September 2009
Latest: Seven more join the Jasmine herd!!
We are now up to thirteen animals having acquired three more adult females with thier cria and a yearling male. This years babies were unfortunately all boys except for one - Jasmine Julia, a mid brown born to Snowfall who is white and was covered by a light fawn male! So were are now 6 females, 7 males.
Sad news:
We lost one of the new adult females to clostridial disease. The former owner hadn't realised that vaccinations were every year and I left it for 2 weeks until my youngest were all old enough to give their first injections to, rather than waste more Heptivac than absolutely necessary.
She was ill for 48 hours, not eating and sitting and died despite veterinary intervention - antibiotics, vitamins and prebiotics. Post mortem at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency confirmed the cause of death. We know that vaccines aren't guarranteed to give protection to camelids and it is possible that even if I have injected as soon as they arrived, she may not have gained any protection. Insurance also hadn't come through, so this proved a very steep and expensive learning curve and maybe a lesson to prospective new buyers to have a sales contract that takes into account possible consequences of the sellers husbandry practises (or lack of) on the health of the animals in question for a specified length of time after the sale.
(Take a look at www.tippenswood.com an alpaca farm run by Anila and David Preston who have both worked in the legal profession and Anila is passionate in assisting the alpaca industry and has developed pro forma contracts which are easy to use and is happy to answer queries.)
This has left us with a 7 week old cria Sunrise, to take care of which caused a great deal of anxiety in the ensuing days until we could convince him that milk now came from a bottle. It would be fair to say that he had to endure a little wrestling for a couple of days to get him to take the teat but camelidynamic principles of restriction rather than restraint in the catch pen, he was feeding well within 2 days of losing his mother.
Sunrise
23rd September 2009
Sunrise now weighs 18.8kg and is taking Camelibra Cria from us as well as tucking into grass and hay and goats milk with a hint of powdered glucose in 5 times a day to a total of between 1-1.5 litres a day.