally. The hard truth is that it’s always a lot easier to fight for an animal that meets you half way and she was more than doing her share.

So we awoke yesterday morning planning on doing routine deworming and vaccinations on the entire herd (it is thankfully not a toe nail month), knowing that we were scheduled to drive Fire Starter down to our vet clinic so that Susan could perform a scheduled C-section today.* Fire Starter had other ideas though. Unbeknownst to us she was already in labor, something which was being masked by her paralysis. When we gave her a shot of dexamethasone yesterday morning to give the unborn cria’s lungs the greatest chance possible of being ready for that whole breathing thing the next day, the dex seemed also to spur her into action and she started pushing within 15 minutes. Well that changed things in a hurry. No herd health day for you! With Jen and Kim both assisting, she was able to deliver the cria while laying on her side the entire time, a far more difficult proposition without the aid of gravity a dam would often have in a normal birth. The fact that the cria was a brown Legacy Gold daughter was obviously a bonus and the newest member of the CCNF herd was bouncing around her and her mom’s bonding pen within a few hours. For now we have been able to milk out mom some and combining that with milk replacer have been feeding the little girl with a bottle. There is some hope that with the cria now out we can throw the proverbial pharmacy — mostly in the form of some powerful steroids — at Fire Starter in the hopes that we can aid her healing and hopefully get her up and walking again. In spite of her condition she has unquestionably bonded to her baby and it’s our hope that she will be able to care for her, even if just partially, in the not too distant future. We shall see.

LATE UPDATE:

Nothing chaps this writer’s ass like late breaking news coming in and messing up my plot line after a post is almost completely done. Perhaps I should refrain from writing pieces on this topic prior to noon time? Live and learn. There has been a change of circumstances! We went into today thinking that we would try introducing the cria (our kids have provisionally named her Golden Fire) to a hanging bottle with a cross-cut nipple as soon as possible. This is something we have done with great success in the past when we’ve had a long term bottle baby. It not only saves one from having to bottle feed constantly but also avoids many of the pitfalls that can potentially rear their ugly heads if and when a cria imprints inappropriately on its human caregivers.

Again, no such luck: Mother Nature had other plans today. One of our first time moms, Margarita, lost her own newborn cria within hours of birth this morning creating a ready made situation for cria swapping. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on your POV) we have experience with that little trick. Though not for the faint of heart, Jen kidnapped Fire Starter’s little girl, doused her in the the fluid from Margarita’s afterbirth so that she would smell right, and voila: instant newborn! Thankfully Margarita had not bonded enough with her little one (also female for whatever it’s worth) to even give this whole thing a second thought. So far as she was concerned it was her cria from the second we put the little one in with her new adoptive mom. That was at least 90% of the battle won almost with the first stroke. The crias in these situations — even the not very bright ones — will almost always get hungry enough that their instincts will take over in their search for milk. The real sticky wicket is getting the new mom to accept the cria. We were admittedly lucky that Margarita was such a good mom and not one of those flakey first-timers that wants nothing to do with a new baby, even when it’s obviously theirs. I’m sure we would have tried anyway but that all just made it so much easier. Though it took a little bit of demonstrating (“We take it all back: Pritchard nipples and milk replacer are so yesterday…what you want is your new mom’s udder!”) within a few hours we had the cria nursing normally off of Margarita as though that was just the way it was always meant to be. So even after a tough 24 hours things really came together in the end today.

Fire Starter, who seemed only briefly concerned with the disappearance of her cria, can now hopefully recover from her injury without the added stress of a newborn. With no worries about hurting a pregnancy any longer, we are in fact scheduled to drive her up to the clinic tomorrow where we will be able to sedate her and get some really good X-rays of her spine in the hope that we can find out exactly what’s going on. There is also another vet in the area who does a lot of chiropractic work with horses that we are hoping will be willing to consult on this. We’ll let you know what happens as things move down the line and I’ll also post some pictures when I get a chance. Fingers crossed this all works out…

*As an aside, that would have been the first ever cesarean birth in our farm’s history.