CCNF Avenger: the best Archangel son you’ve probably never heard of.

Nothing gets judged quite as harshly on this farm as a white male alpaca. From the moment one of those little guys is born they are subjected to incredible scrutiny, far far more so than their female counterparts. Remember that the goal is to look at one of these guys and say “yeah, give me 10 of those!” Chances are if they have a flaw we will be picking on it in very short order. Of course all alpacas have flaws. With a young male it’s all just a matter of deciding what degrees of imperfection one can live with. As if that wasn’t tough enough in and of itself though, here they also have to measure up to an existing standard in the white division of our stud barn. Needless to say, the vast majority of the white males born here end up as gelded fiber animals. We don’t care who your mommy was, how many ribbons or banners your Daddy (or ultimately you) won. We most certainly don’t care how much either of them cost or sold for either. The quality is there or it is not and from the long term standpoint of a true Herdsire with usefulness to a serious breeding program, all the marketing glitz and hype can neither magnify nor mask its presence or lack there of as the case may be. Pretenders need not apply.

Now…having stepped off of that obnoxious little soap box I must confess that we have definitely been far from perfect ourselves in our selections of potential Herdsire prospects over the years. Thankfully, when screwing it up we’ve tended towards being overly optimistic (that one’s not that narrow in the chest…actually he was) rather than prematurely lopping the testicles off of a would-be Kingmaker. In Avenger’s case we drastically misjudged him as he went through his 2nd birthday last year, giving far more credit to the show ring (do as I say, not as I do?) than it was frankly due and not correctly trusting our instincts.  Thankfully, that misjudgment didn’t involve a scalpel going anywhere near the business end of his anatomy, just his omission from the show roster. He was given extra time to show us if he could indeed blossom into his full sibling’s (Savanna) image. In fact with all due respect to Savanna (whose first daughter, Panamera, was the Light Female Champion at the 2010 AOBA Fleece Show), he has probably eclipsed her.  By this past spring the 3 year old Avenger had matured, filled out, and displayed a fleece that was both extremely dense and fine (his 2010 AFD was 18.9 on a farm that feeds liberally). Though he must compete with his sire and little brother, Kinger (TKO’s King of the Ladies) for the attentions of the fairer sex we are very proud of Avenger. You are of course welcome to draw your own conclusions on how we rate him but the fact is that even with the depth of talent around him (Kinger, Arch, Messiah, Precocious, Elite Legend) he is still being bred in-house.  Avenger is also perhaps the most bang-for-the-buck Herdsire we currently have for our clients to breed to at $2,500 (Archangel is closed, King of the Ladies in $4,000 in 2010). It all just goes to show that sometimes it feels great to be proven wrong…