CCNF Reign Dancer Now Co-Owned with Clover Bottom Alpaca Ranch!

We would like to offer our thanks and congratulations to Terry Passanante of Clover Bottom Alpaca Ranch in Washington, MO, for her purchase of half interest in our Herdsire, CCNF Reign Dancer! The son of Futurity JC winner, CCNF Sovereign-Legacy, and a Kahuna/Matrix cross, TGF Let Freedom Reign (thank you, yet again, beloved Munro family!), Reign Dancer is a male that went from being, quite honestly, on the periphery of our longer-term breeding plans to forcefully putting himself front and center, simply by virtue of the first couple of crias he sired here in the summer of 2023.

Not that this should exactly come as any big, bold-faced news, but winning in the show ring is fun. Like, duh. Championships and trophies, whatever form they take, are generally good. And just like potato chips, once you win one, pursuing others becomes inevitable and addictive.

All of that said, let us also allow Reign Dancer’s rise to prominence in the ranks at CCNF to be a bit of a cautionary tale about the — how shall I say this — limited virtues of the halter show ring as an arbiter of which animals should or should not be absorbed into a given breeding program. On any given day, a halter judge can only place the animals in a given class in the final order in which they see them. It is a job (being a judge) yours truly has certainly never wanted, and I don’t even necessarily dispute that on the occasions of his sauntering into a show ring, that there were always a couple of animals that, on the day, legitimately deserved to be placed above Dancer. That’s fine; the very point is that, in the final analysis, it did not and still does not matter. We’re grownups here, and we’ve been breeding alpacas for 27 years. If the judges honestly knew more about our animals than we did, it would only be because we hadn’t done our actual job.

As the record shows, Reign Dancer never finished higher than 3rd place in any halter class he entered, yet we recognized in him qualities that simply do not grow on vines, despite what a quick perusal through industry publications might lead one to believe. In a realm where virtually every marketing description in the alpaca world makes passing reference to density, fineness, uniformity, and “perfect” conformation, it can be hard to separate the hay from the chaff.

Judges need to judge, and we genuinely thank them for their work and what can sometimes seem like a job with few rewards, given the acrimony they face even when they have correctly placed animals in the show ring. But breeders also need to breed and, at times, make strategic decisions that involve analytics that go far beyond anything that show results may represent or reflect. In short, you need to understand your alpacas’ intricacies, pluses, and minuses if you hope to derive good results from your breeding decisions consistently. Some of that can be done using the tools of science and statistics. Much of it cannot. To steal a line from my better half, you must do the work, and sometimes that includes making hard calls.

For every Reign Dancer who rises up from under the radar, there is often at least one other animal who, despite their gaudy show record or marvelous qualities as an individual specimen (or both), fails to make the grade. That’s just reality. This program has repeatedly culled animals — and just to be clear, I don’t mean passed off to somebody else to become their problem, but taken them off of the board entirely — that had previously won Championships and even JC awards at the most prestigious shows in the country simply because, in the end, they (or their production) did not measure up.

As that all relates back to Reign Dancer, the point is that if an alpaca is sticking around and being used here, regardless of what color nylon they may or may not have won, it is because a job is getting done. Quality talks. Breeding results ultimately define an animal and are the only results that truly matter here.

CCNF Reign Dancer is a special, special Herdsire both as a specimen in his own right and as a now-proven commodity. That record will likewise speak for itself going forward. The plan is for Dancer to spend the cold weather months in Missouri with Clover Bottom starting later this year and then ride out the summer months here at his birth farm in VT. Both partners will be offering CCNF Reign Dancer for limited outside breedings. We are excited to see what other fuzzy-wuzzy chaos he can sire for both breeding programs in the years to come! Stay tuned.

Follow me on Twitter at @CCNFAlpacas and on Instagram at ccnfalpacas. You can also find and follow Cas-Cad-Nac Farm Alpacas on Facebook here.