Lonely boys…

I can often measure the hormonal maturation process of our yearling males anecdotally, just by looking out of my office window. In the spring, when those feed groups of young boys (we usually have at least 2 different ones) are still just approaching their respective 1st birthdays, there is of course the odd jostling here and there but we don’t tend to see too much acting out or posturing. As we enter into the late summer and early fall though, it tends to pick up and now as we are heading towards the end of the year, it starts to feel a little Lord-of-the-Flyish all of a sudden. That can be tied to a couple of things. For one, the boys have simply matured and the testosterone is well and truly flowing now, especially for those that were born in the spring and are close to 18 months of age. The second reason we see a lot of aggressive behavior starting to show itself in those groups though, is also because of the temporary presence of their yearling female counterparts, just 8 feet away on the other side of that same barn. It just so happens that those two groups of beautiful young females (yep, two of those too) are likewise coming of age and for better or for worse, this ramps up the showboating and posturing just that much more on the male side of that barn.

Thankfully, we have a relatively easy method of defusing a situation which keeps giving yours truly bad junior high flashbacks: we take the females away and move them uphill to the Arena! Out of sight and smell…out of mind. The only caveat is that before those females can leave, they have to go through what amounts to a quarantine period here first. See the Main Barn acts as the quarantine area for our farm pretty much from May through the end of the year. Specifically, it houses any visiting females (and their crias) that are here for outside stud service. During the fall it also houses all of our juveniles and yearlings, including any of our show string animals — female and male — as they come and go from events off of the farm.

During the middle of the summer, most of those younger animals are out on our outer paddocks grazing and living with nothing but the sun and the stars over their heads, but the male and female groups are nowhere near each other. We quite intentionally make sure that they don’t even share opposite sides of the same fence line. That’s not possible though during the brief October to November window, when we’ve closed down those outer paddocks and brought all the animals in so that they can have shelter as the weather turns cold and nasty.  Quarantine on this farm really exists primarily for the purpose of protecting our female breeding herd and their crias, all of whom live up at the Arena and don’t ever mix with the anyone from the Main Barn. We have always preached that one can not reasonably expect to completely eliminate the risk of exposure of animals to disease. We strive instead merely to minimize and manage that risk. With that in mind, no female of ours that goes into quarantine after being off of the farm themselves or in contact with another animal that was off the farm, can then go and join the “home herd” at the Arena until 21 days have passed in quarantine since any new animals arrived into the quarantine area (in this case the entire 80′ x 50′ Main Barn). Though we are obviously concerned about GI parasites, as well as things as seemingly pedestrian (but troublesome) as everyday cold viruses, the big boogie man here of course is Bovine Viral Diarrhea Virus (BVDV). Like so many alpaca farms that lived through the BVDV scare on the east coast many years back, we tested our entire herd back then, and BVDV is something that all of our new crias are routinely screened for. You do what you have to do.

As I alluded to above, that quarantine protocol we use is not fool-proof, but on balance it has worked for us in the 10+ years that we have operated the farm at its current scale. Thankfully, with more than 3 weeks having passed since we came home from the Empire show in Syracuse, we were able to move all of the young females out of the Main Barn late last week and truck them up to the Arena, where they will all be living at least until next May. Some of them have even been — coincidentally — reunited with their dams in the same feed groups.  As for the the yearling boys left at the Main Barn: it must feel like they just got kicked out of the dance club and are now having to hang out at a fairly sedate PTA meeting. What a buzz kill. Instead of preening for their opposite numbers, the only females left down there with them now, are the small group of older, grumpy, and (most importantly) now pregnant visiting females. What can I say fellas? Everything in its time and place…

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