A funny thing happened on the way to the sugar float (AKA fun with parasite management)

Oh the joy that is parasite management on an alpaca farm! Jen and Kim have spent the past several weeks meticulously going through the entire herd, one feed group at a time, doing fecal tests on every alpaca on the farm. Unfortunately there is no cool and easy way to get those individual samples other than, you know, going in with a finger or two. It’s only fun ’till the exam glove breaks?

For my part I suppose I should consider myself lucky that my better half excludes me from such activities. Do you have any idea how carefully I’ve cultivated the perception of mild incompetence where such things are concerned? Shush, it can be our little secret. In any case, after testing everyone we (yes even me) have then been going through and treating only those animals that show elevated parasite loads. It’s a strategy that aims to treat those members of the herd that truly need it without applying a one-size-fits-all treatment plan. To treat everyone with a broad brush would not only waste money and unnecessarily subject animals to an unneeded dose of drugs (5 days on fenbendazole just can’t be fun) but in the long term would also help to speed up the parasitic natural selection process, building resistance to dewormers through their over use.

So here is the thing about GI parasites: they happen, they’re out there. We have at one time or another seen most all of them. Those that we haven’t encountered yet, we expect to at one point or another. Parasite management in alpacas should not be about a zero sum game, it is not about elimination. Rather it is about controlling the parasite loads to keep them at a sustainable level where herd-wide health is not threatened. It is also vital to pay particular attention to the fact that the ages of the alpacas in question has a huge impact on how they are affected by GI parasites, as well as when they are most likely to be big shedders of the parasites themselves, thus helping to spread the parasitic love. That is true whether we are talking coccidia, strongyles, tape worm,  etc… Remember also that there is undoubtedly a relationship between an animal’s general health — and I’m really thinking primarily about nutrition and body condition here –and their ability to resist and/or tolerate GI parasites. It’s a little bit of a “chicken or the egg” quandary. Did the high load of GI parasites make the alpaca thin and sickly or did the animal in question develop the high load because it was thin and sickly? Having watched these patterns play out over several years here in our herd, my intuition tells me that the answer is probably some of each though I tend to fall more often on the side of the latter. It just seems that those animals that are healthy and in good body condition are more resistant to parasites in general. Duh. Not exactly an epiphany is it?

Now those folks that have — or more likely think they have — a “clean” farm with a zero parasite load either, A. have a truly closed farm where no animal is coming or going or, B. are continually hitting their alpacas’ systems with so much dewormer that it is creating an unsafe situation on multiple levels. Show me an alpaca that arrives at a show and within a day gets shooting diarrhea and there’s a very good chance they came from a farm or ranch where animals are over treated for GI parasites. Anyone that says one should have “zero” parasites present in a herd most likely has a financial stake in helping that happen. Leaving aside any conflict of interest of questions though, I would argue that such a view is not only unhealthy and unsustainable for an alpaca herd but also well…unnatural. Anybody really think there is a zero parasite load in the Peruvian Altiplano? In spite of what some might say, there absolutely is such a thing as a “healthy” parasite load in alpacas. The trick is to understand what that is, something which you are best off talking to your vet about. On the off chance your vet argues for the zero parasite load theory, I would refer you to the third sentence of this paragraph and suggest you get a second opinion. There has been a ton written on this subject over the years, both within the camelid veterinary world and elsewhere so I certainly won’t get into the minutiae of what constitutes a tolerable/sustainable parasite load here. For starters that number may vary by animal and by herd. It is also possible, for instance, for an adult alpaca in particular to be shedding thousands of parasite eggs every day yet be completely asymptomatic. Do you treat that animal? Yeah, you probably do so as to nip the source of a potential problem. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the herd needs to have their GI tracts nuked as well in the process though. The key is to use common sense while staying away from hyperbole. Quite frankly with a herd of some 250 alpacas we have quite enough drama without the need to artificially manufacture more. Obviously if a member of a herd is spewing brown water out its back end, is suddenly losing body condition, or anything of that nature you need to first and foremost get that situation under control and treat the symptom, while also testing (poop, blood, or both) to hopefully address the underlying cause as well. We just try to keep our undies unbunched though. Breath. Think. Repeat.

Parasite management is the primary reason we birth out here in groups of roughly 12 dams and crias. Those cute little fuzzy-wuzzys are a GI parasite’s idea of heaven, especially as they hit 2 to 6 months of age. After a particularly rough turn with coccidia and the resulting diahrea several years ago in our cria pens, we put our heads together with our superb vet, Susan Johnson, to come up with a management plan that would address the issue of parasite control in a proactive way. The thinking was and is to have crias birth out, then grow up together as a group, naturally getting exposed to low parasite loads and thus developing a tolerance to moderate loads as they do so. It’s also important to note that prior to delivering their cria, each female will have a fecal test done on them and be treated, though only if necessary, to knock any high parasite loads down. When the first mom of a given group births out she and her cria are then be placed in a “clean” pen next to the other expectant moms (where they will all eventually end up). Mind you, that pen isn’t truly clean, it’s just that it has been uninhabited for at least three weeks prior to guarantee that there wasn’t anyone over there shedding high loads of — insert your GI bogey man here — that our newborns would then be exposed to.

Though that protocol for the younger members of our herd is certainly by no means a perfect solution, it is far better that what we were doing before. That basically entailed putting out parasitic brushfires wherever they flared up, treating the symptom of the individual animal(s) and sometimes addressing the root cause of the parasite problem within that animal’s individual feed group, albeit on a more macro level (as in let’s give the entire feed group 3 to 5 days of dewormer). Admittedly in a smaller herd, which we were once upon a time, that might work fine. However with 60+ crias/hosts being born here most years, planning ahead, testing, and concentrating our fire where it’s actually needed is a far far more effective strategy for both the short and the long term.

In our fantasized ideal world each group of expectant dams and crias would live outside with their own shelter and be able to rotate into, on a weekly basis, at least 3 or 4 different paddocks for grazing. This is what is known in the grass-fed livestock world as management intensive grazing.  Though we are unfortunately not able to provide our fantasy infrastructure for our due moms (though each birthing group does each get a large double pen and a single huge paddock at the Arena), we have seen testing results elsewhere on the farm which prove the efficacy of management intensive grazing as a valuable tool in controlling GI parasite loads. Each year we have a large group of females — a mix on unbred yearlings, retired girls, and others girls not birthing out until fall, some 50+ animals strong — which during the grazing season lives beneath the sun and stars and rotates through 5 different paddocks, being moved from one to another every 5 to 10 days. Recent fecal tests from the animals of that feed group showed that the parasite loads there were virtually non-existent. Keep in mind that none of those alpacas had been treated with a dewormer in at least a year, in some cases multiple years, and that these most recent tests were even done a full six weeks after they had come off of the pastures and back into a dry lot situation at the Arena!  The planning behind that strategy more or less follows the ideas of a parasitologist Jen heard speak years ago at a camelid health conference at Umass Amherst. The hypothesis is pretty simple: the combination of rotational grazing (thereby removing the would be hosts, the alpacas) on a set schedule with good old UV light breaks the life cycle of virtually all GI parasites. The end game being that when rotational grazing is combined with timely fecal testing and pinpoint treatments only of those animals that truly need it, then dewormers become the final line of defense, not the first weapon of choice. Though it’s just not possible for us to replicate that pasture management practice for our entire herd (10 to 20 more acres of grazable land would be needed at least), you can be sure that we will nonetheless make every effort going forward to draw from these lessons and apply them to our parasite management practices whenever possible.