Walking In a Weaner Wonderland

weaner

wean·er (wee-ner)

-noun

1. A recently weaned animal.

2. A recently weaned alpaca at Cas-Cad-Nac Farm that behaves as if its world has come to an end while also constantly and simultaneously enquiring whether you, their shepherd, have any milk.

So the first crias from the 2010 birth class have left their dams behind and arrived down at the Main Barn for weaning. The next wave will be joining them shortly (we generally have new groups being weaned every couple of weeks for the next several months), though for now there are just a couple of boys in one feed group and the five little girls pictured at left in another. After giving them all a few days to adapt to their new surroundings while locked inside and/or under the shed covered corrals of the barn, they were just today allowed access to their respective outdoor paddocks for the first time and now have the option to come and go from the barn like any other alpaca in the herd, 24/7. In the case of the females we have one of our older 5P girls, Pinaya, acting as a den mother. Granted when she was first notified that this going to be her duty for the next six months or so Pinaya was less than thrilled: she spent several days with her ears pinned to the back of her head making sure that her small legion of weaners understood that she was not to be messed with and not to even think about trying to suckle. Though even Pinaya is adapting now and her minions are quickly becoming attached to her, if nothing else the same way a team can bond with a tough (but winning) coach.

Though there are of course many ways to go about it, we have traditionally weaned arbitrarily when our little ones hit 6 months of age. We do make occasional exceptions choosing to leave a baby with mom longer in cases where we have a smaller cria who could use some extra help. We will likewise wean a bit earlier than six months as well if the adorable little parasite is of good size and the dam is starting to have her body condition compromised by the whole experience of motherhood. We have also learned the hard way over the years not to wean if we are about to have a really nasty cold snap or other horrible winter weather (sleet/rain). Nasty weather can add another level of stress to an already stressful situation for the new weanlings and really sets the table for diarrhea in general and GI parasites in particular who already love to exploit this age group as a rule anyway.

In all cases though the idea behind weaning at or after 6 months of age is that the dam has already done most of the work for us. Most of the crias we wean at that age have spent the better part of a month being kicked away by their dams already and are only getting in an occasional comfort suckle as it is. The reality in any case is that the weaners will behave as though the sky is falling in whether you take them away from their moms for the first time at six months of age or even a year. The dams not so much.  By the time the crias hit 6 months most of them are ready to move on without their kids. There was one year that because of inclement weather we held off the first wave of weaning until the crias were all basically seven months of age. I kid you not that within ten minutes of removing the crias from that feed group their newly liberated dams were literally pronking around the pasture: “we’re free!”  The good news for the little ones though is that most of them develop quickly into confident young alpacas after just a couple of weeks away from their moms. Safe to say that if we could send our 18 year old human kids off into the grownup universe with that relative percentage of quick maturing, life would be a lot easier for all involved!