Livestock Investment
Considerations For Selecting An Alpaca
Kathleen Cullen
Foothills Suri Alpacas
Selecting your first alpacas can be an overwhelming experience. It’s important to make the selection based on as many objective factors as possible. If your goals are to purchase animals for a breeding program the factors to consider are a little different than for a fiber farm program. However, there are many factors common to both.
The first items to check out are the obvious: the conformation and fiber. The best guide for this is the Suri Breed Standard (www.surinetwork.org). Follow this link and you will find a very good document to guide you. The Breed Standard is a guide, no animals are perfect. But using this as a guide you will quickly become more skilled at seeing the difference between great, good, poor and downright terrible conformation and fiber traits. For a breeding program you would want to lean toward great and good conformation, but for a fiber farm animal the conformation traits won’t be as important as the fiber traits. That is, as long as the conformation traits aren’t so bad there will be medical complications.
Once you have looked at the animals and observed their movement, it’s time to examine them on paper. Ask the seller for all the show records, health records, including immunizations, worming, birth weight, wean weight and any other medications administered, such as antibiotics or hormones. If antibiotics or hormones were ever administered find out what was being treated. Don’t be shy about asking “why?”
The next source of valuable information is available at the Alpaca Registry. (www.alpacaregistry.com) Members of ARI can search the database of registered alpacas. This will allow you to search for offspring, ancestors and descendents of animals. This search allows you to look further than what is printed on the ARI certificate for each animal. To do this search you will need the animal’s names or better, their ARI registration numbers. After you have an animal pulled up on the search page, in the middle of the page is a drop down box, from there you can view offspring, ancestors and descendents. It also will show the colors of the animals.
The offspring tab can be used to see if an animal has produced any huacaya itself. Often times these animals are not registered. If the animals you are exploring are females and there are years skipped with no offspring. It’s good to inquire why no cria were produced during those years. It’s not uncommon for a pregnancy to be lost, but it may be it had a cria they chose not to register. That also happens if a male is born that they don’t deem to be good enough to be a herdsire. Remember, only a small percentage of males make it to herdsire status. Again, don’t be shy in asking what happened with the cria that year.
You can check the ancestry tab to see if the animal has any huacaya in its background. Many early imported animals were crossed with huacaya. However, if you then look at the descendents of that same animal and see no huacaya have been produced, that’s good. If you see a some huacaya showing up, the chances are much increased that animal could produce one also.
Soon we will be able to use EPD (Expected Progeny Differences) databases to help us with our selection, but in the meantime, a good visual assessment of the phenotype (appearance) and some inquiries into the health records as well as the ARI registry should give you some tools to make your selection of alpacas less of a guessing game and more of an educated decision. This is not unlike choosing stocks to invest in. One can look at the performance records, and make educated decisions. While there are no guarantees, making an educated decision greatly increases the likelihood of a successful outcome.